Lovecraft Annual No.9 (2015) can now be pre-ordered on the Hippocampus Press store. Weighing in at around 240 pages.

Picture: Back cover, reproducing a Lovecraft letter that included a sketch of a heraldic shield for the K.A.T.

Letters to Marian F. Bonner
H. P. Lovecraft

Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.
Marian F. Bonner

Can You Direct Me to Ely Court?: Some Notes on 66 College Street
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.

66 College Street
David E. Schultz

The Thing (Flung Daily) on the Doorstep: Lovecraft in the Antipodean Press, 1803–2007
Brendan Whyte

Charles Baxter on Lovecraft
S. T. Joshi

Six Degrees of Lovecraft: Henry Miller
Bobby Derie

Cassie Symmes: Inadvertent Lovecraftian
David Goudsward

Clergymen among Lovecraft’s Paternal Ancestors
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.

Lovecraft and Houellebecq: Two Against the World
Todd Spaulding

Donald A. Wollheim’s Hoax Review of the Necronomicon
Donovan K. Loucks

Reviews

Alan Gregory, Science Fiction Theology: Beauty and the Transformation of the Sublime, Baylor University Press, 2015.

“To the extent that science fiction has appropriated ― and reveled ― in the sublime, it has persisted in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, relationship with Christian theology. From its seventeenth-century beginnings, the sublime, with its representations of immensity, has informed the imagining of God. When science fiction critiques or reinvents religion, its writers have engaged in a literary guerrilla war with Christianity over what is truly sublime and divine.”

Also: Theology & Science Fiction: A Syllabus.

Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 3…

Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human — thought undermining itself, in thought.”

A very obscure book of essays, Fearful Symmetries: Representations of Anxiety in Cultural, Literary and Political Discourses, University of Silesia, Poland, 2013. Appears to be in English, though neither Amazon UK or USA has heard of it. It has one Lovecraft essay.

Contents:

* Indian Zigzags – the Industrial Monster. (Cultural reaction to the British industrial imitation of Indian printed cotton fabrics in the 19th century)

* The Victorian Culture and the Fear of the Talented Woman in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.

* The Renaissance Plus ultra and the Recurrence of Non plus ultra as Refelcted in the Poetry of John Donne and John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost.

* “To Be Saved by Chaos”: “Emancipation” of Self by Mutilation and Perversion. Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters and Choke.

* Who’s Afraid of the Supermarket: A Study of Andrzej Wojcik’s and Ewan Jones-Morris’s Semi-documentary Brand New World.

* Civilisation, Fear and Trauma in Doris Lessing’s writing.

* Masochism and Its (Dis)contents: The Politics of In-Yer-Face Theatre and Mark Ravenhill’s Bodies in Crisis.

* What Else Is Civilization For? Narration Overcoming Fear and Trauma in Graham Swift.

* “Seek and Ye Shall Mind” – Conspiracy Theories and the Mechanisms of Online Exposure.

* Civilization Renewal Project – the Ultimate Solution of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

* Indulging a Terrorist’s Fears: A Critical Evaluation of Theodore Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future.

* “The Gently Budding Rose”: Greeks and Fear in Teodor Parnicki’s Historical Novel The End of “The Concord of Nations”.

* “Fetch Me my Feathers and Amber”: Gary Snyder on Civilization and the Primitive.

* Original Sin, Fear and Metaphysical Poetry.

* Gods for the Final Days: Selected Religious Systems Devised by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Philip K. Dick.

In the mid-twentieth century in the West, the political atmosphere of insecurity spawned religious radicalism and made more and more people pay heed to preachers announcing the approaching doom. L. Ron Hubbard devised and marketed a new religion, the Church of Scientology; Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s postmodernist novels Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle and Slapstick also describe new religious systems. Philip K. Dick, in turn, presented religions of his own making, Mercerism, and belief in the Four Manifestations of God, in the short story “The Little Black Box” and novels Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Maze of Death. This essay compares these religions in order to show how they take advantage of human fear and anxiety and what they offer to their followers.

* Fear of the Inside: Neurology as a Science of Sensation in Victorian Literature.

Despite the attempts undertaken by nineteenth-century psychologists, philosophers and physiologists to define “sensation,” the latter remained a conspicuously fluid notion. This indefiteness provided a vast hermeneutic space for writers seeking new rhetorical devices to convey the complexity of human nature. This essay examines a variety of diverse accounts of “sensation” in Victorian fiction, discusses their functions and approaches to the mind-body relationship.

* The Black Atlantic Zombie: National Schisms and Utopian Diasporas in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.

* Fears and Fictions of Samuel Beckett.

* Deeper Darkness: Fear of the Dionysian Ultimate in H.P. Lovecraft.

H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of terror strike at key questions of human existence – specifially, the origins of fear. Creating narratives that invoke and capitalize on Nietzsche’s fear of the advent of nihilism, Lovecraft drafted a world that was alternately mysterious and terrifying, and also coldly rooted in the scientific determinism that was at the core of his materialist atheism. In doing so, he uproots Nietzsche’s hope for man to transcend beyond the “death of God” and the subsequent nihilistic retreat into outmoded religious ideas.

* Mr. Turner’s Fears and Fantasies: The Turner Diaries and White Fear in America.

* Gender Implications of Literary Representations of Anxieties about Modernisation in Turkey: Aganta, Burina, Burinata (1945)

If you can read Italian, the Italian ‘Project Aphorism’ aims to compile a complete list of aphorisms found in Lovecraft’s Italian translations. Here’s an approximate translation of the blurb…

CONTENT — New research to promote sharing ideas on the thought of HPL as a man, writer and thinker, further increasing the circularity of experience / contacts between magazine, experts and readers. The course aims to collect in an agile book the APHORISMS contained in the correspondence, in fiction, non-fiction of Lovecraft.

HOW TO ENTER — Are you a fan of HPL? Want to be a STAR of literary research? Now you can. How? Any fan can “adopt” a text of Lovecraft, [and] move in search of aphorisms through the reading of texts. You should reference your found quotations to the text of an Italian edition. And add more precise data: title of the story, the book / anthology from which the quotation is taken, publisher, year of publication, the translator. We will consider only complete reports on a Lovecraft work.