Category Archives: Scholarly works

The Armchair Detective

19 Friday Jan 2024

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New on Archive.org, a scan of The Armchair Detective for June 1976. Has a few items of interest…

* “Wicked Dreams: The World of Sheridan Le Fanu”

* “Edmund Wilson and the detective story”. The arch critic’s judgement on the best of the genre was just as dismal as on Lovecraft and Tolkien, it appears.

* “An Informal Survey of Cover Art of the Seventies”.

Also a mention of Lovecraft in an article on Chesterton’s Father Brown detective character, noting a circa early-1930s story…

he [Brown] remains untouched by “The Blast of the Book” (an amusing take-off on Necronomicon-like things, although whether Chesterton ever read H.P. Lovecraft is unknown to me) because he is not superstitious

Review of L’Affaire Barlow

15 Monday Jan 2024

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The Pulp Super-Fan super-swoops, cape rippling in the breeze, down onto the new book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy…

This is a well-researched work, and I look forward to further works by this author, who is working on a biography of Barlow. […] The whole story about this affair is pretty sad as many people behaved badly. They pulled in others they shouldn’t have, attacked not only Barlow but others, and led to several proposed publications never seeing the light of day. Worse, some of those are lost, as the only copies were destroyed in a fire.

Meanwhile, down in Mexico the Tabasco Herald compares Tolkien and Lovecraft. I thought this was a review of the new Italian book on the topic, but it seems not.

Three new articles

09 Tuesday Jan 2024

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Three new articles from overseas.

A new open-access article on sanity in Lovecraft’s “Dagon”, although the article is in Portuguse.

The videogame Bloodbourne is commonly said to be very Lovecraftian, almost in an exemplary manner. Andrii Isakov tests that claim in his new open-access article in a Ukrainian journal. More musing on the topic at “Bloodborne through the lenses of Todorov’s theory of equilibrium”.

In a Russian journal, a new article examining ancestral roots and the re-positioning of sacred symbolism in Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth”.

New book: L’Affaire Barlow

06 Saturday Jan 2024

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Newly spotted, L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy (November 2023), with a foreword by Ken Faig Jr.

In L’Affaire Barlow, the author examines primary source material in detail never attempted before, clearly explaining how dangerously close Lovecraft’s work was to being litigated into obscurity. Bruised egos, personal vendettas, and Machiavellian plots abound, making control of the Lovecraft literary estate read like a tale from one of the pulp magazines. Lovecraft designated Robert Barlow as his literary executor. Barlow created the Lovecraft archives at Brown University even as a campaign was waged to wrest control of Lovecraft’s work from him. Barlow’s reputation was destroyed among the Lovecraft circle. It was only after his premature death that his unyielding guardianship of Lovecraft’s legacy was fully understood despite the plot against him. L’Affaire Barlow is the story of Robert Barlow’s quest to preserve the Old Gent from Providence for the ages.

Tennessee Williams and Weird Tales

03 Wednesday Jan 2024

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New in open access, a journal article on Tennessee Williams as a Weird Tales writer and reader contemporaneous with Lovecraft, “What weird meant to Williams”.

“In August 1928, Weird Tales magazine published “The vengeance of Nitocris”, a short story written by 16 year-old Thomas Lanier Williams. What Tennessee Williams wrote later in his life resembles the plots, the structure, and stylings of stories (including the names of characters) that appeared in Weird Tales in and around 1927 and 1928″.