Category Archives: REH

New book: Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy

12 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Fred Blosser has a new book, the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy…

The Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy scrutinizes this full range of Howard’s dark fiction by listing, summarizing, and critically analyzing more than 50 tales.

Blosser is also the author of 2018’s Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengeance: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s American Horrors, and Ar-I-E’ch and the Spell of Cthulhu: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Lovecraftian Fiction. All three would make a pleasing Christmas gift-set in paperback, I’d imagine.

New journal issue: Skelos #4

10 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Weirdletter has the TOCs for Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy #4 (Autumn/Fall 2020). Of likely interest to readers of Tentaclii are…

* “Innsmouth Bus Driver” – by Mark Maddox (frontispiece)

* “Postcards from Lovecraft” – Cliff Biggers (short story)

* Wandrei on Clark Ashton Smith: An Introduction to “Emperor of Dreams” – Scott Connors

* Dracula’s Descendant: An Interview with Dacre Stoker – Anthony Taylor (Dacre being a leading Dracula expert)

On learning that the title has non-fiction, as well as fiction and poetry, I went looking for the TOCs for #1-3. Easier said than done, and only Amazon’s “Look Inside” saved the day. Amazon also shows me that #2 is in Kindle ebook, the others in paperback only. Here are the items likely to interest Tentaclii readers…

#1

* Nameless Tribes: Robert E. Howard’s Anthropological World Building in “Men of the Shadows” — Jeffrey Shanks.

* From the Cosmos to the Test-Tube: Lovecraft, Machen, and the Sublime — Karen Joan Kohoutek.

* A Sword-edged Beauty as Keen as Blades: C.L Moore and Gender Dynamics of Sword and Sorcery — Nicole Emmelhainz.

#2

* Clark Ashton Smith in Carmel — Scott Connors. (Carmel, California)

* “The Shadow Kingdom” and the Origins of Gothic Horror in Robert E. Howard’s Heroic Fantasy — Charles Hoffman.

#3

* Whispers from the Darkness: An Interview with Lynne Jamneck and S.T. Joshi — by Jason V. Brock.

* The Boys from Atlantis – Bobby Derie (article – unknown topic, but may be of interest).

* “It seemed to be a sort of monster”: Misrepresentations of the Cephalopod in the Fiction of Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft — Jack Staines.

New Book: Robert E. Howard: A Closer Look (Starmont Guide, update)

18 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

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An interesting item, new from Hippocampus. Robert E. Howard: A Closer Look, this being the old Starmont Reader’s Guide for Howard, but overhauled and updated for 2020. Done by the original authors too, which is nice…

“the authors have now prepared a radically expanded and updated version of their monograph, taking account of these new discoveries” [by Howard scholars]

The book is structured by character rather than by date, which makes sense for a Reader Guide. The book also surveys his poetry and other work. So it all looks very useful as an introductory guide. Amazon UK has no listing for it yet, but let’s hope it gets on there and perhaps also has a Kindle ebook edition in due course.

Howard in The Souk

03 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings, REH

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New on Archive.org, and seemingly for the first time there, a scan of the pulp Oriental Stories for Summer 1932. It has extensive commentary in The Souk on the historicity of R.E. Howard’s depiction of wine in his then-recent story “Lord of Samarcand”. Howard responded in the January 1933 issue (not online), by which time the title had been re-named The Magic Carpet Magazine.

I’m unsure if Lovecraft would have read Oriental Stories in summer 1932, and anyway studies in the history of Near, Middle and Far East were not generally a subject he favoured with much attention. Although I recall he undertook a long bout of intensive reading on Abyssinia, which likely then informed Dream-Quest — but that’s Eastern Africa, now Ethiopia, so is a bit too far south and although adjacent to Arabia it has a different religious culture. Yet he certainly had a lifelong interest in alcohol and prohibition and would have perused the Oriental Studies notes with interest had he seen them.

Howard Collector #5-8, inc. “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”

09 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, REH

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New on Archive.org…

Howard Collector #5, Summer 1964.

Howard Collector #6, Spring 1965. With the poem “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”, from a letter. This would count as another early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, albeit not in fiction. I wonder what the likely year on this poem is?

Howard Collector #7, Winter 1965.

Howard Collector #8, Summer 1966.

Also new and of interest is a new Dark Worlds Quarterly survey of Robert E. Howard’s Bran Mak Morn in the Comics.

Barlow’s correspondence with receiving libraries

16 Thursday Jul 2020

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Bobbie Derie delves into letters arising from Barlow’s deposits of letter-caches with receiving libraries, in the late 1930s. The focus is on the whereabouts of the Robert E. Howard letters, but the article also throws a little light on the possible disposition of some of Lovecraft’s rarer books after his death…

Later, Mrs. Gamwell [Lovecraft’s aunt] may want someone to look over Howard’s [Lovecraft’s] books for possible library donations, I believe there is not much for the Harris Collection, but other departments might find material.

So the assumption that it was all trucked down to the hill to the Dana bookstore may not be the whole story. Before that happened there may have been some ‘picking’ of certain choice volumes by Brown academics, as well as by his aunt and a few members of his circle.

The Dark Man journal – new issue

15 Wednesday Jul 2020

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I see that Amazon now lists a June 2020 edition of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. At the journal’s website there’s also a new call for papers with a deadline of 16th August 2020.

Thanks to GreyIrish who has provided the TOCs for the latest issue of The Dark Man…

* Editorial by Jason Ray Carney and Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney.
* Willard M. Oliver, “Robert E. Howard and Jack London’s Martin Eden: analyzing the influence of Martin Eden on Howard and his semi-autobiography”.
* Todd Vick, “The Kid, Two-Gun, and history”.
* Karen Kahoutek, “More Than Meets the Eye: the women protagonists of the Conan stories”.
* Ralph Norris, “The Coming of Kull”.
* Luke F. Dodd, “The Sword and Sorcery Themes of The Sword’s Age of Winters, Gods of the Earth, and Warp Riders. (Album reviews).
* The Dark Man interview with The Cromcast [podcast]. (Interview).

There’s also now a table of contents for last summer’s issue. I learn it had an essay on Lovecraft, “Heredity and Madness in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls””.

Also of note is a forthcoming book by a 2020 Dark Man contributor, Todd Vick, titled Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard. It’s set to appear from the University of Texas Press. It sounds to me like a ‘Howard 101’ book aimed at academics who need a quick primer…

You may not know the name Robert E. Howard, but you probably know his work. His most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is an icon of popular culture.

Set for publication in November 2020 or January 2021, the dating varies.

An interview with Brian Murphy

18 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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A new podcast, Literary Wonder & Adventure Show #15: The History of Sword and Sorcery: A conversation with author Brian Murphy. [Link removed – dead]

I see Murphy’s book now has a handy £5 Kindle ebook edition.

And… what better excuse to post here the three classic Chris Achilleos covers for Panther UK’s three-part Skull-face paperback re-issue, which introduced many to Robert E. Howard.

I’m fairly sure I also had these, also from Panther…