{"id":38359,"date":"2020-05-20T05:57:28","date_gmt":"2020-05-20T02:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=38359"},"modified":"2022-06-16T04:45:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-16T04:45:23","slug":"review-lovecraft-annual-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2020\/05\/20\/review-lovecraft-annual-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Lovecraft Annual 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

One can quite imagine S.T. Joshi as a 1920s stage magician. He must surely have at least some<\/em> magical powers, in order to sustain his vast workload and output. Look, there he is now… appearing from behind a curiously carved panel on the darkened stage. An interlude of dancing cats exits stage-right. Joshi steps forward into the spotlight and deftly tips his bright red fez hat in greeting. Then he whisks back his thick satin cape, and with the merest raise of his eyebrows he invites a member of the audience to step up and inside yet another of his mysterious magical cabinets.<\/p>\n

Up the cabinet rises through a stage trap-door. In this case the particular \u2018mysterious cabinet\u2019 is the 2019 edition of the annual scholarly journal titled The Lovecraft Annual<\/em>. This usually appears like magic at the end of each summer. Joshi is here, as usual, the benign editor with the magic wand. Once inside his cabinet it’s a bit of a tight fit, since the page gutters could do with another eighth of an inch. But the audience member doesn’t mind, as he is whirled through 12 essays and several reviews.<\/p>\n

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The first essay is Fred S. Lubnow\u2019s \u201cThe Lovecraftian Solar System\u201d, which briskly alights on each planet in turn and surveys Lovecraft\u2019s footprints on it. The solar tour includes a tantalising single mention of the \u201cwhite fungi\u201d on Neptune, among which Lovecraft\u2019s indescribable Neptunians must move. Lubnow tracks down most solar items, but in one instance he states that \u201cLovecraft made no specific reference to Uranus in any of his tales\u201d. I would point out that there is an inference, at least, in one story. \u201cPickman\u2019s Model\u201d has mention of… \u201cthe trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood\u201d. Trans-Saturnian refers to, I believe, Uranus and Neptune. Admittedly, this is a reference not to the planets themselves but to their depiction in art. The planet Pluto (yes, it is a planet in my view) is understandably left until last by Lubnow, and as Yuggoth it sees the most discussion. It also understandable that Lubnow did not want to burden the survey with items from the letters or the poetry. But I hope that in due course we will see a Part Two, in which he does draw on and survey these. Perhaps even a Part Three on things like comets that enter the system, the aurora or \u2018northern lights\u2019, meteors, the \u201cstar winds\u201d, and similar. <\/p>\n

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Duncan Norris\u2019s essay \u201cHungry fer Victuals I Couldn\u2019t Raise nor Buy\u201d: Anthropophagy in Lovecraft\u201d is an excellent survey of cannibalism in Lovecraft\u2019s work, with abundant historical, anthropological and literary contexts. Once one starts looking, it seems, cannibalism is everywhere and Lovecraft was consumed by it. Usefully, Norris also looks for hidden or hinted-at cannibalism. He does not mention Bloch\u2019s \u201cA Visit with H. P. Lovecraft\u201d and its toothsome ending, which would have been an amusing final nibble for the end of the essay.<\/p>\n

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Andrew Paul Wood\u2019s \u201cThe Rings of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, Durer, Saturn, and Melancholy\u201d is a fascinating speculative essay that draws first on Durer\u2019s famous picture \u201cMelancholy\u201d. Then on the mythical Saturn. Saturn\u2019s \u2018ravening for delight\u2019 aspect, and one aspect of his visual appearance in his defeat, is linked with the possible genesis of Cthulhu. Lovecraft\u2019s fascination with Saturnalia (the Roman revels of 17th December) is noted along with his early knowledge of Virgil\u2019s \u2018golden age of Saturn\u2019, and likely awareness of a lines from Keats\u2019s \u201cThe Fall of Hyperion\u201d…<\/p>\n

And saw, what first I thought an image huge,
\nLike to the image pedestal’d so high
\nIn Saturn’s temple. Then Moneta’s voice
\nCame brief upon mine ear ‘So Saturn sat
\nWhen he had lost his realms’ …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One can quite see the potential inspiration, as Wood suggests, for the famous sitting idol showing Cthulhu on his pedestal. Wood offers the reader a brilliant and fascinating essay. There is occasional over-reaching, but the informed reader can make up his own mind on such things. He misses a few elements that might have augmented his argument. He notes Lovecraft\u2019s \u201cSimplicity: A Poem\u201d (1922), further evidence of Lovecraft\u2019s awareness of Virgil\u2019s \u2018golden age of Saturn\u2019…<\/p>\n

Etherial spirits of celestial grace;
\nAnd he, unspoil’d, may childlike bask again
\nBeneath the beams of Saturn’s golden reign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But he overlooks another poem which offers… \u201cHath held too long his Saturnalian feast\u201d. These items again remind me how useful it would be for Lovecraft researchers to have a keyword-searchable ebook edition of The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Also unmentioned by Wood is that Lovecraft\u2019s friend Loveman had a literary interest in Saturn, evidenced by his naming his journal The Saturnian<\/em>. But it\u2019s only an incidental connection, and it\u2019s quite possible that Loveman was using the word Saturnian as it arose from the French decadent milieu, from which it spilled over into use among poets as a code word for \u2018homosexual\u2019. A little earlier in time Uranian had a similar vogue among Edwardian poets as a code-word. Still, if Wood is right about a partial Saturn influence on the posture of the Cthulhu idol, then the all-male cultists cavorting around the idol in \u201cThe Call of Cthulhu\u201d are also Saturnian orgiasts in the Loveman sense of the word. Because, as Lovecraft himself bemoaned…<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll recall that Rankin [the Weird Tales<\/em> artist] made ample-bosomed wenches of my male<\/em> orgiasts in the Louisiana swamp scene of \u201cCthulhu!\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer\u2019s short \u201cThe Cats\u201d: An Environmental Ditty\u201d is thankfully not saddled with questionable eco-critical theory, and is a straightforward discussion of Lovecraft\u2019s 1925 poem with some historical context. Her essay is a useful study of this powerful New York poem, delving into the sound-patterning and also discussing the relationship to the similar future-visions in the story \u201cHe\u201d. Some phrases in the poem are seen to relate to what she claims to have been the state of the sanitation and water supply of New York City in 1925. Fair enough. But there is a rather unfortunate historical tangle on page 71, in which the reader expecting good evidence for the suggestion is expected to jump from 1925 to 1935, and then we get the quote \u201cno system for disposing of sewage and garbage …\u201d which — on my finding its source — actually relates to circa the 1690s. This date is not given by Hopkins-Drewer, and yet she immediately follows the quote with\u2026 \u201cCertainly, if the pollution had been left unchecked…\u201d in 1925, Lovecraft\u2019s prediction of a future New York City in \u201cThe Cats\u201d would have come true.<\/p>\n

Such a damaging tangle on the historical evidence could have been avoided with just a little online research, and the argument strengthened. For instance I can quite easily find that in the 1920s the Brooklyn water-supply actually came from pumped ground-water in Queens, on Long Island, drawn from a catchment area of over 100 square miles. It was chlorinated by the time it reached the taps of Red Hook and does not appear to have done Lovecraft, or probably any of the street-kitties he encountered at their water-bowls, any harm. On sewage Hopkins-Drewer is correct, although the evidence presented for her point is confused and somewhat misleading. It should have quite easy to nail the claim quite precisely to the mid 1920s and Brooklyn, with just a little research — it\u2019s easy enough to find that by the summer of 1926 raw sewage pollution of the harbour became so intolerably bad that all the New York City public beaches were closed, except those that directly faced the open ocean. When we think of Lovecraft living in Red Hook, we forget the likely summer smells — all the raw effluent of New York City, massing up day after day and week after week around the harbour, and the reek of it wafting in over the tenements. Knowing this, one then reads \u201cRed Hook\u201d somewhat differently — regarding the opening words such as \u201coily waves\u201d and \u201cfilth\u201d. In the searing killer heatwave of June 1925 the shores were presumably oily with more than just ship-bilge, and on a windy day the filthy smell of excrement must indeed have been noticeable even some miles from the shore. One wonders if some prevailing summer wind from such a shore partly explains why, until the public works of the mid to late 1930s, there were still shantytowns, open scrubby land and undrained marshland along the waterfront there and why the eastern parts of Red Hook were heavily dotted with \u201cweedy undeveloped terrain\u201d on 1924 aerial photography. <\/p>\n

However \u201cThe Cats\u201d was actually written in the winter. On 15th February 1925 to be precise, an important point that Hopkins-Drewer does not note. Lovecraft was then about a month into living in his \u201cdismal hovel\u201d at 169 Clinton Street, having luckily moved in just days before the worst snowstorm in living memory (1st-3rd January 1925). The date of the poem might suggest that an early thaw made him suddenly aware of the stench that might well waft up from the shoreline in the high summer. The New York Times<\/em> for February 1925 does indeed suggest a thaw, with one of its articles titled \u201cThaw Releases Frozen Cars\u201d. Also, the few letters Lovecraft sent from New York at this time suggest he was out and about and these make no mention of snow or ice. But if a February thaw and sun was quite enough of a thaw to send a new shoreline scent to Lovecraft\u2019s sensitive nose is rather debatable.<\/p>\n

Such points do not lessen a claim that \u201cThe Cats\u201d is in part an \u201cenvironmental ditty\u201d, and it is anyway a poetical work that is only partly biographical (i.e. the Red Hook location, the implied black cats which relate to his own lost cat, the allusion to Poe\u2019s Pluto, Lovecraft\u2019s repeated nightmare of how the \u201cthick tide retreats\u201d leaving a shining river a mass of oozing mud). It can certainly be read as an environmental poem — \u201cStreams of live foetor, that rots in the sun. … Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.\u201d — but such claims need more precise historical evidence on matters of water-supply, sewerage and weather, and close attention to dates. <\/p>\n

Hopkins-Drewer does excavate one fascinating historical nugget that was wholly new to me. The Chicago gangster Johnny Torrio was \u201choled up\u201d in Red Hook after a January 1925 mob shooting in Chicago, and he took over the rackets there. I can add that he appears to have arrived in Red Hook from Chicago in February or March, probably shortly after Lovecraft wrote \u201cThe Cats\u201d. He went to Red Hook because he had grown up there and it was his old racketeering ground. It\u2019s not impossible, as Hopkins-Drewer hints, that Red Hook was abuzz with the return of Torrio in summer 1925, when Lovecraft was about to write of the similarly \u2018resurrection\u2019-like return to social life of the gangster-consorting Robert Suydam in \u201cThe Horror at Red Hook\u201d. We know that Lovecraft frequented cheap cafes where one could overhear hoodlums talking over the current state of things in Red Hook, and there may also have been local cafe-owner gossip and press coverage of the matter. It\u2019s quite a plausible suggestion, and again a little more research would have let Hopkins-Drewer strengthen the suggestion.<\/p>\n

What of a curious line in the poem \u201cThe Cats\u201d, of their \u201cYelling the burden of Pluto\u2019s red rune\u201d at the city, almost as a form of curse? This is not addressed in the essay, but it offers another route to a concern with animals and thus the environment. “Pluto” is not a science-fiction reference to the cats arriving from that distant planet in a gigantic cosmic leap — akin to that of the Cats of Ulthar or perhaps the Cats of Saturn in Dream Quest<\/em>. Since the planet Pluto was not discovered or named until 1930. Rather, it is a reference to the eye-less cat Pluto in Poe\u2019s famous tale \u201cThe Black Cat\u201d and thus to Pluto the god of the underworld. Lovecraft thus makes a poetic linkage of this cruel mistreatment of cats with the astrological rune for the planet Pluto, which resembles an eye socket with blood dripping from it. Presumably Poe had also seen this macabre likeness, and drew his tale from the observation. Though I can find no scholar of either Poe or Lovecraft noting a possible connection. <\/p>\n

Is there any additional symbolism to the Pluto rune? Unfortunately it is impossible for a search-engine to cut through all the blather produced by neo-pagan parrots and occult mumbo-jumbo munchers. But it’s possible to find some 19th century scholarly sources that suggest a couple of options. To summarise, to one it was spirited living intellect circling above the inevitable river of the underworld (death). To another it simply arose as a confusion with a Nile goddess symbol, when Ptolemy took over Egypt and moved in his new statues. From there it became a sign for Pluto as a god of the underworld. There seems to be no clear route back in time, and the origin is probably lost. All we can really say is that it is a circle in an arc above a short cross. But we can say that Lovecraft\u2019s cryptic literary-historical symbolism in \u201cThe Cats\u201d is also a form of concealed environmental commentary for the learned and literary reader, since it evokes the cruelty of certain types of people to animals. One can also note that he cleverly accents the shape of this \u201crune\u201d with the \u201coo\u201ds seen in the following line\u2019s \u201cswoop low\u201d — which offers a partial rhyme with \u201cPluto\u201d. Two “oo”s (eyes) become one “o” (a missing eye), just as in Poe’s gory tale. The imagery of \u201cswoop low\u201d also evokes the gouging motion involved.<\/p>\n

Lovecraft’s use of “rune” in the poem may seem incongruous since it offers a Nordic touch to the poem, evoking the one-eyed Odin of the North and Northern runes. If so, then this was not entirely his spurious confabulation. Lovecraft may have noted in the histories that Nordic and Teutonic warrior-cultures had long sent armies across the Danube, and had even occupied Sparta and Alexander the Great’s boyhood\/maternal homeland. This would offer Lovecraft a possible cultural origin in the North for the later use of the Pluto symbol in the Egypt of Ptolemy — Ptolemy having raced to claim and hold Egypt as his own, after the death of Alexander. Ptolemy’s Hellenistic Egypt is of course a key place for early astrology and also where one finds the first direct evidence for the origin of alchemy, and it seems from some brief research that such origins were under active discussion in the psychological (Jung) and archaeological literature of the early 1920s.<\/p>\n

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Matthew Beach\u2019s \u201cLovecraft\u2019s Consolation\u201d is a follow-up to his earlier \u201cLovecraft\u2019s Optimism\u201d in Lovecraftian Proceedings<\/em> #2. He examines the possible consolations of \u2018the cosmic\u2019, something Lovecraft offered to some of his friends in letters. These consolations are basically that we need not despair at the ultimate \u2018futility of it all\u2019, because: \u2018cosmic time\u2019 is full of potential, even if rather impersonal from a human perspective; and the endlessness of \u2018cosmic space\u2019 offers infinite possibilities.<\/p>\n

Such a sense of time and scale may then give us a certain sense of freedom from the earthly judgements of others. Hence the personal \u2018indifferentist\u2019 stance that Lovecraft tried to maintain toward others. This stance was bolstered somewhat by his more down-to-earth understanding of the glandular human body, and the (in his eyes) uncontrollable urges this produced. It follows that if some had \u201cabnormal\u201d urges, they couldn\u2019t help it. Equally, a sense of the vastness of time and space may lead us to consider that beauty and significance may reside, or at least be thought<\/em> to be found, outside what our age considers \u201cnormal\u201d. Perhaps even in the non-human, somewhere else in the vastness of cosmic time and space. Such cosmic possibilities might even arouse in us the \u201csense of curiosity\u201d (Selected Letters<\/em> III), and the prospect of the pursuit and gratification of such curiosity would also be a cause for optimism. If not for oneself, then for future generations — to which one contributes useful knowledge today, knowledge on which future generations will build.<\/p>\n

In some sense then, I would also suggest we can see Lovecraft as having anticipated the discovery and \u2018cosmic unity\u2019 later presented by the more advanced novels of galactic civilisation and alien encounter. In which the presence of a striving and expanding mankind in the galaxy at least supplements the formerly cold cosmic wastes with meaning, even if it doesn\u2019t deeply infuse it with meaning. Of course, if Lovecraft\u2019s work and letters actually influenced the genesis of this sub-genre is more debatable and it would take some hard sleuthing by Lovecraftian scholars to prove such a claim. But when Beach notes Lovecraft tell Sully in a consoling letter that one can \u201charbour great hopes\u201d for the human future, albeit in a \u201clight, indefinite way\u201d, and extract from them a \u201cbracing power\u201d that should be harnessed to the human imagination — then he might seem to be laying the foundations for a future galactic empire or two.<\/p>\n

That said, it\u2019s obvious that if Lovecraft has an \u201coptimism\u201d to share then it\u2019s not the blithe emotionalist\u2019s happy-clappy variety of optimism. He says as much himself, and Beech deftly extracts the relevant quotes. Rather it is an optimism that \u201cintegrates rather than ignores the harsh realities within cosmic time and space\u201d (Beech). A sort of Super-rational Optimism. But these \u201charsh realities\u201d offer another clear form of consolation to the cosmicist — that harsh though the universe is, it has clear and un-breakable rules. There is no capricious hostile god or malign devil toying with human lives or expecting weekly sacrifices of burning babes. Similarly, priests have no power to call down retributions or to channel divine beneficence.<\/p>\n

His other consoling advice is more homely and it must draw on the various writers of the classical world that he admired. Practice pragmatism in everyday life. Minimise pain and maximise pleasure, in moderation. Plan for a sensible future, one that will include \u201cinevitable loss\u201d — but with the understanding that \u2018time heals all wounds\u2019, and that both personal human memory and long-term recording allow us to cherish and recall the best of what has been. Lovecraft\u2019s antiquarianism was part of this stance, I would suggest, and somewhat fits with his cosmic view. If there is no god, then ancestors can at least serve one as secular substitutes for the saints and angels. The risk comes in knowing too much about them. Spend too much time \u201ccorrelating the contents\u201d and one\u2019s historical heroes may develop feet of clay, or one\u2019s family tree may develop an unwanted fishy side. A new monograph by Ken Faig Jr. suggests that Lovecraft\u2019s family tree did just that, and I suspect the discovery probably informed \u201cThe Shadow over Innsmouth\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Dylan Henderson\u2019s \u201cThe Inability of the Human Mind\u201d: Lovecraft, Zunshine<\/em>, and Theory of Mind\u201d seeks to sift Lovecraft\u2019s rich life for signs of autism — whatever that is these days, as the definitions are stretched and warped by non-autistics seeking a ‘get out of jail free’ pass for bad behaviour — then he tries to do the same at a few points in Dexter Ward<\/em>. There may be a case to be made, but I was not convinced by this brief tour of some possibilities.<\/p>\n

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A brief Notes<\/em> paragraph notes that no less than three new Lovecraft documentaries are underway.<\/p>\n

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\u201cH. P. Lovecraft\u2019s \u2018Sunset\u2019\u201d is S.T. Joshi\u2019s own musical choral setting for Lovecraft wistful autumn\/fall poem of 1917, with pages of musical notation. I don\u2019t read music, so can\u2019t judge this item. Joshi\u2019s blog reports that his choir has performed it several times, but it appears not to be online.<\/p>\n

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Ann McCarthy\u2019s \u201cThe Pathos in the Mythos\u201d is a short essay that points up some elements of emotional \u2018colour\u2019 in Lovecraft\u2019s work: the joy he finds in certain places and evocative views; the delight in dogged research and scholarly detection; his sympathy for old and isolated men, both living and those literary ancestors isolated from him in time. One might have added his tenderness and concern for cats, although admittedly this is more in the poems and letters than the stories.<\/p>\n

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Jan B. W. Pedersen\u2019s \u201c\u201cNow Will You Be Good?\u201d: Lovecraft, Teetotalism, and Philosophy\u201d is a survey of alcohol in the stories, and partly in the letters and in The Conservative<\/em>. This is introduced with eight pages of general history on temperance and teetotalism, pages which might instead be given over to digging into the context of two fascinating Lovecraft quotes which Pedersen leaves un-examined. The first is the 1915 quote… \u201cto transform himself to a beast, and in the end to degrade himself and his descendants permanently in the scale of evolution\u201d. The second is from 1932, talking with R.E. Howard about \u201cthe hard-pressed classes\u201d and their drinking… \u201cThe more drink-sodden they get, the worse their biological stock becomes\u201d. Evidently in 1932 Lovecraft was still holding to the \u201cthree generations is enough\u201d argument of the 1910s, a slogan which implied the outright danger of allowing the breeding of a \u201cfourth generation\u201d. Circa 1910 the commonly understood sequence of degeneration ran: nervous temperament and moral laxness in the first generation; then their children, who have severe neurotic behaviour leading to addictions and drink; leading in the third generation to insanity and suicide; then at the last a sterile fourth generation with outright cretinism and often malformed bodies and heads. There was also an increasing understanding that recessive genes could be carried by seemingly healthy people, and passed to offspring who would then exhibit the defect. Peterson misses a prime opportunity to explore or at least summarise the anti-liquor movement’s theory of generational degeneration and recessive traits. To ask if Lovecraft understood this correctly, if it was modified by research or was supported by other currents in society and\/or developed and added to by Lovecraft himself. Then to tease out what uses might have been made of it in the stories.<\/p>\n

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I had anticipated that Michael D. Miller \u201cLovecraft\u2019s Open Boat\u201d might be about the young Lovecraft\u2019s row-boat on the Seekonk river, finding connections to \u201cDagon\u201d via Lovecraft\u2019s recurring dream of the Seekonk drained to oozing mud, and his landing by row-boat on the muddy washed-over Twin Islands in the Seekonk. But it is not. Miller finds some parallels between Lovecraft\u2019s indifferentist and cosmic stances and Stephen Crane\u2019s \u201cThe Boat\u201d (1897), a story inspired by his shipwreck while travelling to pre-communist Cuba.<\/p>\n

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Horace A. Smith\u2019s \u201cLovecraft Seeks the Garden of Eratosthenes\u201d details the young Lovecraft\u2019s astronomical observations of the Moon in 1903-06, in particular certain areas of the Moon, and offers some fascinating historical context about the lunar life theories and the observations of William Henry Pickering. Pickering imagined the life he \u2018saw\u2019 on the Moon as being a low vegetation. Could the young Lovecraft\u2019s vivid imagination have mused on these Selenites as vegetable animals, a possible precursor to some of his later creatures? Possibly, but Smith sagely calls that idea \u201ca stretch\u201d. Yet Smith also notes something from early in Joshi\u2019s I Am Providence<\/em>: that the young Lovecraft once had a \u201cnow lost tale set on the dark side of a Moon\u201d, although at an unknown date. Smith doesn\u2019t speculate on what the story might have had in it. But I\u2019ve looked into the story\u2019s scientific spur and it seems informative. In 1854 the eminent German astronomer Hansen had proposed that our Moon was not a perfect sphere, but was deformed by a huge elevation of about 35 miles in height. This \u2018bump\u2019 was directed toward Earth, presumably due to gravity, and its presence would mean that a shallow atmosphere could just about persist on the dark side, most likely with some icy crater-lakes and thus the potential for primitive life. However, by 1903-06 most scientists assumed that any water and ice would long ago have been lost to space. But not all<\/em> scientists, as the Germans were still proposing an 1890s \u2018water ice\u2019 theory for many cosmic bodies, and this was championed and bolstered by the substantial book Glacial-Kosmogonie<\/em> in 1912. The theory apparently persisted into 1930s Germany. In the 2010s abundant water ice was indeed found by probes on the surface of the Moon, and presumably it exists in even more abundance on the dark sides of the poles. One assumes Lovecraft\u2019s lost juvenile story would have encountered life of some kind (he recalls it as a “thriller” in a letter to Kleiner) and one wonders if Lovecraft’s 1919… “insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter” (“Beyond the Wall of Sleep”) preserves a hint of the subject matter. Likely written at around age 14, the science of 1904 suggests he would have imagined shallow ice lakes and their sub-surface primitive entities. In this he would have been following the recent German elaborations of Hansen\u2019s initial 1854 proposal. One assumes that the astronomical journals were keeping readers abreast of such developments from Germany, even though the growing consensus elsewhere appears to have been that any Moon water had long since drifted away into space. Such a juvenile tale would thus, eventually, have been proved partly right by science. No ice-lakes, no vegetable-insect life musing on their slow alien philosophies, but… around 6% water-ice per NASA probe-scoop, and possibly much more ice banked up in the crater-shadows. Quite how his tale’s presumed protagonists and their acetylene lamps would have reached the dark side of the Moon from Providence is another question. One imagines that Lovecraft’s beloved black cat, leaping and darting all around his telescope in the garden dusk, might have given him the idea of simply leaping to the Moon as if in a dream. Lovecraft would muse more solidly on such matters a few years later, in his “Can The Moon Be Reached By Man?” (1906).<\/p>\n

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Scott Meyer\u2019s \u201cDiabolists and Decadents: H. P. Lovecraft as Purveyor, Indulger, and Appraiser of Puritan Horror Fiction Psychohistory\u201d attempts to detect alignments between Lovecraft and the Puritan worldview, and this seems most useful in a short section in which he examines the letters. <\/p>\n

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Steven J. Mariconda\u2019s \u201cHow to Read Lovecraft\u201d column muses on Lovecraft\u2019s playfulness, although the essay sticks within the confines of the 1930s\/1970s psychological ideas of the puer aeternus<\/em> (aka \u2018Peter Pan Syndrome\u2019) and Jungian archetypes. We also learn that Lovecraft\u2019s mother was \u201capparently progressing toward schizophrenia\u201d. She was undoubtedly mad before her botched gall-bladder operation and death, but \u201ctoward schizophrenia\u201d seemed to me a rather bold armchair diagnosis. Does one really \u201cprogress\u201d toward such a thing? I\u2019d never heard that said, and on investigation it appears not to be the case — on which point see the 2013 paper \u201cThe Myth of Schizophrenia as a Progressive Brain Disease\u201d in a leading Oxford University Press journal. Another point of error in the column is the claim that… \u201cLovecraft was thirty-three and Barlow was sixteen when the former went to Florida\u201d. Actually, when Lovecraft stepped off the bus, he was forty-three and Barlow was fifteen. <\/p>\n

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Finishing up the 240 page issue is a lengthy book review by veteran Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig Jr., reviewing the new Ave atque Vale<\/em>, here rather amusing titled Ave atque Value<\/em> — perhaps in an unconscious pun on its mere $30 price in paperback. This is the fine new book of reminiscences of Lovecraft, effectively replacing the previous Lovecraft Remembered<\/em>. Faig\u2019s review is entertaining and erudite, and doesn\u2019t forget to give the juicy details of the book — that it has notes and an index, biographies of contributors, and 400 footnotes. One data point has already been superseded — my recent discovery of more Eddy memoirs adds to our knowledge of the bookshops, and Faig\u2019s observation that \u201cLovecraft knew each of the big three of Providence bookselling\u201d must now be expanded to four — including \u2018Uncle\u2019 Eddy.<\/p>\n

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Well, that\u2019s it for 2019. Onward to the 2020 issue — which I imagine will be going to pre-order relatively soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One can quite imagine S.T. Joshi as a 1920s stage magician. He must surely have at least some magical powers, …<\/p>\n

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