Out now, an authorised biography of Alan Moore.
“It stalks the wild Moore…”
01 Monday Aug 2011
Posted in New books
Category Archives: New books
Lovecraft in Historical Context, volume 2 – now out in paperback
31 Sunday Jul 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works, Summer School
Now available as a paperback, for those who prefer to read in print rather than from a screen — my new book Lovecraft in Historical Context: further essays and notes. PayPal accepted.
CONTENTS: Story – “The Quest to Azathoth” (new 5,000 word short story). Essays and Historical Notes – 1. The Typewriter of H.P. Lovecraft; 2. Some Notes on the Origins of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”; 3. Appendix: Quabbin and “The Colour Out of Space”; 4. Lovecraft, Houdini, and Egypt in Fantastic Literature; 5. What Does Danforth See At The End of Mountains?; 6. A Fainting Spell: Lovecraft and fainting; 7. Looking into Lovecraft’s Toilet; 8. Loveman as a Source for “Hypnos”. 9. The Mystery of “J.N.”; 10. A Note on the Pickwick Club Disaster; 11. On The Real Mammoth Cave and “The Beast in the Cave”; 12. The Winds of Insanity; 13. The Cats of H.P. Lovecraft; 14. Cats and the Fantastical (a bibliography); 15. A Note on the Elder Signs; 16. Secrecy and Secretions; 17. Postcards from the High House; 18. Two Postcards from the Providence Public Library; 19. An Alternate Ending: a fiction.
Illustrated with my own cover artwork. 31,000 words. 134 pages. July 2011. Perfect-bound paperback with colour covers. Buy it here.
Also available: the first volume of Lovecraft in Historical Content (2010) in paperback
Summer School: final assignment
31 Sunday Jul 2011
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings, Summer School
My final creative assignment for the 2011 Lovecraft Summer School. It’s a 5,000 word short story based on a combination of the entries in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and newly written for the Summer School. For your reading pleasure, “The Quest to Azathoth” is available in print, fronting in my new book of essays Lovecraft in Historical Context: further essays and notes. PayPal accepted.
Gollancz to make ebooks from 5,000 out-of-print titles
27 Wednesday Jul 2011
British SF publisher Gollancz is to set up a special ebooks website, called SF Gateway. We won’t have the nice heft of those old yellow library hardbacks. But hopefully we’ll see tempting prices from the new site. I can just about remember reading some Asimov and Clarke as a youth in those famous yellow hardcovers (which now apparently cost a fortune to collect) so I guess Gollancz will trade on a significant ‘nostalgia factor’ and goodwill. The authors being chosen are out-of-print (at least in their Gollancz editions), and will include, among others…
L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Keith Roberts, Clifford D. Simak
The aim is to have 5,000 ebook titles by 2014. I’m pretty sure that all those wonderful UK Panther paperbacks of Lovecraft from the 1970s were Gollancz reissues under their Panther paperback brand? There must be a lot of other weird stuff in those Gollancz files. For instance, I found a 1970 Gollancz book called The Man Who Called Himself Poe, an anthology of stories all featuring Poe as a character. It would be very nice if the books were broken down into per-story files, and then the fans could recombine and share them in new anthologies that would download as a collection. So if you wanted all the fantasy and ghost stories set in Roman Britain, you could have an on-the-fly ebook. But probably there’s some gruesome little copyright thing that would crawl from the abyss and prevent that from happening.
If you’re interested in the Gollancz Lovecraft, there’s H.P. Lovecraft in Britain : A Monograph by Stephen Jones. Jones had…
access to the original Victor Gollancz publishing files which consisted of around seventy-five letters and memos. From these and for the first time we can see the relationship between Arkham House that was run by August William Derleth and Victor Gollancz here in the UK – from the rather shaky start to the impressive collection – some of which are unique to Britain that we now have today. [and the book] details the history of [Lovecraft’s] printed volumes of work in the UK.
Gollancz are also going to have a new online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
New Joshi projects
17 Sunday Jul 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi has a new page on his website, a listing of forthcoming publications he has authored or edited. Looking especially interesting is the Joshi-edited collection of in-depth essays Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos (Miskatonic River Press, announced Spring 2011 and apparently due Fall 2011) which is set to sit nicely alongside his earlier book The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (2008). I’m currently coming to the end of the first volume of Joshi’s Lovecraft biography I Am Providence, but probably won’t be spending that kind of money again on new hardbacks in the near future. But other Joshi books are certainly now on my “wants” list, if I can pick them up cheaply in used form. I think the Joshi-edited Lord Of A Visible World: An Autobiography In Letters seems likely to be my obvious follow-on from I Am Providence.
Lovecraft in Leather
13 Wednesday Jul 2011
Posted in New books
Apparently Barnes and Noble have just published the hardcover H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics). 1112 pages. Any news of the quality you get for $20? I mean, for $20 I suspect there’s a dodgy castle-rustler somewhere in Outer Patagonia rubbing his hands over selling his stash of the worst moth-eaten hides. And some Korean slave-labour printers feeling mighty tired.
Mythoscon 2011 programme booklet in PDF
04 Monday Jul 2011
Posted in New books, Odd scratchings
I just found that Cthulhuwho1 has the complete Mythoscon 2011 programme booklet online as a 300dpi printable PDF (60Mb). Here’s hoping we get the chance to purchase the panel discussions in MP3 audio format soon. Perhaps it could even be a condition of purchase that each buyer transcribes a given section of the audio to text?
Houdini: Art and Magic
11 Saturday Jun 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books
A review of the exhibition Houdini: Art and Magic (The Jewish Museum, New York, 2010), which has now transferred to the Skirball Center in Los Angeles until 4th September 2011. There’s an accompanying book, from Yale University Press.
Lovecraft and Houdini had connections, not least in the long story Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (1924). Lovecraft ghost-wrote this for $100 (paid in advance, for the only time in Lovecraft’s life), based on an after-dinner tale invented by Houdini but which he claimed as true. Lovecraft seems to have considered it improbable and badly formed, and was pleased to be told in confidence that it was actually a fabrication, since he could then let his imagination rip on the tale. Although often talked of as a minor story, and as having a little too much of the travelogue about it, Michel Houellebecq’s 1991 book on Lovecraft said Pharaohs contained some of Lovecraft’s… “most beautiful verbal extravagances”. This was, of course, also the story whose manuscript Lovecraft fatefully left and lost on a train, and which he then had to spend some of his honeymoon re-typing — possibly to the detriment of his marriage.
Lovecraft also admired Houdini for his tireless debunking of spiritualists and other faux-mystic charlatans. Houdini is known to have socialised with Lovecraft, occasionally dining with him after shows, and in one of his letters Lovecraft recalls being taken out by Houdini to the incongruous theatrical event of a Noel Coward play in 1924. Houdini personally arranged for Lovecraft to have a meeting with a newspaper publisher, with a view to some employment, but nothing came of it.
Lovecraft later had a further very healthy payment of $75 for a ghost-written Houdini article attacking and debunking astrology. Houdini’s sudden death due to a student prank, in 1926, put an end to the prospects of more collaborations and income — such as the planned The Cancer of Superstition, a book debunking superstitious beliefs. Lovecraft had apparently already drafted this in basic outline form, and started researching magic and witchcraft for it. Possibly some of this research found its way into his The Horror at Red Hook.
Future Lovecraft
03 Tuesday May 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
A call for the Future Lovecraft anthology of Lovecraftian science fiction. The editors seem to be inclined toward far-future and space SF. Deadline: 30th June 2011.
Above: “Spaceship Attack” (2010), by Tsukumogami.
Werewolves in Literature anthology – now available in print
03 Sunday Apr 2011
Posted in New books
For those who prefer print books over ebooks, my Werewolves in Literature: an anthology of classic stories is now available as a 540-page 160,000-word printed book. This anthology contains 25 classic stories and tales from the 13th century through to the 1920s, in a uniform print edition using Abobe Caslon Pro as the font at 11pt.
The anthology has previously been available as a two-volume ebook via the Amazon Kindle stores. For space reasons this new print edition has had to omit one long novelette, and the complete Dumas novel.
Lovecraft collected for the Kindle
01 Friday Apr 2011
Posted in New books
Cthulhu Chick writes…
“after several months of working on the project when I could — snatching minutes and hours between work, grad school, and making Cthulhus — I am very proud to announce that I have finished an eBook of The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft.”
Kindle version available. These are the public domain version floating around the Web, not the corrected Joshi versions available in the three Penguin Classics editions. Still, it’s nice to have a free collected edition for the Kindle that’s had some thought put into it.
Kindle edition of Ice Cores
24 Thursday Feb 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The new Kindle edition of my Ice Cores: essays on Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is available now in the UK and in the USA. Slightly revised, and with another four passes of proofreading to correct a few minor niggles from the print edition. Hand coded for the Kindle, with illustrations.
Talking of Kindle / ebook sales, Barnes & Noble’s chief executive William Lynch says…
“we now sell twice as many ebooks as we do physical books at BN.com”