Tentaclii has gone a bit quiet on Robert E. Howard and Conan et al. It’s not because I’ve lost interested, but because the material isn’t there to note. There seems to have been a lack of suitable items recently, other than the new cash-in comics and foreign translations and suchlike so ably tracked by Messages from Crom.

But now the Robert E. Howard Days (aka Howard Days) in Cross Plains, Texas, are just over six weeks away. It may be that various scholarly and thoughtful publications are being timed to appear for that.

In the meantime I see that Exploring the Worlds of REH Omnibus collects Fred Blosser’s themed ebooks (Howard’s Weird Texas, etc) into a single paperback. Along with eight new articles. I see he also has the survey ebooks Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes and More Sons of Ringo.

One item I thought might be of note was Conan the Barbarian Epic Collection: The Original Marvel Years – Queen of the Black Coast. This was a chunky Marvel 1970s Buscema/Thomas reprint volume released last Christmas. But be warned that the cover and title is misleading. On reading the details you find this is only the run-up to his meeting Belit the ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ (issues #43-59). Conan meets her in #58 and then #59-to-#100 or thereabouts is the rest of the Belit run, as ably collected in Dark Horse’s earlier reprint book Chronicles of Conan, Volumes 8-12. So, be warned that you’re not getting the run that the new ‘Original Marvel Years’ cover seems to promise.

I took a look to see if I had missed anything else in the last year or so, and noted “Der Barbar aus dem Norden: Nordenbilder in Robert E. Howards Conan-Erzahlungen”, in the journal NORDEUROPAforum, 2020. On ‘images of the ancient North as they appear in R.E. Howard’s Conan’. It may interest some readers here, especially because it’s under full Creative Commons Attribution and is thus available to be translated from the German.

Also there’s now a new and mighty-thewed blog-post category here at Tentaclii, REH. I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged as many posts as I can find.

Since I last looked, the Italian Lovecraftian scholars have released several new journals.

Zothique #9 appeared at the end of September 2021.

* “an article on “The Weird and Sword & Sorcery”, which highlights the ‘Celtic substratum’.”

* “a small but succulent special section dedicated to the theme of music in weird literature, introduced by an essay by Davide Arecco, researcher and professor of History of science and technology at the University of Genoa, and with rare or unpublished stories ( by L.A. Lewis, Clark Ashton Smith, Emil Petaja, A.W. Calder, Jessie Adelaide Middleton), poems (by Jo. Dart and Robert Chambers) and also a comic that, signed by the master Gino Carosini (author of the text and drawings) presents a meeting as strange as it is unexpected: the one between the tales of Lovecraft and the music of Chet Baker!”

* “the fourth part of Mariano D’Anza’s long study on Robert E. Howard’s poetry”

Zothique #10 which apparently appeared a few weeks later as an “Autumn 2021” edition. This is the second Robert E. Howard special, of a planned three.

* “another substantial selection of articles and essays dedicated to the Bard of Cross Plains, together with a choice of unpublished works that expand the Italian bibliography of the writer.”

* “Giovanni Valenzano offers a very detailed excursus on werewolves and other shape-shifting beasts in Howard’s fiction”

* “Andrea Gualchierotti with brilliant erudition speaks to us of magic and witchcraft in the cycle of Conan the Barbarian, finding surprising parallels with the real magicians of the classical world.”

* “Mariano D’Anza’s work on the sources of Howardian poetry continues, this being his fifth section.”

Studi Lovecraftiani #20 with the announcement post being dated 12th January 2022.

* “a thorough examination of HPL’s cultural heritage in modern literature and media”

* “an in-depth study of cursed grimoires and impossible books that sprang from its pen and that of other authors”

* “a piece on Lovecraft’s monsters seen as a psychological metaphor, the first part of a learned study on the abstraction of corporeality in HPL’s fiction”

* “an original article that discloses a source never before identified for the short story “The Nameless City”.”

* “three unpublished [in Italian] writings by HPL himself, starting with a memory of his school days, where the writer also tells a funny episode that occurred during the graduation ceremony; then one of his essays where he criticizes the famous poem “The Waste Land” by Thomas Eliot, and, translated here for the first time, there are also his extraordinary notes that he needed to write the famous short story “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.”

The Italian Horror Magazine also notes that #20 has…

* “”Lovecraft’s Call: A Few Considerations on the Cultural Heritage of the Providence Dreamer.” The last part of which talks… “about Lovecraft the philosopher and conservative, a man flanked by authors apparently very distant from him such as Cesare Pavese, William Butler Yeats, Yukio Mishima and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Ezra Pound and even the late-stage Pasolini.”

* “Lovecraft and the Bible, examining the influence of the King James Bible on Lovecraft’s tales.”

* “an interview with Richard Stanley, director of The Colour Out Of Space movie.”

Some books bits that don’t seem to justify a post on their own.

The European Conservative journal has a free review-article on the “Afterlife of an American Pulpster”…

Two recent American novels feature not the vivid characters who were products of R.E. Howard’s imaginative pen, but fictionalized versions of the man himself. Teel James Glenn’s A Cowboy in Carpathia was published in 2020 by Pro Se Press. David Pinault’s Providence Blue appeared in 2021 from Ignatius Press.

hplovecraft.com now has the table-of-contents for the third book in The Robert H. Waugh Library of Lovecraftian Criticism. Looks tasty. The entire three-volume set will weigh in at 900 pages.

Taskerland reviews, as a Lovecraft newbie daunted by I Am Providence, the shorter H.P Lovecraft: A Short Biography. This being S.T. Joshi’s 100-page whistle-stop abridgement.

S.T. Joshi’s Miscellaneous Writings and his 1980s Journals have been published.