14 Sunday Jan 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Curtis Wright Maps has a copy of Off the Ancient Track: A Lovecraftian Guide to New England and Adjacent New York and offers some nice interior scans of the $150 item. This is the first edition, not the revised edition.
11 Thursday Jan 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
New to me, Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures in Popular Culture (2018) from Indiana University Press. Accompanied a year later by its shelf companion Beasts of The Forest: Denizens of the Dark Woods (2019).
09 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
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”.
07 Sunday Jan 2024
Posted in REH, Scholarly works
Released at the end of November 2023, The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (13.2). Howard Works has the TOCs, which reveal no Lovecraft material.
Also in Howard news, Dark Worlds Quarterly has the new and richly illustrated article surveying “The Inkers of John Buscema’s Savage Sword”.
06 Saturday Jan 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
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.
03 Wednesday Jan 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
The new Dead Reckonings: A Review of Horror and the Weird in the Arts No. 34 is now on the Hippocampus Press website. As well as the reviews, there’s “An Interview with Ellen Datlow”.
03 Wednesday Jan 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
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″.
02 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of an article on ‘Lovecraft and Cats’ in Offcourse #95 (December 2023). Freely available online.
31 Sunday Dec 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
Brazilian journal Das Questoes has an ‘After Speculative Realism’ special as its latest issue. Leads with “The Cthulhu Ascendancy: H.P. Lovecraft and the Tentacles of Speculative Realism” in English. The later article “Is the Future of Speculative Realism in the Study of Literature?” may also interest.
The latest edition of Brumal also has “Hijos de Cthulhutl: deidades prehispanicas y horror cosmico en H.P. Lovecraft” (‘Sons of Cthulhu: Prehispanic Deities and Cosmic Horror in H.P. Lovecraft’. Though the choices don’t quite seem to suit the grand title. The author examines two lesser collaborative works “The Transition of Juan Romero” (1919, a quick demo for the Circle of how to revamp a “dull” story by amateur Philip B. McDonald) and “The Electric Executioner” (1929, a revision of an earlier story by de Castro).
30 Saturday Dec 2023
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
The podcast 30 Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft stretched to a 90 minute Christmas special, the better to encompass the scholarly might of Ken Faig Jr.
21 Thursday Dec 2023
Posted in Astronomy, New books, Scholarly works
SFcrowsnest this week reviews the new book When The Stars Are Right: H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy (2023).
Lovecraft’s Ladd Observatory, as if abandoned and in one of his tales.
19 Tuesday Dec 2023
Posted in Films & trailers, Historical context, Scholarly works
Deep Cuts has a long and balanced post on Lovecraft and the movie The House of Rothschild (1934), which he saw with Barlow on arriving in Florida. One wonders what else was playing locally and was perhaps seen during Lovecraft’s visits with Barlow? Possibly the forthcoming Lovecraft in Florida will cast some light on such topics.