Category Archives: New books

Published: Walking With Cthulhu : H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in Historical context, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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My new book is here! Walking With Cthulhu : H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26. 55,000 words, 198 pages. Illustrated.

Another good haul of new discoveries! Including two new possible sources for Cthulhu. All heavily referenced and footnoted.

Buy a new paperback copy here! Kindle user? It’s also on the USA Kindle Store and the U.K. Kindle Store.

CONTENTS:

Timeline of Key Dates.

Introduction: A Walk in New York.

SURFACE: Walking the Streets of the City:

1. H.P. Lovecraft and the psychogeographers.

2. H.P. Lovecraft’s night walks in New York: psychogeographic techniques

3. The nature of the New York streets.

4. A note on H.P. Lovecraft and immigrants.

5. H.P. Lovecraft’s New York coffee houses and ice-cream parlours.

UNDERGROUND: On the Monstrous, Occult, and Hidden:

6. H.P. Lovecraft and the subway.

7. It emerged from the subways!

8. On mystical and occult New York.

9. On H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Boas

10. New York as R’lyeh, sunken city of Cthulhu.

“Nyarlathotep” annotated.

Bibliography.

Index.

Weird Tales sold to new owner

24 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in New books

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The modern Weird Tales magazine has been sold by Wildside Press to a new owner/editor. Or at least, the rights to use the brand name for a magazine. The new owner is Marvin Kaye, whose first issue of the magazine will apparently be a Cthulhu special in Feb 2012. SF Scope writes of Kaye…

“The 73-year-old Kaye edited the anthology Weird Tales, The Magazine That Never Dies, which Doubleday published in 1988. He is the author of 16 novels and six nonfiction books, in addition to plays and play adaptations. He has edited at least 30 anthologies, and won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 2006 for The Fair Folk.”

New Justin Woodman book announced

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Historical context, New books

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Justin Woodman announces he’s working on a new book, to be titled Lovecraft’s Monsters: The Pulp Roots of the Paranormal…

“A preliminary outline has been drafted, with some initial work already started on the early chapters. More of this later as I present some of the ideas and source material relevant to book in forthcoming posts (which I hope to upload on a basis of around 2-3 weekly).”

Sounds like it might be about the historical way in which pulp horror skewed and influenced the conceptions of paranormal investigators from the 1920s onwards?

Lovecraft as fictional character

19 Friday Aug 2011

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia today surveys the use of Lovecraft as a fictional character. I hadn’t spotted Peter Cannon’s The Lovecraft Chronicles book yet, so thanks to Silvia for that. It’s an alternate-history fictional biography, posing the question: “what if Lovecraft had lived?” According to S.T. Joshi’s review the book has him going to England, then (improbably, but no doubt colourfully) going off to fight for the left in the Spanish Civil War. I answered the same question myself a while back, as part of the 2011 Summer School. While I took him down a different fork there were a couple of overlaps with Cannon. I also had Lovecraft try to repurchase his birthplace in the 1960s with the money from movie rights, and not writing much fiction after the 1940s.

Marina Warner on The Arabian Nights

18 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in New books

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Lovecraft was a big fan of the The Arabian Nights in his youth, and he’d no doubt be pleased to hear the the foremost British writer on myth and fairytale has written a 500-page book about it. Independent scholar Marina Warner‘s Stranger Magic: Charmed States in the Wake of the Arabian Nights is due to be published by Chatto & Windus in the UK, and Random House in the USA. Seems they’re going to try and get it out for the New Year book token market.

“A dazzling history of magical thinking, exploring the power of The Arabian Nights and its impact in the West, and retelling some of its wondrous tales. […] Translated into French and English in the early days of the Enlightenment, this became a best-seller among intellectuals, when it was still thought of in the Arab world as a mere collection of folk tales. For thinkers of the West the book’s strangeness opened visions of transformation: dreams of flight, speaking objects, virtual money, and the power of the word to bring about change. Its tales create a poetic image of the impossible, a parable of secret knowledge and power. Above all they have the fascination of the strange — the belief that true knowledge lies elsewhere, in a mysterious realm of wonder. […] With startling originality and impeccable research, this ground-breaking book shows how magic, in the deepest sense, helped to create the modern world, and how profoundly it is still inscribed in the way we think today.”

Marina Warner can be heard discussing The Arabian Nights on BBC Radio 4’s highly recommended In Our Time programme (UK access only, those outside the UK try here).

Current trends in fantasy/SF publishing

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in New books, Odd scratchings

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The bull-o-meter nudges the top end of the scale in some of the opening publisher quotes in The Library Journal‘s new cover article on the fantasy/SF renaissance. But otherwise it’s an interesting survey of the ‘big publisher’ trends in the mad scramble from Sept to Xmas. The highlights…

* Gritty ‘dark fantasy’ infiltrates the sort of over-padded fantasy epics that you can stop a door with. But who wants to slog through a 3,000 page trilogy full of ‘grim’, in the current climate?

* A new trend for historical/fantasy desert settings, Arabian Nights style. Interesting. I could imagine a lot of Lovecraftian elements could creep in there, if done well. There’s certainly a lot of public domain material to mine for authentic descriptions and background.

* Growth “in the male urban fantasy market”. That sub-genre must have completely passed me by. Sounds like it’s a 20-something target market, for guys afraid their manhood will shrivel up and fall off if they read about faeries and elves?

* Authors who write about zombies are moving them into political satire and comedy. Best place for them. They’re such dull monsters, the only thing left to do is poke fun at them.

* Steampunk continues to flounder about looking for fresh settings and twists, judging from the article.

* New galactic-spanning space adventures have become very rare, as 50-something SF authors churn in a mire of near-future gloom and angst. Publishers will be republishing their old “upbeat” space epics, to compensate.

* There’s a gap in the market for smart optimistic young-adult hard SF, which will increase as the economic recovery starts.

The biggest news is probably that Neal Stephenson is back with a new novel, Reamde, in September. It’s another 1000-page doorstopper. I don’t mind the size and I really enjoyed Anathem — but it seems that Reamde is more like Cryptonomicon which while gripping was forgettable. No news of any new book from Stephen Baxter, sadly.

Spawn of the Green Abyss

14 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in New books

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This sounds fab. S.T. Joshi’s fave mythos stories collected in one volume (forthcoming)…

Spawn of the Green Abyss

“The House of the Worm” (1933) by Mearle Prout.
“Far Below” (1939) by Robert Barbour Johnson.
“Spawn of the Green Abyss” (1946) by C. Hall Thompson.
“The Deep Ones” (1969) by James Wade.
“The Franklyn Papers” by Ramsey Campbell.
“Where Yidhra Walks” by Walter C, DeBill, Jr.
“Black Man with a Horn” by T.E.D. Klein.
“Nethescurial” by Thomas Ligotti.
“Black Brat of Dunwich” by Stanley C. Sargent.
“The Phantom of Beguilement” by W.H. Pugmire.
“…Hungry…Rats” by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (new in this edition).
“Virgin’s Island” by Donald Tyson (new in this edition).

Lovecraft Annual 2011 now shipping

14 Sunday Aug 2011

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Shipping now, the Lovecraft Annual No.5 (2011).

Locked Dimensions out of Reach: The Lost Stories of H. P. Lovecraft

Cosmic Maenads and the Music of Madness: Lovecraft’s Borrowings from the Greeks

Blacks, Boxers, and Lovecraft

On H. P. Lovecraft’s “The House”

From Bodily Fear to Cosmic Horror (and Back Again): The Tentacle Monster from Primordial Chaos to Hello Cthulhu

Lovecraft and I

Lovecraft and the Sublime: A Reinterpretation

Lovecraft: A Gentleman without Five Senses

Endless Bacchanal: Rome, Livy, and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Cult

“Cool Air,” the Apartment Above Us, and Other Stories

Lovecraft’s “The City”