I had a chance to look at Angela Carter’s 1975 essay on Lovecraft, “The Hidden Child”, written for the UK’s leftist New Society weekly magazine. It has an interesting dynamism and pungency that I don’t often read now, except in the likes of Mark Steyn or Jonathan Meades at their best. She was of the brisk and blunt generation that came of age via the British underground press, and which was perhaps best exemplified by Swells & Co. and others writing in the NME at its 1975-1984 height. One fragment is almost a story…

He adored erudition, like the Argentinian Borges, to whom he has an odd stylistic resemblance. But he took the easy way out and invented all his own references. So his work provides all the appearance of pedantry but none at all of the substance. He devised whole libraries of books to validate his mythologies. They have the most wonderful titles. The Pnakotic Manuscripts. The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. The “delirious” Image du monde of Gauthier de Metz. The suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kitlten of von Junzt.

One could write a very Lovecrafty tale about the arrival at his door late, very late, one night of a (preferably) demented student clutching in his hand an actual copy of the dreaded Necronomicom of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, bound in human skin, stolen from the enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale and brought triumphantly to the Maestro of the Twisted Nerve, who has so often mentioned it.

Shocked horror of the master, who never thought the vile thing existed. Has he thought the abomination into existence? Or did it always exist, has he always been unconsciously quoting it? Opening the pages with trembling fingers, he discovers cryptic marginalia on the time-seared pages, penned what centuries ago in what fearful city yet, unmistakably, in his own handwriting.

Carter also attempts a little pop psychoanalysis with Lovecraft. Psychoanalysis was all the rage in the mid 70s, as the disillusioned flower-children among the British literati turned inward, their revolutions seemingly defeated and trodden into the mire of a socialist Britain. Lovecraft she deems a perpetual boy, seeking his way back to boyhood, but rather to …

The beastly world of childhood, with its polymorphously perverse imaginings; its wild, inconsolable fears; its terror of darkness, of loneliness, its hatred of strangers. Its love of long, strange words and facility for inventing private languages. Its ability to construct elaborate mythologies out of the cracks in the crazy paving or the patterns on the wallpaper. Fear of cold. Weakness. Clawing, screaming temper tantrums. Self-abuse, old wives’ tales.

She may not be far wrong in that. But then it seems to me she perhaps projects something of the bubbling and festering violence of mid 1970s urban England onto Lovecraft, and also foreshadows the feminist turn toward seeing ultra-violence lurking around every phallus. She deems the lack of surface sexuality in the stories to be masking…

a strong sado-masochistic element. Carnage, ghouls, cannibalism. Ravages of “demon claws and teeth”; corpses “mangled, chewed and clawed”. … Is it any wonder, when evil finally manifests itself, that it does so as an obscene and huge ejaculation? [pus, slime, surgings, bubblings, etc]

* Dustin Geeraert (2010), “Spectres of Darwin: H.P. Lovecraft’s nihilistic parody of religion”. (Masters disseration, University of Manitoba. An advanced work from an M.A. student. “In Lovecraft, one can find a response to Darwin which rather uniquely sympathizes with religious belief aesthetically, culturally and emotionally while simultaneously condemning it intellectually and scientifically”)

* Heath Row (2008), “H.P. Lovecraft’s Use of Dream and Elements of the Fairy Tale: a survey of five topics”, Hedge Trimmings, Vol.2, No.1, November 2008.

* James R. Russell (2011), “A Tale of Two Secret Books” (Paper
presented at ‘Knowledge to Die For: transmission of prohibited and esoteric knowledge through space and time’, 2nd-4th May 2011, Berlin, Germany. Looks at the Armenian compendium of ancient mathematico-magical texts, the Vec’hazareak or ‘Book of the Six Thousand’, and Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon)

* Jerome Alestro (2005?), “Du Cuachmar d’Innsmouth a la Metamorphose: aspects de la transformation” (In French. Appears to be a paper presented at a conference in 2005? Compares Lovecraft to Kafka, in relation to the conclusion of “The Shadow out of Innsmouth”)

* Rodolfo Munoz Casado (2012), “Los mitos de Cthulhu como movimiento literario” (PhD thesis for the University of Madrid. In Spanish. Seems to be a broad survey of Lovecraft’s influence?)

Roger Luckhurst (he of the “savaged by Joshi” fame) pops up in the Times Higher education newspaper today, with an article “Tentacles: the new fangs”…

Sea monsters are inspiring new critical theory and can even be a useful tool in the seminar room

Who knew?

* Cole Nelson (2014), “Devils in the Wilderness”: The Character of Wilderness in American Horror Fiction, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Journal of Undergraduate Research XVII, 2014. “The Dunwich Horror” is one of three texts analysed. Explores the idea that description of wilderness in horror might be influenced by the manner of social deviance at the time of writing)

* Eric LaFreniere (2010), “An Awe-ful Integrity: The Science-Fiction Horror of H.P. Lovecraft” (2nd Place Winner of the long research essay category in the Madison Writing Awards 2010, James Madison University)

* Olmo Pedro Castrillo Cano (2013), “Memoria Explicativa del Trabajo de Fin de Master, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”” (In Spanish. Title roughly translates as: “An Explanatory Memorandum on The Work of The Master in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth””. For the University of Seville, Dept. of Communication. Seems to be an analysis of “Innsmouth”, possibly as part of adapating it as a film? script?)

* S.T. Joshi (trans. Alexander Pechmann), Das Ubernaturlich Grauen in der Literatur (In German. Appears to be a substantial free PDF sample of Golkonda Verlag’s German language edition of S.T. Joshi’s Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature)

* Vicente Quirarte (2014), “Morir en Azcapotzalco”, Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, No. 122, 2014. (In Spanish. Note that the HTML version of this article appears prematurely truncated. Muses on what might have happened had Lovecraft followed Barlow into exile in Mexico City, in order to recuperate from his survived illness. The author supposes that there Barlow would have gladly acted as typist for Lovecraft, and the climate would also have encouraged new fiction writing. With a legacy from Barlow’s aunt, the two friends would set up house together and Lovecraft discover a new sunset paradise amid the summer estate villas and strict social hierarchy of Mexico. Lovecraft would learn to read and write Spanish, and thus directly influence the peak years of early magic realism. However, the illness would return and Lovecraft dies in 1945. Barlow — having the income from Lovecraft’s estate and so not needing to teach classes — escapes homosexual blackmail by a student and thus lives to 80, and so Derleth never gets a look-in. These musings are made on the occasion of the publication of a book of Spanish translations of the works of Barlow and Lovecaft. The PDF version of this article appears to be a longer version of the 2012 blog post “Lovecraft, Barlow y Azcapotzalco”).

* Stefano Lazzarin (2014), “Il volto velato: Iperbole e reticenza in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, e nel racconto fantastico e d’orrore otto-novecentesco”, Between journal, Vol 4, No.7, 2014. (In Italian. “Lovecraft … as part of a certain line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantastic genre and horror literature [which] plays with — and reflects on — the rhetorical devices of hyperbole and reticence. In the texts examined by the author, what cannot be represented is chased throughout the story and is finally revealed, but only to leave room for an irresolvable ambiguity … The last horror, unnameable and unthinkable, is nothing more than an empty signifier.” In Italian.)

72nd World SF Convention, London in August 2014. The keynote academic speaker is Isabella van Elferen (author of the book Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny), on “In Space, No One Can Hear David Bowie: A Brief History of Unheard Music”…

Few authors have described the terrifying silence of space more grippingly than H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories narrate the “black seas of infinity” surrounding human life. But the vacuum of space, Lovecraft asserts, listens. Through the “audient void” of his universe voiceless sounds resonate. Detestable, gigantic, absurd … What could this arch-alien possibly sound like?

MLA 2015 Vancouver, session roundtable on “Weird Fiction, Weird Methods”. Does weird fiction have a single coherent approach and origin? Does it need to be read and studied differently than other fiction? Can it find a place in academia, or is it just too… weird?

* Kate Marshall (elements of American naturalist literature may have been co-opted by the early weird)

* S. T. Joshi (recapping Lovecraft’s theories of the weird)

* Ali Sperling (the early literary weird should be understood as part of the history of modernist literature)

* Matthew Taylor (what the new Speculative Realist philosophy has taken from the old weird, especially re: autonomous self-generating systems that have unhuman frames of reference)

* Eileen Joy (can academics develop a weird methodology for weird literature, by borrowing ideas from the philosophers of OOO Speculative Realism?)