Announced for Lovecraft’s birthday, the scholarly Lovecraft Annual No. 15, 2021. 270 pages including, among others, at least four topographical pieces…

* The Acolyte of the Abyss: or, In the Long Shadow of the House at 454 Angell Street.

* Following The Ancient Track.

* The Promise of Cosmic Revelations: How the Landscape of Vermont Transforms “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

* The Church That Inspired “The Horror at Red Hook” and the Fall of the House of Suydam.

On H.P Lovecraft’s 131st birthday, I’m pleased to present my offering to the Master. An Index for the book The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H.P. Lovecraft (second revised edition). I had often felt the lack of a ‘topic, imagery, place and name’ index for this 600-page volume, so I made one.

Download (PDF). Version 1.1, August 2021.

It’s 3,000 words as a 32-page PDF file, and as such it should be feasible to print as a little imposition-software booklet and slip between card covers. Or upload it to a POD booklet printer. Note that it’s not under Creative Commons and is not for re-sale, please.

I suspect that the Guild of Indexers will not be sending me a gilt-edged invitation card to their annual Christmas Ball, on seeing this. I did it my way, without poring over weighty manuals on indexing, but it should be perfectly serviceable for Lovecraftian look-ups. There are no line-numbers though, as that would have added far too much extra work. Thus you will need to skim down the page to find the item being searched for.

Neale Monks has a new review of Robert H. Waugh’s The Monster In The Mirror: Looking For H.P. Lovecraft (2006) in the latest SF Crowsnest…

Waugh argues that Lovecraft was strongly coloured by the Baptist religion of his family and Waugh provides numerous examples of how this religious background comes through in his writing. For example, the sheer variety of Old Testament names given to the characters of his novels, such as Asenath and Zadok, can’t simply be ascribed to chance. At the very least, they demonstrate Lovecraft’s knowledge of scripture. Then there are the incidents in Lovecraft’s stories which seem to have Biblical parallels. ‘The Dunwich Horror’, for example, includes not just events, a virgin birth, but also entire sections of dialogue apparently inspired by scripture.

 
At The Dark Man today there’s also another book review, of Robert Weinberg’s The Weird Tales Story: Expanded and Enhanced (2021). I had the original of this pegged as an early fannish history, light on business history, and would probably have got hold of it when The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales finally comes down in price (or becomes an affordable ebook).

But now The Weird Tales Story has been substantially expanded, and seemingly has a lot more to say about both R.E. Howard and editor Farnsworth Wright…

the book also exudes an almost hagiographic devotion to Farnworth Wright’s tenure as editor.

Right, sounds good to me.

Now listed at Hippocampus, the revised and augmented book Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman. The word “augmented” seems a bit of an understatement, as this second edition of the book has grown from 244 to 514 pages. Also new is Born under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith…

The correspondence begins in 1913 [then extends] sporadically all the way down to 1941.