I’m pleased to see that The Lovecraft Lexicon now has a Kindle ebook edition. The paper edition had held its price remarkably well, wobbling around £30 with postage, and I’ve thus been unable to justify getting it despite its obvious usefulness. But the Kindle ebook is a budget £3.84 (roughly $5), which is in my price-range (thanks, Patreon patrons!).

It’s billed as “A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P. Lovecraft” in 589 pages (Amazon says 480 pages for the print edition).

No reviews for the Kindle edition, but a glowing review from Wilum Pugmire adorns the Amazon page for the paper edition. A review by Dan Harms (Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia) picks up small points of structure and navigation that might have been handled better, but also approves. I’ve no idea what S.T. Joshi thinks of it, but it forms a nice extension to The Lovecraft Encyclopedia, though without the scholarly references. Someone adept with a scanner and Excel and a few sorting macros could, theoretically, merge all three into a gigantic seamless A-Z mega-pedia.

I’ve now read the introduction, the substantial mini-biography of Lovecraft, and have read through to the ‘Houdini’ entry. It’s rather good and concise-yet-meaty, and sometimes draws on the letters. “Nyarlathotep” is missed out, presumably because its elements also appear elsewhere. Also skipped are a few other prose-poems such as “Memory”, and some fragments. So far I’ve only come across a few light touch suggestions of sources in The Lovecraft Lexicon, usually to do with geography, such as the passing suggestion that Bolton might equate to Lawrence on the Merrimack. The setting of “The Rats in the Walls” is also assumed to be Cornwall and the influence of Northumbria is not considered. There’s good awareness of Biblical and early modern books, but the deep linguistics is not investigated, e.g. Krannon, beyond the most obvious.

The ebook was obviously scanned and OCR’d from a print copy, and I’ve so far seen three lingering OCR errors. Thus the more obscure spellings will need to be double-checked if used in scholarship. Also, there are are few errors arising from use of old non-Joshi texts, such as “the windmill salesman” (“Colour Out of Space”) — which should be “woodmill”.

The book’s biography of Lovecraft is very sound and elegantly written. As an offprint it would be eminently suitable for introductory use on an undergraduate or masters course in a sensible university, I’d suggest, if… i) one were doing three lessons on Lovecraft in a 12 week semester; and ii) the course was not being taught by an anti-fan.

On a more minor point, we’re also told that the mill town of Bolton in northern England is in the West Midlands, which caused a guffaw from someone in the West Midlands. Culturally and geographically the English Bolton is in ‘the North’ and is just north-west of the city of Manchester, and thus definitely not in the Midlands. But it’s an understandable error to make, when the mainstream media in their London bubble constantly make similar mistakes, idly assuming that everything north of the Watford Gap can be mentally dismissed as ‘the North’, and regularly claiming that the West Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent is ‘a town in the north’ (it’s neither). Even the clueless new Parliamentary candidate to be M.P. for Stoke-on-Trent South, a big-shot lawyer being parachuted in, immediately called the city a “town” in print in the media — probably to his Imminent Doom in the coming General Election.

The hplovecraft.com site has the full content-lists for the forthcoming To a Dreamer: Best Poems of H. P. Lovecraft and Selected Essays.

Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (2019, “second edition” in a $25 paperback)…

“This title is being released at NecronomiCon Providence 2019 [late August 2019]… In this new edition, the editors have updated all references to current editions of his work and also exhaustively revised their notes and commentary”.

Super. Though, much as a love synthwave, I’m still not keen on the garish synthwave-coloured cover. But I guess it’s equally ‘of its time’ as the late 90s retro occult-a-billy of the first edition…

Cuttlefish?

The interior design of the hardback first-edition was very pleasing (uncredited, presumably in-house at Ohio University Press), and I’d hope that’s being kept for the new edition.

Lovecraft Annual No. 13 (2019) is shipping, and has a full contents-list online. “Free shipping worldwide” with another eligible purchase. It’s also listed on Amazon if you prefer to get it that way.

One article is “Lovecraft’s Open Boat”. Ooops, I hope I haven’t pipped the author, re: connecting Lovecraft’s boat – the Twin Islands – “Dagon”, as I did in my May “Lovecraft afloat on the Seekonk” post.

The issue looks appealing, but the 2008 and 2015 issues are still higher up my “to get” list.

The journal Russian Literature Vol. 106 (May-June 2019) is a special issue on the Russian Gothic, including under the Soviets and after. Appears to be all in English, but is paywalled Elsevier stuff. Judging by the abstracts, it’ll help a lot if you’re conversant with the latest strands and currents of political thinking inside Russia — to know what they’re talking about when they refer to things like “the neo-Eurasian dream of a New Russian Middle Ages” etc.

A previous special issue was on Magic, Magicians and Russian Literature (Oct–Nov 2017) but there about half the essays appear to be in Russian.

I’m still digging up newly-encountered stuff which appeared 2015-2017.

Such as the £1.99 Kindle ebook of The Lurking Chronology: A Timeline of the Derleth Mythos (2015). Only 46 pages (Amazon says 44), but I can imagine that new Mythos writers will probably want this sitting alongside the old Chronology out of Time pamphlet (which laid out the interior chronology of the Lovecraft stories) and the latest edition of the 400+ page Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia which puts it all in a handy A-Z format.

The Lurking Chronology is so short that the 10% Kindle sample includes none of the actual Chronology, so I don’t know how telegraphed or fulsome the dated entries are. Given the apparently large size of the Derleth Mythos, I imagine it’s a fairly brisk canter through the dates. There’s only one brief review worth having, and even that only says it’s a “useful tool” in “40 pages of text”, with no details of the format of the entries.

Anyway, finding this vague item spurred me to plug “Derleth” into Amazon, to see what’s out there in 2019. It appears that there’s still no ‘Best of the Derleth Mythos’ in audiobook, sadly. I prefer good audiobooks for fiction, these days. If there was such a thing, and ideally from a reader of Wayne June or Phil Dragash quality, then it might persuade me to consider spending some time revisiting the Derleth Mythos. I had read him way back when I first discovered Lovecraft, via some of the UK’s Panther 1970s paperback reprints of the ‘collaborations’, but I don’t really recall his tales now.

But my search for “Derleth” on Amazon did pop up a new affordable £3.86 Kindle ebook of the A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos (2015) which is stated by the Amazon page to be a “3rd edition”. I knew there were two editions, the hardback and then the revised paperback, and that much of the “academic apparatus” was said to have been jettisoned for the paperback.

Amazon’s 10% free sample, sent through to my Kindle, proved to be very substantial. It also gave me the element I most wanted, which is the opening section. This usefully collates evidence for Lovecraft’s attitudes to: i) his own use of small elements and hints gleaned from previous writers, ii) his comments on the unfixed nature of his own evolving backdrop of story-lore, iii) the tacit encouragement he gave to fellow writers to make occasional passing mention of his story-lore, and iv) Hugh B. Cave, who Lovecraft evidently felt had ‘overstepped the mark’. The chapter doesn’t also look to the poetry for evidence, as it might, in poems such as “On the Thing in The Woods”.

As a text the sample for A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos is extremely slick. But I’m not inclined to pick through the rest of its twists and turns re: Derleth. I’m really not that interested in post-1945 Mythos stories, as none I’ve tried make me think “I’m reading a lost Lovecraft story”. But I may well get the full book for review at some point in the future, and skim some of the sections which appear to painstakingly assess and categorise Derleth’s output. I’d focus instead on any biographical elements related to Lovecraft’s estate, such as the precise details of Derleth’s relations with and shunning of Barlow shortly after Lovecraft’s death — I assume the book examines that key historical pivot in detail.

The 10% free sample confirms the “3.0” or third edition, and that it’s “revised”, but the sample has no details of what’s been fixed or changed. Perhaps there’s a changelog at the back of the full book, but that’s just my guess.