Houdini & Lovecraft: The Ghost Writer

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in New books

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A new Kindle ebook, Houdini & Lovecraft: The Ghost Writer, a novelization of a feature-film screenplay. Sounds interesting…

“It’s 1924, an era of emerging technology, but also of spiritualism and [stage] magic. Harry Houdini, the great conjurer and mystifier, well known as a psychic debunker, is hired to put together a team to investigate [plot spoiler]. Meanwhile, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is down on his luck [in New York, and] Houdini drafts the reluctant Lovecraft to join his team […] to chronicle the magician’s adventures in the paranormal.”

The author Ron Wilkerson has written a good deal of the newer Star Trek series, and…

“…was nominated for an Emmy as a part of the writing team on the seventh season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Open Lovecraft additions

29 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in Scholarly works

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A few more items added to the Open Lovecraft page…

* Kisantal Tamas (2003) “Fantasztikum, horror es toredekesseg H.P. Lovecraft szovegeiben”, Tartalom, 2003, 1, pp.14-22. (In Hungarian).

* Oliver Hedegaard Holm (2005), “Skygger Over Tiden: it studie i forfatteren H.P. Lovecraft som oversaettelsesobjekt. (In Danish with an English summary as an appendix. Title translates as: “Shadows Over Time: H.P. Lovecraft as an object of literary translation”. Examines the elements that characterise Lovecraft’s fiction, and from this suggests a set of criteria to assess the validity of a foreign-language translation of his stories).

* Oliver Plaschka (2008) “Verlorene Arkadien: sas pastorale motiv in der englischen und amerikanischen fantastischen Literatur — H.P. Lovecraft, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson”. (Thesis in German. Title translates as: “Arcadia Lost: the pastoral theme in English and American fantastic literature”).

* Louis-Pierre Smith Lacroix (2008), Mythologie de Lovecraft: contexte, pretexte, texte (Masters dissertation, Universite Laval, Canada. In French with short English abstract).

New England Vampire Panics of the 1800s

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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The Smithsonian magazine has a long article on “The Great New England Vampire Panic”. The story is based on the work of a consulting folklorist at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, who has documented…

“80 exhumations […] concentrated in backwoods New England, in the 1800s” […] “The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks”