Looking to stash the perfect Christmas present for the little monsters? Just published, Here There Be Monsters: The Legendary Kraken and the Giant Squid from Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. ThisZine has a review.

It seems to be a careful and well-illustrated little volume of 80 pages, moving from the myths to modern ocean science.

“He seamlessly moves among exploration of history, mythology, film, literature and scientific discovery; the discussions of how everyone from Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Jules Verne to Walt Disney kept the myth of the ferocious kraken alive in people’s imaginations are especially interesting. The book is abundantly illustrated with charts, maps and photographs.” — Kirkus Reviews.

I’m continuing to add new links to the Lovecraft links directory. About ten have been added in the last few days, one of the most notable being Fruitless Recursion — a journal of reviews of scholarly books on science fiction, fantasy, horror. It seems to be an annual, with one issue per year.

Hippocampus Press is listing the scholarly Lovecraft Annual No. 4 (August 2010) as available for their checkout.

Table of Contents:

Lovecraft’s “The Bride of the Sea” and the Uses of Bathos | Manuel Pérez-Campos

Following “The Ancient Track” | Jonathan Adams

Letters to Carl Ferdinand Strauch | H. P. Lovecraft

Appendix: A Library Goes Regionalist | Carl F. Strauch

The Construction of Race in the Early Poetry of H. P. Lovecraft | Phillip A. Ellis

The Ecstasies of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “Medusa’s Coil,” and Other Erotic Studies | Robert H. Waugh

Notes on a Nonentity | H. P. Lovecraft

In Memoriam: Dr. Harry K. Brobst (1909–2010) | Christopher M. O’Brien

Time, Space, and Natural Law: Science and Pseudo-Science in Lovecraft | S. T. Joshi

S.T. Joshi’s monumental Lovecraft biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft should be publishing/shipping in August 2010, or so the Hippocampus Press website says. This book is the sumptuous $100 2-volume hardback of S.T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), but in a new edition that adds 150,000 words originally cut for length/cost. Plus the text has been…

“thoroughly revised and updated in light of the new information on Lovecraft that has emerged since 1996”.

Unfortunately those in the UK will have to add a rather hefty $55.95 for standard U.S. Postal Service shipping, more than half the cost of the books themselves(!). At current exchange rates that means a total cost with shipping of £99.95. Expensive, but only 1000 copies will be issued, and one third of the run appears to have already been pre-ordered based on word-of-mouth and forum mentions. And compare that price to the cheapest price for a brand-new copy of the 1996 paperback edition via Amazon UK — currently £42.40 inc. shipping. Or the abridged version of the 1996 text, A Dreamer and a Visionary, which sells for £42.50 new.

No news on any possible future paperback edition. I’m guessing we may only get this definitive hardback edition. Many of which will hopefully go to major libraries around the world, once the reviews and notices hit the library journals.

Hopefully this new book won’t continue the tradition of dreadful cover-art, something that seems to plague Lovecraft books.

If you can read Italian, the new 200-page edition of the scholarly journal Studi Lovecraftiani (#12, July 2010) is free online. For the first time, it seems…

“The move of SL from traditional paper format to an electronic version is an experiment which — it is hoped — will bring new readers. From the next issue, however, we will also return to having a paper version of SL, which will complement the electronic one.”

The PDF text allows copy and paste, so you can run it through Google Translate and/or Babelfish if you want to figure out what’s being said — sadly there are no English summaries of the articles.

And it’s easy enough to get a print-on-demand copy of your PDF edition, via an upload to lulu.com, if you really must have one for your collection.

The ‘new publications’ notes at the end of the volume refer to the essay “Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P Lovecraft”, but the text doesn’t provide the PDF link: it’s here.

The British philosophy journal/book Collapse had a special ‘Concept Horror’ issue in 2009, which is now freely available on Archive.org. Among others this includes the essays:

Graham Harman and Kieth Tilford. “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl / Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo”.

A defence of “weird realism”, suggesting that 20th century philosophical thought has much in common with weird fiction.

China Mieville. “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire – Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?”.

While this doesn’t initially sound a very promising title for Lovecraftians, it does have a fascinating prologue: “The Tentacular Novum” (pp. 105-112) giving a survey of… “the early adopters of the tentacular” in horror fiction. He surveys the kraken, giant octopus and squid — as they appear in Verne, Hugo, Wells, and Hodgson. He dates the phenomenon back to 1907, and its highpoint to 1928…

“A good case can be made, for example, that William Hope Hodgson, though considerably less influential than Lovecraft, is as, or even more, remarkable a Weird visionary; and that 1928 can be considered the Weird tentacle’s coming of age, Cthulhu (“monster […] with an octopus-like head”) a twenty-first birthday iteration of the giant ‘devil-fish’ — octopus — first born to our sight squatting malevolently on a wreck in Hodgson’s The Boats of ‘Glen Carrig’ in 1907.”

To see what that high-point looked like, visit Francesca’s Octopus Pulp Fiction gallery.

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