Category Archives: Scholarly works

Steampunk Symposium 2020: Weird West

30 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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The Steampunk Symposium 2020 (27th-29th March) is going “Weird West” as its theme in spring 2020. As in ‘the old west’ or ‘the wild west’ of America meets the weird, via steampunk. The event plans “…over 200 hours of programming with a grand schedule of presentations, exhibitors, vendors, entertainers”.

I’m unfamiliar with the sub-genre, but interested to learn that there’s obviously enough of it to hang a symposium on. I assume that the sub-genre must have stepped beyond a simple transplanting of mundane zombies and stock vampires into the Old West, with a few airships thrown in alongside the steam-trains? Do any readers know of really imaginative works in this sub-genre, which also work within an R.E. Howard / Lovecraft framework e.g. “Valley of the Lost”, “The Horror from the Mound”, “Transition of Juan Romero”, “The Mound”, etc.

Meanwhile, over in comics-land, this week Por Por takes a look at the 1977 survey book Comics of the American West. Never reprinted and now collectable, it seems. It’s not yet on Archive.org.

New book: New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft – in Kindle ebook

22 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Released tomorrow (Monday 23rd September) in Kindle ebook format, Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham. This is the second and final volume of Klinger’s Annotated Lovecraft and it’s good to see that S.T. Joshi’s corrected texts have once again been used.

The 512-page paper edition has a later release date according to Amazon UK (“25th Oct 2019”). But I’m told that it’s a simultaneous print/ebook release for the USA.

I see that in the ebook and the Google Books preview the annotations are given as endnotes, rather than footnotes. Presumably that’s to allow pop-outs over the page for Kindle Fire readers, and ’round-trip’ links on the older Kindle 3 e-ink ebook ereaders. But I read somewhere that the first print volume had a “1/3 sidebar” for its annotations, so presumably that format will be repeated for the second print volume? Update: Yes, Klinger confirms the same format is used for the second volume.

It’s an amusing touch to have the front cover hint at Lovecraft’s love of spaghetti. The print edition has a different cover.

In order of presentation in the book:

The Tomb.
Polaris.
The Transition of Juan Romero.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath.
The Terrible Old Man.
The Cats of Ulthar.
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.
The Temple.
Celephais.
From Beyond.
Ex Oblivione.
The Quest of Iranon.
The Outsider.
The Other Gods.
The Music of Erich Zann.
The Lurking Fear.
The Rats in the Walls.
Under the Pyramids.
The Shunned House.
The Horror at Red Hook.
Cool Air.
The Strange High House in the Mist.
Pickman’s Model.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

At the back there is a new ‘Lovecraft Gazetteer’ of place-names, as an appendix. This includes invented places, including places in outer space.

“The late Prof. Upton of Brown”

21 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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“The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle.” — H.P. Lovecraft.

Possibly this was the man who saved Lovecraft’s life. As a youth Lovecraft was contemplating throwing himself into the river in despair — just before the kind offer came from Prof. Upton.

Added to Open Lovecraft

18 Wednesday Sep 2019

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* T.A. Elfring, ‘Haunted Space’: Non-Representational Encounters in Heart of Darkness and H. P. Lovecraft. (Masters dissertation for Utrecht University, 2019).

* D. Becaj, Art as a Source of Horror in H.P. Lovecraft’s Stories (A well-illustrated Masters dissertation for Mariboru University, Slovenia, 2019. In English).

* B. Derie, “Editor Spotlight: Christine Campbell Thomson”, Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein blog, 15th August 2019. (Examines the work of the Selwyn & Blount anthologist Christine Campbell Thomson, mostly through the letters of Lovecraft and his circle and contemporaries. This successful series of British ‘grue’ anthologies is often alluded to under the general name of Not At Night, though later in the series the titles varied. Weird Tales offered their most suitable grue-some stories, these being selected by the magazine’s London agent Charles Lovell).

* M.A. Davidsen, “Do you believe in the Lord and Saviour Cthulhu?: The application of Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos in Western Esotericism”, Masters dissertation in Theology and Religious Studies for Leiden University, Netherlands. (Survey and tabulation of different types of incorporation).

New Book: A Wild Tumultory Library

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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Just published, Mark Valentine’s A Wild Tumultory Library is a 350-page collection of a wealth of short essays on the most obscure ‘forgotten’ writers, books, and a few bookshops — with what appears to be a strong British focus. A small sampling of the many titles…

The Palace of Isis: A Note on Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kor’. [1940s, so not an influence on Tolkien’s Kor]

Pagan Mysteries in the Novels of P.M. Hubbard.

Some Books on Tea Cup Reading.

Modern Ghosts: The Macabre Fiction of L.P. Hartley.

The Ancient Art: The Tales of A.E. Coppard.

‘Great-Nephew to the Queen of Faerie’: A Note on the Grindletonians.

Zodiacs in Britain.

At the Sign of the Black Pterodactyl: George Hay and Books of ‘Some Other Dimension’.

First Postgraduate Forum on Research in the Fantastic

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Super, Germany now also has a big multi-day Tolkien conference alongside the UK. I never knew that, but perhaps it’s new. Jena University will host the conference from 11th to 13th October 2019. This year’s theme is “Power and Authority in Tolkien’s Work”.

Lovecraftians in Germany may want to note that the organisers are piggy-backing the wider “First Postgraduate Forum on Research in the Fantastic” on this, with the Forum ahead of the conference on the 11th October 2019.

The New Ray Bradbury Review: horror special

16 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The latest edition of The New Ray Bradbury Review, No. 6, 2019 is on Bradbury’s horror.

Do make sure to look at the publisher’s blurb, as it’s a small masterpiece… of cringing defensiveness, something that is surely no longer needed for a master of genre literature in 2019. Nor does the blurb’s lurch into clueless comparisons reassure the potential buyer: Stephen King, the Oxford Lovecraft edition (very questionable), and an apparent Oxford edition of Clark Ashton Smith… but where is that last item? Perhaps the blurb writer was thinking of the Penguin Classics edition.

Yet if one can get past the blurb and the flippant cover-art, then clicks the ‘Look Inside’… the actual table-of-contents reassures.

Time for the journal’s editors to have a few words with their publisher, I’d suggest, about how the journal should be marketed and presented for sale.

There’s also another new journal on one of the greats, whose ‘poetry with a pen’ was of a different sort. The latest issue (#77) of the high-quality Jack Kirby Collector journal is a “Monsters and Bugs” special issue…

100 pages in colour, for just $10.95.

William Deminoff

12 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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One of the last to live in Lovecraft’s house at 66 College Street, before it was removed in 1959, was a Lovecraft fan writing his dissertation at Brown. William Deminoff (class of 1954) appears to have been an assistant professor at Brown in 1957 (Ken Faig Jr. found a tenancy record for that year, but not that Deminoff was a Lovecraftian) and had gone on to be active in early Lovecraft fandom. The cutting below is from March 1965. This raises the possibility that Deminoff made photographs of the house in situ in its garden court, that may still exist? The name “Deminoff” is not found in Joshi’s comprehensive bibliography, which suggests that his final dissertation was not on Lovecraft.