“The Return of the Undead”

31 Tuesday Mar 2020

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“The Return of the Undead” by Kalem member and Lovecraft friend Arthur Leeds, in the Halloween 1925 issue of Weird Tales (November 1925). (Continuation of the story on page 712).

Lovecraft praises the story to Barlow in O Fortunate Floridian in a letter of January 1934, calling it a “splendid tale of a child vampire” in a fever hospital. I don’t see it mentioned or included in any surveys of ‘Lovecraft faves’. Judging by letters to Weird Tales it was also a strong favourite with the readership that season. It is presumably nearly out of copyright now (1st January 2021), and could make for a timely graphic novel adaptation.

Incidentally, in the same letter Lovecraft also gives another bit of data for the end-point of the Arthur Leeds biography, which I don’t think I had in my biographical chapter on Leeds: in the winter of 1933/34 Leeds was overwintering at Coney Island, at the Hotel Clement. A seedy place, judging by this possibly 1940s photo. The hotel was burned out in 1948 and a report of the fire furnished posterity with the information that it was “adjoining the center of the resort’s amusement area”.

This situation might suggest that, during this part of the Great Depression, Leeds in some way deployed his stage-craft and production talents at Coney Island. Possibly helping to build and revivify the attractions there for the coming season? It would be nice to think that he was able to deploy his talents on the more macabre attractions such as the Ghost Train, Hall of Mirrors, and the like. But a year later in 1935, Lovecraft tells Barlow that Leeds is out of a job again and is getting in line to get onto some New Deal work. Possibly Coney Island was thus only seasonal and transitory work, if Leeds was indeed working there in the winters.

Fungi From Yuggoth

30 Monday Mar 2020

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A clear look at the cover for Fungi From Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition (2017), via the scan for a copy currently for sale on AbeBooks.

The tight crop on the seller’s scan makes it look vaguely like it might be a booklet. But it was in fact a limited edition 288-page hardcover, copiously annotated. With fine illustrations by Jason C. Eckhardt. 300 copies were issued at $45 each, and a paperback or ebook edition has yet to appear.

David E. Schultz, one of the leading authorities on Lovecraft, has spent decades preparing this annotated edition of the Fungi. He meticulously discusses the origin of the poem (including the influence of Donald Wandrei’s similar cycle, Sonnets of the Midnight Hours), its connections with Lovecraft’s fiction, Lovecraft’s changing thoughts on natural expression in poetry, and the complex history of the poem’s publication — both as individual sonnets and as a unity. Schultz also provides penetrating annotations on every poem.

Whispers from the Ghooric Zone bagged a copy in 2018, and kindly offered potential readers a peep inside.

Literary Influences of Robert E. Howard

30 Monday Mar 2020

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Todd B. Vick has just launched a new blog series, “The Literary Influences of Robert E. Howard”, with the increasingly forgotten James Branch Cabell as the opener.

In his review, Howard calls Cabell the ablest writer of the present age. Along with many other readers back then, Howard was seized by Cabell’s command of the English language.

Carl van Vechten’s portrait of Cabell, 1935. B&W from the Library of Congress, but here newly up-rezzed, tweaked and colourised by me. View on a dark background and good monitor, to see the wooden cane in the lower half. Feel free to use for worthy projects.

DMR also recently had a short post Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery: James Branch Cabell which noted others influenced by Cabell…

Neil Gaiman counts JBC as his favorite author.

The Lovecraft-Barlow letters also reveal that Cabell was a key idol for Barlow. The Lovecraft-Bloch letters also indicate Bloch was an admirer, though perhaps less ardently that Barlow.

What of Lovecraft? He was more tepid. In 1920 he called Cabell a “real thinker”. But while judging most of Cabell’s fiction “sound and admirable”, and often with an enjoyable “light, witty, & sophisticated manner” and a fine ear for “prose rhythm”, for fantasy Lovecraft very much preferred Dunsany for his “genuine magic & freshness”.

He was distinctly sniffy about the politics, though, by 1935. To Bloch he wrote… “Cabell strikes me as a pale-pink Anatole France — with a lot less to say than his prototype had”. Pale-pink here seems to refer to Cabell’s politics. If one was ‘pink’ in the mid 1930s, one was a dupe or a fellow-traveller of the ‘reds’ (the Communist Party). Such people failed to know or recall that when ‘the revolution’ is in its early stages the intellectual comrade — the bookish guy with intellectual theories and a taste for poetry — is the one put up against the wall and shot by the thuggish element among his comrades. Still, even in a letter to Bloch of November 1935 Lovecraft can still be found lauding Cabell and overlooking his political foolishness. In this letter Lovecraft remarked that Cabell had… “one of the finest and maturest styles yet found in American prose”.

Guns, Love, and Tentacles

28 Saturday Mar 2020

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The real-time-comic styled sci-fi AAA vidogame Borderlands 3 has a new strongly Lovecraftian makeover, in the form of its major “Guns, Love, and Tentacles” premium DLC. On release now, it’s apparently it’s a great success and even strongly improves a vital aspect of the game.

Kotaku’s review sums it up (partial spoilers)…

The scenery on Xylourgos is […] a massive (and dead) monstrosity known as Gythian serves as the centerpiece, and inhabitants have built a town directly under its corpse. Gythian is an ever-present aspect of the environment and storyline, with tentacles stretching both literally and metaphorically across the planet’s vast wastelands. [The alien planet] Xylourgos is also cloaked in darkness thanks to a perpetual solar eclipse, the thin glimpses of light that manage to escape casting an eerie blue-green hue over the icy landscape.

Gythian is an obvious homage to Lovecraftian deities like Cthulhu [with] a cult that worships Gythian’s heart as part of some bizarre love ritual. There’s also an NPC [non-player character] who believes himself to be a fishman a la “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and asks the player to lower him into a frozen lake to commune with his fish queen.

Borderlands 3 isn’t a game known for its incredible boss fights. They usually go a little something like this: a giant bad guy appears [at the end of the game’s level] and you shoot them until they die. [Yet here the player at last gets] a boss fight that actually feels difficult, compelling, and rewarding […] it makes a nice change from defeating Borderlands bosses through brute force.

[…] one of the most enjoyable romps I’ve had with the Borderlands series since it debuted in 2009.”

Sounds great. Doubtless there will be a gazillion play-throughs on YouTube before the weekend is out, so go there if you want to see more of what the game looks and plays like.

Abounding Astounding Stories

28 Saturday Mar 2020

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Astounding Stories Magazine, a new collection category on Archive.org, collecting links and previews for 397 scans. Some are duplicates, and British editions are included in the count. As is nearly always the case, Archive.org’s ‘Sort by Date Published’ filter is useless. So are the year filters over on the left hand side, where they exist. It might however be possible someone to push the RSS through some ninja regex and thus re-sort the links by year, then publish the chronologically sorted links to a blog post.

Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge

27 Friday Mar 2020

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Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge seems somewhat relevant to Lovecraft’s time in New York City, and Brooklyn in particular. The 2020 challenge is to create an unconventional makeover for the iconic bridge…

The New York City Council and Van Alen Institute have launched Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge, an international design competition. [They will pick six] unconventional designs that respect and enhance the bridge’s landmark status [while maintaining safe access and use].

I’m thinking… tentacles…

Deadline: 19th April 2020. Aimed at architects, but there’s no reason why enthusiast teams shouldn’t enter, or that someone couldn’t also start a more artistic ‘fringe’ contest for the bridge over the summer.

Going Dutch

27 Friday Mar 2020

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Now in the final stages of preparation is Clark Ashton Smith: Poems in Prose, as a Dutch translation with Glossary. The translator is now looking for native Dutch speakers to assist with the final polishing…

I’ve been silently but steadily working on a Dutch translation of the Poems in Prose. I’m in the last round of editing and I expect to publish them later this year. Are there, by any chance, other Dutch speakers on these forums?

New book: A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937

27 Friday Mar 2020

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A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937 is listed as available March 2020. It’s a £45 academic book from the University of Wales Press here in the UK, and apparently tries to marry two currently active academic lines of interest. Firstly the focus on the aesthetics of “emotional effects” (mainly around feelings such as disgust) in the weird, and secondly the recent elaboration of the possible philosophical implications of the weird. The book has chapters on Poe, Machen, Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, and Lovecraft.

“English dreams and memories”

27 Friday Mar 2020

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Seen below are some good photo-reference pictures for an 18th century suit, and these may be useful for artists seeking to depict H.P. Lovecraft as an 18th century Englishman of letters. Interestingly, if Lovecraft had ever acquired the financial means to purchase a steam-heated English mansion in Devonshire, complete with semi-tropical glass-houses, then he could have settled in England. Since he knew of…

… the legal provision which makes me still able, as the grandson in direct male line of a true-born Englishman, to call myself a rightful British subject.

… but otherwise one imagines that our climate would have dampened his ardour for England, even on a summer visit of a few months.

New book: Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom

27 Friday Mar 2020

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The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom: Volume One: A Tour of the 1930s is a lavishly illustrated 516-page new book. The $150 first edition is said to have sold out already, but there’s an ebook at a still-hefty $40.

Some have called it a “sumptuous scrapbook”. John Locke (The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales) has called the book…

“A much more detailed portrait of First Fandom than previously available”

There’s also the interesting addition of… “Original narrative comics, that bring to life key events”.

I can’t immediately find scholarly or otherwise weighty reviews. I’m thus uncertain if it offers a few nods toward less public and less photogenic networks, such as Lovecraft and his circles. Ideally one would want a whole chapter on the influence of that on early science fiction, but it might be tough to find quality archival pictures.