Category Archives: Scholarly works

New Book: Tolkien e Lovecraft

03 Sunday Dec 2023

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My ideal book, and… it’s in Italian and I can’t read Italian. Urg. Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico is newly published in the Historica Edizioni series.

J.R..R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft: the gods of fantastic writing, co-founders of a genre that is both deeply ancestral and very modern. The conventional view would place them at opposite ends of the fantastic ecosystem: light and shadow, black and white, Tolkien synonymous with airy fantasy and Lovecraft with deep horror. Yet in the epic of Tolkien’s Middle-earth there is no shortage of flashes of darkness and terror, just as in the dark Lovecraftian cosmos, populated by unspeakable entities, fairy-tale horizons of enchantment and wonder are also found. By analysing their masterpieces, and the reading that inspired both men, this book aims to read the two great architects of the imagination from a more flexible perspective, one which attempts to frame and understand them within their authentic complexity.

Soon to be available via Amazon Italy, which has a 28th November 2023 publication date though the book is not currently listed as shipping. Amazon UK “knows ‘a nurthing” about the book.

The Scientist in Popular Culture

20 Monday Nov 2023

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New to me, a 2015 McFarland study I’d missed, The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King and the Horror in Between. Finding this led me to note that the same author also put together a Haunted House Short Stories anthology in 2021, and (more in my line) edited a new essay collection book The Scientist in Popular Culture: Playing God and Working Wonders (2022). Amazon has no TOCs for the latter, but Google Books has a basic list of chapters:

Frankenstein Goes West;
“Pay Attention, 007”;
A Space Odyssey;
The Scientist as Sixties Icon;
Why Is Everything So Heavy in the Future?;
Through Heroism and Science, Woman Inherits the Earth;
A Scientific Method to Muppet Madness;
All of It Madness;
A Feeling for the Clone;
Dexter;
Its My Time Now, The Time of Science;
I Suggest You Don’t Worry about Those Things and Just Enjoy Yourself.

Monstrously big in Japan

16 Thursday Nov 2023

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New in the Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, an academic article offering “An Exploration of the Appeal of the Cosmic Horror Series of Gamebooks for Call of Cthulhu TRPG | RPG”. This considers, partly via online surveys, some of the reasons for the sustained popularity of the Call of Cthulhu RPGs in Japan.

The Call of Cthulhu series is said to be bigger than D&D in Japan, and synonymous with ‘tabletop RPG’. The success is apparently aided by the relatively simple rules, adaptability to different time-frames and sub-genres, and a strong player base among female fans (meaning male fans can ‘play with my waifu’).

Recognition reviewed

08 Wednesday Nov 2023

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At the SFRA, a new review of S.T. Joshi’s book The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft…

Joshi does not hesitate in calling out cynical personalities who profited from Lovecraft’s legacy only to trample on his reputation later. [But] controversy has had little effect on the sales of his fiction around the world. The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft is ultimately a testament to the power of the stories, which have proved resistant to many different crises, and will certainly survive many more.

Theology and H.P. Lovecraft

31 Tuesday Oct 2023

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A review of the multi-author book Theology and H.P. Lovecraft (2022). Paywalled at Project MUSE, but a substantial chunk of the review is available free. Useful and detailed, even with ‘what there is’ of the review. The reviewer makes me want to take a look at the book, bouncing off my very slightly deeper understanding of theological points which I’ve glimpsed due to my interest in Tolkien. The books TOCs also look quite enticing…

Moore Lovecraft

28 Saturday Oct 2023

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org, an academic book on Alan Moore: Out from the Underground (2018), one of the Palgrave series which discussed comics and graphic novels.

Has little to say about Lovecraft, but does show that the Lovecraft influence was strongly present as early as 1969…

Having met the young Dave Womack at the second British comics convention in 1969, he [Moore] sent him some illustrations and an article on Lovecraft, the latter of which featured in the first issue of his dual comics fanzine/adzine Utopia/Valhalla in February 1970.

And adds one more item to the list of early Lovecraft as character appearances…

Moore’s “Breakdown” in Embryo 4 [circa 1971?] had similar Orwellian themes (‘Cold terminal eyes in the control chamber fingerbutton proseflash’) and ends with a conversation between Orwell, Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury.

Embryo #4 is a zine that doesn’t appear to be on Archive.org.

Lovecraft’s internal mythos networks

25 Wednesday Oct 2023

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In the latest Journal of Popular Culture, one of those single-author corpus text-mining / digital humanities papers, “The ‘Cthulhu network’: The process by which the popular myth was made”. This only examines Lovecraft’s works. The many cross-references and allusions found in works by members of the Lovecraft Circle, and also ideas and names shared by letters, are also mentioned. But that aspect of the growth of the Mythos is suggested as needing “further research”.

Freely available, under full Creative Commons Attribution.

The Recluse, 1927

20 Friday Oct 2023

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New on Archive.org, a good scan of Paul W. Cook’s The Recluse. This 1927 issue has Lovecraft’s ground-breaking “Supernatural Literature”…

Imagine a copy of this plomping down on the doormat in 1927, and opening it to find Lovecraft had laid it all out for you.

From the Lovecraft circle, the issue also has a dream-tale by Donald Wandrei and a poem by Clark Ashton Smith. Plus a cover drawn by Vrest Orton. Even a somewhat supernatural poem by Arthur Goodenough, among others.

The Tentaculum

15 Sunday Oct 2023

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Now in its fourth issue and including non-fiction, The Tentaculum PDF magazine. The latest issue is available to $3 Patreon patrons. Then that issue become free, when the next appears.

Historical non-fiction so far, in the free PDFs:

#1 “The Life and Works of Sonia H. Greene”.

#2 “Edmond Hamilton: Parallel Lovecraftian” [With the convention picture ‘Edmond Hamilton holding pulps’ via the University of California].

#3 “The Hogbens: Atom Age Appalachians” [surveys Henry Kuttner’s ‘Hogben’ tales of a family of weird mutant hillbillies. With an excellent photo ‘Gauer and Bloch with C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’ via the Wisconsin Historical Society].

I’ve tickled the b&w Hamilton picture with a few AIs and some Photoshop…

Edmond Hamilton at NyCon 3 (1967) holding British pulp magazines containing his stories. AI enhanced.