Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos

Excellent news — Bobby Derie’s Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos is set for August publication, according to a new Hippocampus Press catalogue listing. The author had mooted to me a much later date, so I’m pleased to see it due out so soon. I’d welcome a review copy of this book.

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And coming in September from Hippocampus, the affordable paperback of S.T. Joshi’s two-volume Unutterable Horror: a history of supernatural fiction.

RISD completes Museum renovation

The Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art has just completed extensive renovations of the Eliza G. Radeke Building, costing around $8.4m.

H.P. Lovecraft attended the grand opening in late April 1926. Probably on Sunday 25th April, the day after the official dedication ceremonies of what was then known as the Eliza G. Radeke Museum of Art. Lovecraft also found that he shared his Barnes St. house with… “an official of the School of Design Museum” (Letters from New York, p.312). This calm new museum must surely have been a Lovecraft haunt in the years after his return from New York. Lovecraft already knew well the RISD Museum’s neighbouring…


This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.

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Added to Open Lovecraft

* Kevin Corstorphine (2013), “‘Colors We Cannot See’: Invisibility and The Limits of Perception in Weird Fiction”. (Paper presented at the conference “The Weird” University of London, November 2013. Compares key stories of invisible monsters, and their probable influence on Lovecraft. Previously presented as “Invisible Monsters: The Limits of Perception in Bierce, Lovecraft and Machen” at the International Gothic Association meeting, University of Surrey, August 2013)

* Catia Cristina Sanzovo Jota (2013), “Terror and shock in H. P. Lovecraft. (Possibly a class paper?)

The Scotch Bakery on Court and Schermerhorn

Rheinhart Kleiner opened his memoir of Lovecraft, “Bards and Bibliophiles”, in…

a little coffee shop at the corner of Court and Schermerhorn Streets, Brooklyn” (Lovecraft Remembered, p.188)

I may have found a picture of this cafe, titled “Schermerhorn Street looking north to Court Street, 1928” From Brooklypix

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Looking at the other available views of Schermerhorn/Court, it seems there were no other corner cafes there in the 1920s. The “Scotch Bakery and Lunch Room” can be seen on the right of the picture, and there is also a sculptural sign for it on the right-hand lamp post.

At the corner cafe Lovecraft and the gang would sup a 1 a.m. coffee and peruse the early morning editions of the New York newspapers, often before setting out for a long night walk. …


This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.

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The location of “Juan Romero”: update

New ending for my short topographical note of September 2013, titled “The location of “Juan Romero”: Area 52″. Scratch the couple of sentences speculating on how Lovecraft might have learned of the area, and replace with…


How did Lovecraft come to know of the area? He appears to have been inspired in his choice of a desert setting by reading an amateur journalism author he named in a letter as ‘Phil Mac’ (Prof. Philip B. McDonald), who had apparently used a similar desert / mining setting, but for a “commonplace adventure yarn” (Lord of a Visible World, p.69). It seems Lovecraft had copied out a “dull” and “commonplace adventure yarn” sent to him by McDonald, intending to send the copy to his correspondence circle with a detailed critique of his own. But then he decided to just spend a day writing his own story based on the same or similar setting, and he then sent out both… “Youze gazinks have seen both Mac’s and my yarns.”

Philip B. McDonald graduated M.E. (Master of Engineering) from Michigan College of Mines. In Lovecraft’s The Conservative, McDonald was stated to be “Assistant Professor of Engineering English, University of Colorado” in July 1918, though he later moved to New York to become assistant professor of English, New York University. It appears he was the husband of the noted amateur journalist Edna Hyde McDonald (“Vondy”). McDonald’s desert story was not used in Lovecraft’s The Conservative and seems not to exist today, nor any of his fiction. So we don’t know how closely Lovecraft used, or not, what he called “the richly significant setting” of McDonald’s “dull yarn”.

Public domain, Jan 2015

Some of the writers who go ‘public domain’ in Europe and the UK in January 2015, under the 70 year rule…

* Max Brand (Wild West stories of the Munsey era)
* Irvin S. Cobb (prolific writer of the Munsey era, some horror)
* Arthur Quiller-Couch (English adventure novelist and poet, some ghost stories)
* John Palmer (mystery writer, biographies of Ben Johnson and Kipling)
* David Wright O’Brien (fantasy & SF writer, nephew of Farnsworth Wright the editor of Weird Tales)
* J. Storer Clouston (some science-fiction novels)
* Robert Nichols (English poet and fantasy writer)
* Margery Williams (Became a conventional children’s writer, but she first wrote the 1913 novel The Thing in the Woods, apparently a “potboiler about a werewolf and its slightly more human brother on the loose in rural Pennsylvania” Lovecraft read it, so a possible influence on “The Dunwich Horror”).
* Rene Daumal (French surrealist)
* Hulbert Footner (mystery and detective writer)
* C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne (popular adventure novels, mostly pirate tales, but also the author of the novel The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis)
* Greville MacDonald (son of the pioneering fantasy writer George MacDonald. Wrote the biography, George MacDonald and his Wife. Other works include The Sanity of William Blake, fairy stories, and the apparently rather fine English fantasy How Jonas Found his Enemy: a Romance of the South Downs, The latter ridiculously expensive and rare, presumably due to his Alice in Wonderland connection.)

“BY this corner of the graveyard the red dawn discovered to Jonas a little pool of clear water, with mosses and parsley-ferns all around it, and so clear and cool-looking that he must drink. The larger part of it was still shadowed by the wall. On knees and hands, he put his lips to it and drank. The refreshment was wonderful. He rose with a sense that he should find the lost sheep yet and bring her home. He looked down once more into the clear pool. It was wider than he had thought—indeed, he had been mistaken; it was a great tarn on the mountain-side! Then he saw that wonderful things were happening on the face of and all round the water. What appeared to be little glow-worms were lying motionless in groups on the mosses in a still-shadowed region by the side of the water. From beneath a low arch in the wall, where the water was slowly flowing away in a river, there came, against stream and wave and wind, a fishing-boat. Its great red sail was spread, and its pennant shone silvery blue in the sun. It came alongside a pier of mossy stones, and cast anchor. From it leapt twelve strong young fishermen, all with bright faces. They took up the little creatures with the glowing lights, and carried them aboard; then back again to other groups, until all were gathered in. For they were all sleeping human forms, close-wrapped in grave-clothes, but with their light still living, as might be seen by anyone who had suffered. When all were safe aboard, the men cast off and the boat disappeared under the arch.” — from How Jonas Found his Enemy: a Romance of the South Downs (1916).