I’m pleased to see that Strawberry Hill, birthplace of the Gothic Revival in the personage of Horace Walpole, has been restored. Walpole initiated the Gothic novel, with his The Castle of Otranto (1764). The 2005-2015 restoration of the house is finished, and the curators are now able to also restore much of Walpole’s original collection to their original places around the house…

“A complex exhibition involving more than 49 lenders, including a significant number of private collectors, its principal aim is to display Walpole’s pieces in their original settings”.

This major exhibition, “Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection”, is at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, England. It opens on 20th October and runs through to 24th February 2019. The location of the house is about ten miles west of the centre of London, in a district of London that is safe for tourists to visit.

This exhibition could be your only chance to fully savour some of the original physical context for the birth of the neo-Gothic and the Gothic novel.

Yesterday I stumbled across Dave Cesarano’s 15,000-word catch-up overview of epic/high fantasy from 1977 to 2011. I found it usefully informative, as someone who hasn’t taken much notice of newly-published epic fantasy books since Thomas Covenant t’wuz a lad, and who thus welcomed hearing a fan’s succinct plainly-spoken overview of how it all turned out.

It turned out badly, it seems. On the one hand, a cadre of sour Tolkien-haters racing ever-downwards into despair, gore, rape and angst, all chasing an adolescent’s shallow idea of what “edgy” and “realism” is meant to look like. On the other hand, waves of badly-written lacklustre Tolkien pastiches, foaming out to ever-wider lengths at the behest of cynical publishers. And in between the two, the slowly widening chasm of tone-deaf political axe-grinders.

That’s the impression that I came away from Cesarano’s essay with, anyway. Possibly there are other weightier surveys of the epic fantasy novels of the period, akin to Joshi’s sweeping critical take on the history of recent weird fiction. Though I don’t know of any offhand.

But if Cesarano’s fan-viewpoint is to be trusted, and I’ve no reason to doubt his sincerity, then evidently I didn’t miss much in terms of the big post-Covenant works. Except perhaps for Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow & Thorn series (though he’s on record was wanting to infuse leftist “politics” into the genre), and some Marion Zimmer Bradley. Elsewhere I hear good things about Ardath Mayhar’s first Dunsany-like book How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon, and her later Crazy Quilt: The Best Short Stories. Also Jon Brunner’s The Compleat Traveller in Black (1986) and David Gemmell’s debut novel Legend (1984). If I’d have heard about those in the mid 80s, rather than the gloomy-but-worthily ‘grown up’ Thomas Covenant books, which eventually killed my interest, then I might still be reading fantasy.

Anyway, here are the links for Cesarano’s “The State of Fantasy Since 1977”. Keep in mind that he’s talking about epic fantasy novels here, and is not straying off into short-stories, anthologies, fantasy-steampunk, schoolboy wizards etc.

Introduction: The State of Fantasy in 1977.

1. Fantasy: 1977-1989. (If you’re short of time, just start with “1982”).

2. Fantasy: 1990 – 2000. The Age of the Doorstops and Gimmicks.

3. Fantasy: 1999 to 2011. Disillusionment and Nihilism.

Conclusion: Fantasy: 1977 to 2011. Wrapping It All Up.

I see that the 2013 Kindle edition of H.P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent has vanished from Amazon UK and USA. The extended essay was an early and well-regarded examination of Lovecraft’s ‘decadent’-influenced period (which lasted to about 1926), both in his writing and life.

So it’s just as well I got the ebook when I did, back in 2013. Thankfully I find that it’s still on my Kindle, as the print-on-demand paper price is a bit steep.

Why has it vanished? Well, it was republished in a corrected form for WaterFire Providence in late summer 2013, as a fundraiser. So my guess would be that they were only permitted to offer it for a time-limited five-year period?