I found a new newspaper book-review in the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, which reviewed an Italian book on Lovecraft’s reception and reputation in Japan. Yes, in Italy the mainstream newspapers review obscure Lovecraftian scholarship.

This new collection of essays edited by Gianluca Di Fratta appeared in May 2018 in Italian, and appeared under the title Lovecraft e il Giappone: Letteratura, cinema, manga, anime. The core of the newspaper review, approximately translated and polished for clarity…

Japan, thanks to its distinctive historic culture and its glowing re-use of its own mythology, has been a particularly fertile ground for the spread of Lovecraft’s cosmology. His obscure, ancestral and evil deities, recall on one hand Japan’s Shinto pantheon, and on the other hand they fit perfectly into the popular virtual universe of video games and comics that glow from Japan’s ubiquitous screen-culture.

American troops stationed in Japan after 1945 spread the pocket-book and free Army editions of the Lovecraft stories that had been printed for the U.S. military. This sparked an interest in ‘HPL’, as he is known by many fans, and this interest has been growing exponentially. He has inspired countless film productions or virtual games, even if the literary remains the field of choice of many. As demonstrated, for example, by the admiration expressed by a great writer like Haruki Murakami, to whom… “Lovecraft has opened up his personal abyss of [cosmic] indifference and pushed us all in”, and for which “the existence of Lovecraft represents an ideal” for a writer, an ideal explicitly cited in Murakami’s well-known trilogy.

Despite the title, the new book does not deal exclusively with the influence of Lovecraft in the country of the Rising Sun [Japan], but also delves into “high” literary themes (provided that the stale division between “high” and “low” culture still holds), such as example, the unsuspected similarity between T.S. Eliot and H.P. Lovecraft that was traced by the gothic [specialist?] Gino Scatasta in his “Lovecraft and tradition”. Reference is also made to the influence exercised by Lovecraft on European and American cinema, a theme developed by writer and screenwriter Antonio Tentori. His essay shows how the posthumous fame of HPL has now surely delivered him into the ranks of the eternal writers.

There appears to be no “Look inside” or tables-of-contents which can be easily found for the book, but a short Barbadillo review in Italian usefully added more details and itemised the chapters…

The book was born from the collection of the proceedings of a conference of the same name – provides an extensive account of his strange process of cultural assimilation in Japan, analysing all the manifestations in the most disparate fields, from the narrative to the essay exegetical, from the cinema to the comic, to the animated film, to the publicity, up to the most extravagant forms typical of that people, such as the morbid eroticism or, at the other extreme, the total ‘cute’ Lovecraftian monsters such as nice puppets in the Pokemon style. The preface is by Gianfranco de Turris who frames the essays. Gianluca Di Fratta provides a historical introduction, a chapter on the influence on comics, and two concluding chapters on the Lovecraftian imaginary in Japan. Giacomo Calorio surveys the influence on Japanese contemporary cinema, and Riccardo Rosati looks at anime [Japanese animation] intended for cinema screens.

S. T. Joshi has a new blog post, which usefully pins down the differences between the forthcoming-soon book Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft and 1998’s Lovecraft Remembered…

“we have included most of the material in that [1998] volume (some items were omitted for copyright issues; others for editorial reasons) and included several newly discovered memoirs not included in Peter’s volume.”

Right, so it sounds like the Lovecraft scholar would still need both. The new book will be a $30 trade paperback, Joshi states, as well as a hardback.

Should one be considering sampling some of Dunsany’s vast output, on whom Joshi is also the expert, he usefully notes…

“Darrell Schweitzer’s “How Much of Dunsany Is Worth Reading?” (first published in Studies in Weird Fiction, Fall 1991)”

This has been reprinted in the new The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature (#11, 2018). It can also be found in Schweitzer’s essay collection Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantastic Literature.

The new issue of the open access journal Brumal has appeared. Vol 6, No 2 (2018) is ‘Horror and the Fantastic’. English abstracts, then Spanish, Portugese or French texts. On a first pass, the specifically Lovecraft items are:

* “Towards a classification of space in fantastic horror texts”. In which… “we outline three sorts of spatial categories: the natural, the supernatural, and the preternatural spaces, and take incomparable English-speaking authors as a starting point, such as H. P. Lovecraft” before moving on to consider Spanish writers.

* And a review in Portuguese of the book O Fantastico: Procedimentos de Construcao Narrativa em H.P. Lovecraft (2017). [trans: The Fantastic: H.P. Lovecraft’s Procedures of Narrative Construction]

The book can be obtained from Brazil and I see it was also reviewed recently in Revista Abusoes. It appears to be a two-volume Masters dissertation from 1979, which gathered dust for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered, hailed as something special, and published.