Category Archives: Scholarly works

Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation

20 Thursday Sep 2018

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I spotted a scholarly ebook that’s new to me, Brian Leno’s Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation (2015). The title essay originally appeared in The Cimmerian, noting some of the concepts and ideas that Robert E. Howard absorbed during his Lovecraft correspondence, and then deftly wove into his fiction. It goes on to suggest that Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” (written late 1934) was a story intended as a semi-satire and one-upmanship of HPL’s themes…

“Pigeons From Hell” was surely meant to be Howard’s response to HPL’s claims that New England was the setting for horror. By recalling his earlier exchanges with Lovecraft, he set out to prove that an old southern house, peopled with his distinctly southern imagination, can become much more terrifying than Lovecraft’s New England home in “The Picture in the House,” with its not-so-scary occupant’s ramblings about cannibalism.”

I’m fairly sure I read this essay some years ago, when it was free on The Cimmerian. I thought it broadly plausible — but rather doubted the strong suggestions that Lovecraft would have been ‘offended’ by reading the story. Amused and itchily tickled to occasional laughter, more likely.

I’ll pass on the book’s middle essay, on Howard’s comedic westerns. But the third and last essay has some interest, examining the possible sources of Howard’s “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”. My forthcoming book on some of Tolkien’s earliest sources has led me deep into such northern materials.

According to the blurb for Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation there’s also discussion in the book on “Did he [R.E. Howard] or did he not see the 1933 film King Kong before his death in 1936?”, but I can’t see that on the contents page on Amazon ‘Look Inside’. Presumably it emerges as part of one of the essays?

Also of note, in recent Howard ebooks, is Don Herron’s 630-page The Dark Barbarian That Towers Over All. I see that was released on the cusp of 2014/15. This packages the former essay books The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph — both on Robert E. Howard of course — as a new $5 ebook. For good measure there are also another half dozen or so new essays. It looks promising.

Lovecraft’s library and ‘Atlantic culture’

19 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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There’s a new “Knowledge in Books” special issue of the Italian journal Nuova informazione bibliografica, and it has an interesting-looking article by a bibliophile on Lovecraft’s personal library in the context of the ‘Atlantic culture’ of the time, presumably meaning the 1890s-1930s cultural interplay between the east coast of America and Britain / Spain and Portugal. However it appears to be in a paywalled journal, and all they have is the front page. So I can’t grab it and do a quick summary translation. Still, it may be of interest to some readers…

Crypt of Cthulhu 111

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Crypt of Cthulhu 111 (Michaelmas 2018) is now on pre-order.

Contents:

Disturbing and Disquieting Editorial Shards by Robert M. Price.

Sadiva’s Lover by Gary Myers.

The Many Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith by Scott Connors.

Asperger Syndrome in R. H. Barlow’s “The Summons” by Charles D. O’Connor III.

Through the Gates of the Prepositional Phrase by Donald R. Burleson.

H. P. Lovecraft and the American Stonehenge: Hokum, Pseudo-archaeology, & the Imagination by Darrell Schweitzer.

The Muddle in High Street by Timothy Burall.

Maal Dweb of Xiccarpth by Will Murray.

R’lyeh Reviews.

Mail Call of Cthulhu.

Poems by Randall D. Larson and Charles Lovecraft.

Two new Joshi books

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

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A new blog post from S. T. Joshi, which reveals a major new book…

David E. Schultz and I are close to completing work on a comprehensive volume of memoirs of Lovecraft, under the title Ave atque Vale: Reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft. This will be a new publication by Necronomicon Press.”

It promises to be more comprehensive than 1998’s Lovecraft Remembered, and will be annotated…

“and we have annotated the individual items to correct errors and provide other useful information”.

Joshi also plans to self-publish a book of essays titled The Development of the Weird Tale, with some new essays. Of the titles, “Samuel Loveman: Shelley in Brooklyn” (previously in a booklet on weird poetry) sounds rather interesting to Lovecraft scholars, as does the end multi-essay section “Lovecraft and Some Lost Classics of the Supernatural”.

Some Notes on a Non-entity: The Life of H. P. Lovecraft

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m pleased to see that Jason Eckhardt’s graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life was published last summer (2017), with what is said to be a well-researched script by Sam Gafford. Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H. P. Lovecraft eventually weighed in at 118 pages of art. It covers the entirety of Lovecraft’s life, using the clever framework of a stage-play directed by HPL himself.

Amazingly, according to the writer…

“Much to my surprise, the project has been passed on by every publisher and agent I’ve contacted. I’m truly gobsmacked at this as I thought it would be an easy sell especially considering the quality of Jason’s artwork.”

The book is still only in hardcover, at present, and at an eye-watering price of £40 here in the UK via Amazon. The UK-based publisher PS Publishing currently has it listed at a more reasonable £25 plus shipping. It looks great and I’d imagine it would do rather well selling as a $6 Kindle ebook for 10″ digital tablets, once the print-run is eventually sold out at PS.

It doesn’t appear that PS has sent out review-copies yet, as there are no real reviews online at present, other than few comments from buyers at Amazon and a brief promo-blurb at Publishers’ Weekly.

New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature – samples

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

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The forthcoming academic collection New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature (Nov 2018), on Lovecraft’s famous essay Supernatural Horror, now has free chapter abstracts and page previews of chapters.

“Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism” may be an interesting chapter to some, in terms of the life — though I’ve now seen it and the author is clearly rather too dependent on Joshi’s I am Providence while failing to really connect a general discussion of the history of dandyism with Lovecraft himself. Key bits of evidence are not mentioned, such as Lovecraft’s Clinton St. Sunday-morning ‘dandy walks’ with his circle, in which he sported an ancestral cane.

The book also has two surveys of how Supernatural Horror was received by later critics.

The Corner in Lovecraft and Ballard

09 Sunday Sep 2018

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W. Wiles, “The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard”, Places, June 2017.

“H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, and both made the humble corner into a place of nightmares.”

A good long article, in a landscape and urbanism journal. Though the author doesn’t know about a possible ‘root’ for this in Lovecraft’s life, to be found in his mother’s apparent belief in and fear of… “creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark” as her madness deepened. The quote was from Clara Hess, a neighbour of his mother…

“I remember Mrs. Lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark, and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively…” — Memories of Clara L. Hess, given in De Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography.

This sources to: Clara L. Hess, letter to The Providence Journal newspaper, 19th September 1948, later reprinted by Derleth (with some additions gleaned from an interview with her, including the “corners” item) in the book Something about Cats and other Pieces, Arkham House, 1949, under the title “Addenda to H.P.L.”

If you’re interested in this topic, you may also be interested in two hours of the Lovecraft philosopher Graham Harman, speaking at the Secret Life of Buildings Symposium: 21st October 2016.

An early Lovecraft appearance in fiction: “The Black Druid”

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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An early appearance of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is to be found in “The Black Druid” by Frank Belknap Long, published in Weird Tales for July 1930. The Editor, Farnsworth Wright, knowingly bills the story on the contents page as: “A short tale that compresses a world of cosmic horror in its few pages”, trusting the regular reader to make the connection between “cosmic horror” and Lovecraft.

The picture illustrates the Lovecraft character in his ‘dream form’.

The story is interesting to scholars of Lovecraft’s life for being a knowing bit of fun-poking fictional commentary on Lovecraft, by someone who knew him on a near-everyday basis during the New York years. Lovecraft is only lightly veiled as “Stephen Benefield” and the character has similar concerns, physical attributes and locales. The story also fictionalises Lovecraft’s wife Sonia. Possibly the Bene in the name Benefield was even a comment on Lovecraft’s frugal diet, hinting at beans.

Archive.org’s OCR of the text is middling, but I’ve made the story readable as a PDF and have given it some annotations and a little introduction — along the way solving a very minor scholarly mystery about an entry in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.

Download PDF.

Accessing Mythlore

08 Saturday Sep 2018

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Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature has a two-issue rolling wall, meaning that you can’t download the full-text for the last couple of issues. But, as time goes by, the articles gradually become free and public. You can bypass this by accessing Mythlore at the Free Online Library, where the latest couple of issues are available and public.

This means that while their new article “”Love of Knowledge is a Kind of Madness”: Competing Platonisms in the Universes of C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft” appears to be locked down until April 2019, it’s actually free here. The same issue also has “”Letting Sleeping Abnormalities Lie”: Lovecraft and the Futility of Divination”, and again it’s free here.