Marina Warner’s new book on magic and the reception of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, reviewed…

“The second part attends to the Arab and European habit of attributing foreignness to evil magicians. These dark enchanters come from dark places (Africa and India) and profess dark (pre-Islamic) faiths. During the Enlightenment, black magic became inevitably dark skinned; necromancy became inseparable from “nigromancy”.

Of obvious relevance to much weird fiction from the 1920s and 30s, and Lovecraft’s use of mad Arab wizards, etc. Warner is not your usual theory-clotted lit crit academic, she’s a proper historian and independent scholar.

S.T. Joshi has updated his blog with news of new projects and progress on old ones. A updated and enlarged edition of the collection of Lovecraft’s poetry, The Ancient Track. The possibility of “an anthology of original stories based on At the Mountains of Madness“. Joshi’s history of supernatural fiction, Unutterable Horror, in set for Autumn 2012.

Click on the “Look Inside” at the Amazon page for the new The White People and Other Weird Stories — and the 10% Kindle preview gives you the excellent introductions by del Toro and S.T. Joshi, for free…

del Toro: “Philosophers, writers, and artists are rarely emotionally successful human beings.”

S.T. Joshi: “…the supernatural can only manifest itself in literature when a relatively stable and coherent idea of the natural has been arrived at.”

S.T. Joshi: “…the best weird writers understood that supernatural motifs could serve as metaphors for the expression of truths about the human condition (the vampire as social outsider, for example) in a more vivid and pungent manner than in conventional mimetic realism.”

The book is not available in the U.K. Kindle Store (sigh…, when will publishers learn that publicity is now global and not national?), but U.K. readers can read the intro by going to the American Amazon store and clicking “Look Inside”. I guess you may have to be registered with the U.S. Amazon to do this.

Hannes Storhaug-Meyer has just published his M.A. dissertation as a printed book, The Morphology of the Unknown: The Narrative Technique of H. P. Lovecraft…

“This thesis shows that the unknown actually forms the core of a narrative technique which we can identify in most of Lovecraft’s works. Through close readings of three of his most famous texts, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, this thesis analyzes the central role that unknowns play in them. It highlights how unknowns are created, maintained and resolved in the course of the narrative. The analyses also show how these unknowns affect the narrative flow and how the reader is affected by their presence. Ultimately, this thesis describes a narrative technique or model which is centered on the unknown and which is commonly found in Lovecraft’s texts.”

“Hannes Storhaug-Meyer is a teacher of English at Honefoss High School in Norway. He has studied British and American literature at the University of Oslo and received his M.A. for the thesis ‘The Morphology of the Unknown’.

Issue 10 of Dead Reckonings: a review of horror literature, out now. Includes an index to the first ten issues.