S. T. Joshi’s Blog from 2015

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December 15, 2015 — Cineaste on Lovecraft and Other Matters

The Winter 2015 issue of Cineaste, a leading magazine devoted to film, contains an extensive article on Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark: H. P. Lovecraft and Modern Horror Cinema,” by Christopher Sharrett, along with Sharrett’s interview of me. Only a part of the former item is available online (http://www.cineaste.com/winter2015/haunter-of-the-dark-lovecraft), while my interview is only available in the print edition. So go pick it up!

A very interesting deluxe illustrated edition of “The Colour out of Space” is being prepared by Amy Borezo of Shelter Bookworks (http://www.shelterbookworks.com/the-colour-out-of-space). I have written the introduction to this edition. It is limited to 40 copies and promises to be an instant collector’s item. The first 10 copies ship on February 15, 2016; the remaining by March 15. Better order soon!

I have become involved in several interesting ventures by Jonathan Dennison of Cadabra Records. Jonathan is working on issuing recordings (on LPs—that’s right, vinyl!) of Lovecraft stories, read by Andrew Leman, and asked me to write the liner notes. The first one is apparently out (http://www.cadabrarecords.com/2015/11/h-p-lovecraft-the-hound-the-music-of-erich-zann-on-sale-1112/), although I have not received a copy. There will be two more LPs (one containing “The Picture in the House” and “Pickman’s Model,” the other “The Lurking Fear”).

Then Jonathan, apparently inspired by Wilum Pugmire’s YouTube video of me reading some Clark Ashton Smith poems (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5HonrvWSZM), asked if I was interested in reading some Smith poems on a 45 rpm vinyl record! I of course said yes, and we set up a session at a nearby recording studio (AudioLogic, Inc.), where I read CAS’s “Inferno,” “Nightmare,” “The Eldritch Dark,” “Nyctalops,” and (of course) “To Howard Phillips Lovecraft.” I don’t believe this recording will become available until around March or April, but I’ll let you know the moment it arrives. Can anyone play 45s anymore? I have a turntable, but am not sure it can do so without a special adaptor. Jonathan may have me do more such readings in the future.

Speaking of recordings, my choir’s second performance of Handel’s Messiah on December 12 was recorded (by AudioLogic, as it happens). I was mightily relieved that we decided to record this second performance rather than the first (on December 5). In that performance, the choir was reasonably good but the orchestra was simply awful. Indeed, I was probably better when I played first violin last year on my choir’s “Messiah Sing-Along.” But the orchestra was much improved for the Dec. 12 performance. It was not perfect by any means, but quite creditable overall. We have still not made a decision as to whether we will actually run off CDs of this performance (it would be a two-CD package); but if so, I will alert any interested individuals.

I seem to be amassing an absurd number of forthcoming titles, especially with two publishers. For Centipede Press, I have already completed eight projects (totalling ten volumes): large omnibuses of the work of Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, John Metcalfe, E. F. Benson (2 vols.), J. Sheridan Le Fanu, W. C. Morrow, and Robert Aickman (2 vols.). (The Machen, Bierce, and Stoker volumes are for the Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction; the others are for the Masters of the Weird Tale series.) I have already cited the six volumes I have prepared (well, the W. W. Jacobs volume is still being assembled) for the Classic Weird Fiction series to be published in the first half of 2016 by Dark Renaissance Books. For Hippocampus, I have such books as my Varieties of the Weird Tale, my editions of Lovecraft’s Letters to J. Vernon Shea and Others and Lord Dunsany’s The Ghost in the Corner and Other Stories (uncollected and unpublished stories), and no doubt some others. Once all these books come out (and there is no guarantee they will all appear in 2016), that will give me a total of 246 published books.

The 2015 issue of the Weird Fiction Review is listed by the publisher as “shipping in early December,” but I have not yet received any copies. It’s a spectacular issue, so let’s hope it appears soon! Issues of Dead Reckonings and Spectral Realms are also complete, but will probably not be released by Hippocampus until early next year.

November 29, 2015 — Handel’s Messiah and Other Events

Let’s talk of some more pleasant things, shall we?

In what can only be considered the luck of the draw, a short letter of mine was printed in the New York Times (both print and online editions) recently. It was a pungent rebuttal to one of the resident dunces (i.e., conservatives) on the paper’s editorial staff, David Brooks, and reads as follows: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/opinion/substitutes-for-religion.html. I suppose this carries some faint echo of recent controversies.

I was thrilled to see my chapter “The Old Gods Waken: H. P. Lovecraft and Other Cosmic Horrors” appear in a lavish picture book, The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History, edited by Stephen Jones. The book originated in England with Elephant Books, but I received a copy of a US edition published by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. The book’s list price is $40.00 (itself an incredible bargain), but I see that online venues are offering it at a substantial discount: http://bn.com/s/9781495009136. My chapter probably constitutes no more than 2500 words, but the 23 pages of the chapter are filled with a host of illustrations of Lovecraft’s (and other related writers’) works, ranging from the Weird Tales artists to recent artists such as Les Edwards, Bob Eggleton, and Bruce Pennington.

Mark Rahner, a Seattle media figure who runs the Geek Nation podcast, recently conducted an interview with me on H. P. Lovecraft. It can be found here: http://media.kisw.com/a/111130899/bjgn-11-19-20-special-ops-h-p-lovecraft.htm. I again discuss some of the controversies roiling the field, but I doubt I’ve said anything here that I’ve not already uttered in print.

The noted journal Rue Morgue has just published an issue commemorating H. P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday, part of which features an interview with me, intermingled with interviews of other figures in the field. The issue is well worth picking up, for all manner of reasons. See http://www.rue-morgue.com/.

I have just completed assembly of the fifth volume of my Classic Weird Fiction series for Dark Renaissance Books. I am not sure that any of these books have actually been announced, but I imagine they will be soon. The five in question are:

A volume of the stories of W. W. Jacobs remains to be compiled.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have been devoting a fair amount of my time writing a treatise on detective fiction, entitled Varieties of Crime Fiction. In all honesty, I am not sure who will publish this work, but it has been an engaging project to work on. Here is the complete table of contents, with asterisks indicating the chapters I have already written:

  1. Introduction
  2. The Golden Age
    1. *Dorothy L. Sayers: Lords and Servants
    2. *John Dickson Carr: Puzzlemeister
    3. *Margery Allingham: Murder, Gangs, and Spies
    4. *Philip MacDonald: Expanding the “Cosy” Mystery
  3. The Hard-Boiled School
    1. *Dashiell Hammett: Sam Spade and Others
    2. *Raymond Chandler: Mean Streets
    3. *Ross Macdonald: Family Affairs
  4. The Psychological Mystery
    1. *Margaret Millar: Scars of the Psyche
    2. *Patricia Highsmith: Guilt and Innocence
    3. *L. P. Davies: Powers of the Mind
  5. Some Contemporaries
    1. *P. D. James: The Empress’s New Clothes
    2. Ruth Rendell:
    3. Sue Grafton:
  6. Conclusion
  7. Bibliography
  8. Index

My most recent chapter was an excoriation of the work of P. D. James, whom I found to be vastly overvalued as a detective novelist and as a writer overall. The title of the chapter is a variation of the title of my unkind chapter on Stephen King in The Modern Weird Tale.

I have been led to understand that only a few copies of the hardcover edition of Michael Aronovitz’s Alice Walks remain in print from Centipede Press (http://www.centipedepress.com/horror/alicewalks.html). Better pick up these remaining copies soon! They are bound to be collector’s items, if they are not already. Michael is now set to publish a superb new novel, Phantom Effect, with Night Shade Books (due out in February 2016).

My choir, the Northwest Chorale, is set to sing Handel’s Messiah one more time—but as it is an eternally rewarding work, I believe we will do it well. Here is the information on the dates and venues: http://www.nwchorale.org/concerts.php. The performance of December 5 should be attended by the esteem’d W. H. Pugmire, while that of December 12 should find Sunni and Jason Brock in the audience. That latter performance will also be recorded and will eventually be issued as a 2-disc CD.

I trust my singing will be found less offensive than my writing!

November 24, 2015 — Once More with Feeling

It appears that my recent blogs have been somewhat misunderstood: I suppose in this humourless age, where everyone feels at liberty to be offended at anything and everything, satire and reductio ad absurdum are dangerous tools to employ. (How I wish more of us could adopt Lovecraft’s sensible attitude: “I am as offence-proof as the average cynic.”) One Justin Steele in particular has written a response (http://www.arkhamdigest.com/2015/11/trouble-in-lovecraft-land-were-all.html) that I feel mischaracterises my position, so I felt the need for what I hope is my final word on this matter. I shall attempt here to write in as sober and temperate a manner as possible, so as not to give even the most sensitive of us the impression that I have insulted them. I have made many of these points over and over again during the past year and a half, but they appear not to have sunk in. So here we go:

1) The World Fantasy Award is a purely literary award. It is awarded purely for literary excellence in the field of weird fiction. It commemorated Lovecraft because (a) it was created for the First World Fantasy Convention in 1975, held in Providence, R.I., which was essentially a Lovecraft convention, and (b) it acknowledges Lovecraft’s literary greatness, both intrinsically and in terms of his influence. That is all that the award “means.” The award says nothing about Lovecraft as a person (just as other awards in this and related fields say nothing about the person or character of the figures they are named for). The changing of the award is an implicit rejection of Lovecraft’s literary status. It suggests that Lovecraft’s racism is so heinous a character flaw that it negates the entirety of his literary achievement. This is one of many reasons why I find it mystifying how any genuine devotee of Lovecraft can be in favour of changing the WFA bust.

2) We have no reason to be confident that the current agitators will stop at the WFA bust. Indeed, the prime mover in the matter—Daniel José Older—has made his general contempt for Lovecraft quite clear, as when he called him a “terrible wordsmith.” (I suspect he would say much the same about Poe, Dunsany, Machen, and any other writers who don’t write the kind of slangy, faux-hipster style he favours.) It is quite evident that some of these agitators really don’t like Lovecraft as a writer and resent his fame and influence, and have seized on the one flaw of his racism to cast him out into the literary darkness. Vigilance needs to be maintained that the tarring of Lovecraft’s reputation doesn’t go any further.

3) The discarding of the WFA bust may in itself be insignificant, but it is troubling for a multitude of reasons. It is, for example, an historical error to pass condign judgment on figures of the past because they are perceived to have departed from the moral, political, and social views to which we adhere. This shows a cultural intolerance and lack of historical understanding that is very discouraging. We have not exactly attained moral and intellectual perfection ourselves, and I daresay we will be judged harshly for all manner of derelictions a hundred years from now. (We now hear of students at Princeton University—where I did graduate work in 1982–84—lobbying to have every vestige of Woodrow Wilson’s name eliminated from the campus merely because he made a few racist comments, as if these comments somehow repudiate all the significant political and diplomatic achievements of his career.)

4) The current discussion of Lovecraft as a racist is a tendentious caricature. His views are far more nuanced than most people realise. (How many are aware that he expressed admiration for the Hasidic Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for adhering tenaciously to their cultural and religious heritage?) It is easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views (although I have never been clear on what such a condemnation actually accomplishes, or how it contributes to combating racism in our own time); it is lot harder to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the nature, origin, and purpose of his views. That takes actual work—a profound study of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and a canvassing of the scholarship on the history of race prejudice. A few Internet searches will not suffice. (A good place to start is my own compilation, Documents of American Prejudice [Basic Books, 1999].)

5) The assumption seems to have taken hold that racism somehow defines the totality of Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought—a preposterous assertion that anyone who knows anything about Lovecraft must realise is false. (Moreover, Lovecraft’s racial views have been known for at least five or six decades; it is odd that only now are they evoking sanctimonious outrage.) We all need to do a better job of explaining to the world that Lovecraft was a lot of other things than a racist—he was an atheist, a devotee of science (chemistry, astronomy, physics, anthropology), a traveller, a cat-lover, a student of colonial architecture, a mentor to dozens of younger writers, an acute commentator on the political, social, and cultural events of his time, and so much more.

6) Why is Lovecraft being singled out for excoriation because of his racist views? If the agitators who lobbied against the WFA bust were really concerned about the elimination of racism in our society, they would go after many other targets; but I hear not a peep from them about that. Why this selective outrage? If the heavy-handed satires in my recent blogs have conveyed anything, it was that Lovecraft was far from being alone in the expression of views we currently find obnoxious. As I mentioned, the interpretation of Dracula as an anti-immigrant tract is highly plausible, even obvious. I am an immigrant. I have also won a Bram Stoker Award. If I were really upset at Dracula’s (and, by implication, Stoker’s) anti-immigrant stance, what should I do? The only decent and honourable thing, it seems to me, is to return the award. What is not decent and honourable is for me to agitate for the changing of the award merely because of my personal discomfort with it. That, my friends, is fascism. The prototypical definition of fascism is: It is not enough that I do (or not do) a certain thing; everyone must do (or not do) that thing. That is exactly what has happened in this case. This whole issue also reveals a deeply anti-democratic bias on the part of the agitators. So far as I know, only two or three individuals who won the WFA have expressed discomfort with it on the grounds of Lovecraft’s racism; there are hundreds who have not done so, and certainly more than two or three WFA winners who have objected to the changing of the award—but apparently their views count for nothing. (Moreover, a vote was taken among attendees of the 2014 World Fantasy Convention about whether to keep or discard the bust, and those who wished to keep it were in the majority. But this vote seems to have been disregarded by the WFC committee.)

7) It would help if the World Fantasy Convention committee had presented some—or any—explanation as to why the award was changed. The secrecy with which this matter was handled has done a disservice to the field.

8) No fair-minded reader could say that my discussion of Ellen Datlow in any way constituted “vitriol.” I was raising a legitimate query as to why she has turned against Lovecraft after profiting from anthologies that could only have been assembled because of Lovecraft’s ascending reputation. Similarly, my comment directed at Jeff VanderMeer was in no way insulting to him. It is simply the plain truth that his offhand comment does not begin to address the multifarious complexities of this issue.

9) I do not question the sincerity of those individuals (whether they be persons of colour who have been the victims of race prejudice—as I have been on a few occasions—or others who are concerned about the continuing prevalence of prejudice in our society today, as I certainly am) who genuinely believe that changing the WFA bust might have some positive results in terms of inclusiveness in our genre. I happen to think they are mistaken on that particular issue, but that is a disagreement that I trust we can have without rancour or accusations of bad faith. (I am, however, not convinced that Mr. Older is one of these people.)

10) My dissociation with Dan Clore was not because he disagreed with me, but because he treated me in an abusive and insulting manner. He in effect stated that I was a right-wing racist bigot, even though he knows that I am a leftist. Perhaps he did not intend that impression to be conveyed, but to me it was conveyed. I did not take particular offence at his remark, but I am not enough of a masochist to keep on working with a writer who insults me in this manner. I would have trouble including his work in any of the publications I personally edit, but he is free to appear in any other publications he wishes, and I wish him good luck in his endeavours. I assume there are all manner of other venues for the dissemination of his work. My wife’s reaction to Clore’s intemperate post was natural and understandable—how could anyone expect her to react otherwise? When she sees me being insulted and abused on a Facebook page devoted to myself and my fans, what can you expect her to do? (I will go on and say that if anyone insults my wife, that person insults me, so I would advise being very careful what you say to or about her.)

11) There is a considerable amount of disingenuousness out there. If there is a “rift” in the weird fiction community, it has not been caused by me but by certain other writers (and their supporters) who have taken umbrage at my less than enthusiastic assessments of their work (they apparently feel their work is above criticism), and therefore joined the Older bandwagon regarding the Lovecraft bust as a way of gaining a bit of revenge on me. There is no need to name names; everyone knows who they are. And anyone who has read their postings about me and about Lovecraft on Facebook and other venues over the past two years will know that they are not exactly ready to adopt the “Can’t we all get along” attitude that Mr. Steele recommends.

And that is all. I have no desire for any kind of rift in the Lovecraft or general weird fiction community, but I am well aware that there are those among us who are unalterably opposed to Lovecraft and will do anything to bring him down. I trust we are in agreement that we can’t let that happen.

November 19, 2015 — More Crusades for the Crusaders!

I have been led to believe that the celebrated editor Ellen Datlow was a major force in getting the Lovecraft bust discarded from the World Fantasy Awards. If this is so, it casts a dubious light on Datlow herself. One has to wonder about the moral compass of a person who has materially benefited from Lovecraft’s increasing reputation by opportunistically assembling two volumes of Lovecraft-inspired fiction (Lovecraft Unbound [2009] and Lovecraft’s Monsters [2014]) and who then turns around and kicks Lovecraft figuratively in the posterior. Sadly, she does not appear to be alone in this kind of behaviour.

Speaking of which, I have another crusade for the moral crusaders to seize upon. The chief award of the Mystery Writers of America is the Edgar Award, named of course after Edgar Allan Poe. But, as I hope we all know, Poe was not only an ardent supporter of slavery (note his wicked caricature of an African American in “The Gold-Bug”), but also a pedophile (he married his 14-year-old first cousin—which in many states would be considered an incestuous union to boot), and a drunkard. How disgusting! That Edgar Award cannot be allowed to stand! Gear up for the campaign, folks!

And here’s another crusade just ripe for the plucking. It appears that L. Frank Baum, “beloved” author of The Wizard of Oz, was in the habit of proposing a kind of “Final Solution” for Native Americans, expressing the desire to wipe them from the earth (or at least the United States). So we can’t read any of the writings of this horrible man anymore, or even watch the Wizard of Oz movie.

But wait! There’s an even riper target available. A loathsome politician of the past was a slaveowner. True, he did free his 250 slaves—but only in his will, which would take effect after his death, so that he himself would not be inconvenienced by the absence of free labour. And yet, this politician is how “honoured” by the appearance of his vile mug on the one dollar bill! I believe this contemptible person’s name is George Washington. This must not be allowed to stand!!!

Extra! Special! Breaking news! Daniel José Older is a racist! I had suspected something like this all along, but he has recently confirmed it in a statement in the Guardian (the UK newspaper, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image) following the discarding of the Lovecraft bust: “Writers of colour have always had to struggle with the question of how to love a genre that seems so intent on proving that it doesn’t love us back.” This remark clearly proves that Older thinks all “writers of colour” think and feel alike! If that isn’t stereotyping, I don’t know what is. I for one have never felt the slightest discomfort being in this field—and for many years I was the only person of colour doing any serious work on Lovecraft and on weird fiction in general (with the exception of my fellow countryman Devendra P. Varma). But evidently I, as a defender of Lovecraft, do not count as a “writer of colour,” even though I have been diligently working in this field (to the tune of 227 books) for about 40 years.

That same Guardian article quotes the eminent Jeff VanderMeer as stating that changing the bust was a “no-brainer.” Pardon me for suggesting that Mr. VanderMeer reveals a certain deficiency in brainpower by failing to grasp the immensely complex social, political, cultural, and historical factors surrounding this entire issue. He, like so many other crusaders, doesn’t wish to be confused by complexity and nuance.

This whole absurd contretemps can’t help but remind me of one of my favourite quotations, found in a letter from George Santayana to Bertrand Russell: “People are not intelligent. It is very unreasonable to expect them to be so, and that is a fate my philosophy reconciled me to long ago. How else could I have lived for forty years in America?” This is more true now than when it was written 98 years ago.

I repeat what I’ve said before: Lovecraft will be around a lot longer than any of his current dectractors. Let’s have a show of hands, people, to see who you think will be more remembered in history: H. P. Lovecraft or…Scott Nicolay? Nick Mamatas? Jeff VanderMeer? Daniel José Older? S. J. Bagley? Edward Morris?

Okay, okay, I’ll stop laughing now.

November 15, 2015 — Books from Muncie!

On a recent trip to my family home in Muncie, Indiana (where I am assisting in the process of clearing out my mother’s house, as she has moved into an assisted living facility), I found a number of my own books, old and new. As my mother will not have much use for them (if she ever did), I was able to send these books back home and am now happy to offer them for any interested customers:

But the two most choice items—at least in terms of rarity—are these:

The calendar was fashioned as a surprise birthday present to me on my 29th birthday, and it is a charming item. It features delightful illustrations by Jason C. Eckhardt depicting various incidents in my life and work. One copy of the calendar is signed by Eckhardt. The hardcover edition of the biography is of course quite scarce, as only 250 copies were printed.

I was delighted to attend the premiere on November 13 of a humorous Lovecraft-inspired play, Shoggoths on the Veldt, written by Cameron McNary and directed by Daniel Wood. It opened at INSCAPE Arts here in Seattle and will run until December 5. Check out the website: theroguesgallery.tv. It is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end, and is one of the most successful attempts at Lovecraftian humour I have ever encountered. I am hoping the company will take the play on the road, perhaps appearing at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival next year and NecronomiCon 2017 (if there is such a convention).

I did not intend to say anything further about the discarding of the Lovecraft bust from the World Fantasy Awards, but a few other points now occur to me:

1) The next goal of our moral crusaders must surely be the Bram Stoker Awards. Stoker’s Dracula, it is quite evident, is a vile anti-immigrant tract: here is a story about a “monster” from Eastern Europe who has come to England to drain the life-blood out of noble Anglo-Saxons! Given Europe’s current migration crisis, Dracula is just about the last text one would want to read right now—and Stoker is about the last person one would wish to “honour” with an award. Indeed, if our moral crusaders don’t go after the Stoker Award (as well as science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award—Campbell was a more virulent racist than Lovecraft), then it will only prove that those crusaders really aren’t interested in combating racism but only in carrying on a personal vendetta against Lovecraft. And I would hate to think that of them.

2) These same moral crusaders appear to be claiming that the supporters of Lovecraft are “whining” because of the recent turn of events. Evidently, their own whining for more than a year, which led to the discarding of the bust, doesn’t count as whining. I am reminded of Sir John Harington’s immortal couplet: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

3) The co-chairman of the World Fantasy Convention committee, David G. Hartwell, is now claiming that the decision to change the award to one that does not represent any person, living or dead, was made years ago. I hope I will be pardoned for doubting the veracity of this assertion. No one heard any talk about changing the award before our valiant moral crusaders began their campaign a year or so ago. Well, perhaps Mr. Hartwell is feeling a bit of heat on both sides. I do not envy him.

To end on a more pleasant note—but to keep on the subject of awards—I find that I am the recipient of an award that I continue to honour and respect, viz., the British Fantasy Award, which was bestowed upon my edition of Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961–1971 (PS Publishing, 2014). It is nice to receive recognition from an award that has not been tainted by undue political considerations.

November 10, 2015 — The World Fantasy Award

It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) Accordingly, I have returned my two World Fantasy Awards to the co-chairman of the WFC board, David G. Hartwell. Here is my letter to him:

Mr. David G. Hartwell
Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

Dear Mr. Hartwell:

I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.

I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.

Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me.

I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues.

Yours,
S. T. Joshi

And that is all I will have to say on this ridiculous matter. If anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken.

Should anyone care to express an opinion on this matter to Mr. Hartwell, feel free to write to him at the above address or to his email address: dgh@tor.com.

October 17, 2015 — The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Its Aftermath

The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon (October 2–4), was a most entertaining event, and I was pleased both to appear on several interesting panels and to see some of the many films, long and short, that were on offer. This was the 20th anniversary of the festival, and so the organisers dug out some choice films of the past to offer a sense of how far this festival has come in the past two decades. I was delighted to see again John Strysik’s haunting Music of Erich Zann film (which actually dates to as early as 1981—Strysik had shown it to me in the fall of that year, at Brown University, and I contrived to get it shown informally at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston); Bryan Moore’s quietly effective 44-minute rendering of Cool Air, with Jack Donner starring as Dr. Muñoz; and several other interesting specimens. This film was followed by a superb trailer for a full-length film, The Shadow over Innsmouth, that Bryan has just completed, and which promises to be one of the most faithful and effective Lovecraft adaptations ever done. On top of that, Bryan presented me with a splendid bust of Lovecraft for my private collection—a smaller version of the bust that was unveiled at the Providence Athenaeum at the NecronomiCon convention in 2013.

Photo of the small reproduction of the H. P. Lovecraft bust by Bryan Moore   Photo of S. T. Joshi with the small reproduction of the H. P. Lovecraft bust by Bryan Moore

(Thanks to Janice Klain for the photos!)

Of the panels, the most lively was “Lovecraft’s Editors,” with Richard A. Lupoff, Scott Connors, and myself speaking with great animation and enthusiasm about many of the editors who dealt with Lovecraft in his own day—from W. Paul Cook to George Julian Houtain to Edwin Baird to Hugo “the Rat” Gernsback to F. Orlin Tremaine.

Several interesting books, both by me and by others, have come in recently. I was pleased to receive copies of Dennis Etchison’s It Only Comes Out at Night (Centipede Press), a large volume containing 38 of Etchison’s best stories. This is a self-standing volume, not part of either the Masters of the Weird Tale series or the Library of Weird Fiction. I see from the publisher’s webpage (http://www.centipedepress.com/horror/itonlycomesout.html) that the edition is already sold out! I have one spare copy that I would be happy to offer for $75.00 (the list price is $150).

I also received a copy of the paperback edition of A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Dark Regions Press). In many ways this edition is an improvement on the original Centipede Press edition of 2014, chiefly because I was able to drop some items that Jerad Walters forced me to add (including illustrated versions of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and “The Lurking Fear,” neither of which are true Mythos stories in my estimation). Strangely enough, the book does not yet show up on either the publisher’s website or any other online book venues—but I did sign about 50 copies of the paperback edition, so I imagine it will be available for sale soon. So far, I only have one copy to call my own.

I also received one copy of Darrell Schweitzer’s Awaiting Strange Gods, a volume of his collected Cthulhu Mythos tales just out from Fedogan & Bremer (http://www.fedoganandbremer.com/products/copy-of-copy-of-copy-of-awaiting-strange-gods). It is available as a trade hardcover and two different limited editions. I copyedited the book and wrote an introduction to it. Schweitzer’s Mythos tales over the past several years (a number of which have appeared in my anthologies) are striking in their ability to fuse horror, pathos, and domestic conflict—a highly unusual and distinctive combination.

Penguin has sent me copies of three new Penguin Classics titles that will be of interest to weird readers: Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe; Charles Beaumont’s Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories; and Ray Russell’s novel The Case against Satan. While they are all welcome publications, I was sorry to see that at least the first two of these volumes did not receive the “full” Penguin Classics treatment—i.e., annotations, bibliography, and so forth. There is already considerable scholarship on Ligotti (less so on Beaumont), and readers would have benefited from some notes and commentary. Nevertheless, all the books are welcome. My enthusiasm for the Ray Russell novel is not high, but its influence on Blatty’s The Exorcist is undeniable. I have only one copy of each title, so I cannot offer any to customers; but these books are readily available in bookstores.

Finally, I have received several copies of the newest instalment of my (moribund) series, Studies in Supernatural Literature, from Rowman & Littlefield. The title is The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales, edited by Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442256224/The-Unique-Legacy-of-Weird-Tales-The-Evolution-of-Modern-Fantasy-and-Horror). The book—which contains splendid essays on the magazine Weird Tales by such critics as Jason Ray Carny, Bobby Derie, Scott Connors, and several others—is the usual appallingly expensive hardcover edition, but I have three copies that I would be happy to unload for the bargain price of $40.

Many more of my books are coming in the future! The first two volumes of my “Classic Weird Fiction” series (the weird tales of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and E. Nesbit) should be out soon from Dark Renaissance Books; I have compiled several new books for Dover Publications; and from Centipede Press alone I have prepared editions of the work of Robert W. Chambers, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, D. H. Lawrence, E. F. Benson, W. C. Morrow (in collaboration with Stefan Dziemianowicz), John Metcalfe, Robert Aickman, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Machen. And I’m compiling two original anthologies (Nightmare’s Realm for Dark Renaissance Books and a tribute volume to Caitlín R. Kiernan for Centipede Press), with several more (including Black Wings VI) in the planning stages. It’s getting to the point where I can’t keep track of my own work anymore.

September, 27, 2015 — New Hippocampus Publications

I am happy to announce receipt of several recent publications from Hippocampus Press. These volumes actually debuted at the NecronomiCon last month, but my personal copies did not find their way to me until now. I now have copies of the following to offer to customers on the usual terms:

A lot of choice items here! The edition of Letters to Robert Bloch constitutes my 226th book.

I see that I am cited in an article on Thomas Ligotti (timed for the release of the Penguin Classics edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe) by Michael Calia in the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/articles/penguin-classics-to-publish-ligotti-stories-1442851513). I believe Calia has written other articles on Ligotti in WSJ; but as that paper’s website is available only by subscription, I have not seen these items.

A colleague, Daniel Wood, is seeking to raise money via Indiegogo for what looks like a most amusing dramatic presentation, Shoggoths on the Veldt, to be staged here in Seattle (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/shoggoths-on-the-veldt-a-cthulhu-adventure-comedy--2). I encourage all interested individuals to consider contributing to this venture. I am supplying signed copies of Black Wings III (paperback edition) and The Ghost of Fear and Others: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories as an enticement.

On another note entirely, I have heard that my selections from H. L. Mencken’s “Free Lance” column (1911–15), entitled A Saturnalia of Bunk, has been accepted by Ohio University Press—the press that published my first true book (H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism) all the way back in 1980. I have sweet-talked Mary into proofreading the whole book, as the expert readers who evaluated the manuscript for the publisher found a certain number of typos in it. A thankless job!—but one that I am confident she will perform with her customary meticulousness, if not with the greatest enthusiasm.

Looking forward to the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland (October 2–4)!

September, 20, 2015 — Madness of Cthulhu 2 Arrives!

I am happy to announce the receipt of copies of my 225th book—The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume 2, just published by Titan Books (http://titanbooks.com/the-madness-of-cthulhu-anthology-volume-two-6791/). I have four copies to offer to interested customers. I will have to ask for $15 for a copy (this is the list price), because I am covering the postage to US members. The book has all-original stories by all manner of good writers, including Laird Barron, Jason C. Eckhardt (“The Hollow Sky”—one of the most powerful riffs on At the Mountains of Madness ever written, and which I’m encouraging the author to turn into a full-length novel), Cody Goodfellow, Mark Howard Jones (“The Last Ones”—a gripping story of cosmic horror set in the author’s native Wales), William F. Nolan (a brilliant noir/Lovecraftian amalgam), and much else besides.

I don’t have a great deal to report, since much of the first part of September was spent at my family home in Muncie, Indiana, where my mother had to undergo emergency surgery to remove her gall bladder. She is now faring much better, and we hope to place her in a good assisted-living facility in Muncie as early as next week. She will be 88 years old on October 17 (which, as I’m sure I have mentioned in the past, is also H. P. Lovecraft’s mother’s birthday!). Here’s hoping for continued life and productivity for her!

I have received a copy of a new novel published by Night Shade Books, The Promise of the Child by Tom Toner (Volume One of the Amaranthine Spectrum, whatever that may be). I do not doubt that this book is of interest, but as I have no inclination to read or review it, I would be happy to dispose of it for a discounted price of $20 to anyone interested (the list price is $26.99).

A book that may be of somewhat greater interest to my readers is John L. Steadman’s H. P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal Tradition, just published by Weiser Books (http://redwheelweiser.com/detail.html?id=9781578635870). I read this book in ms. and made some extensive criticisms of it, especially in its adherence to the “Derleth Mythos”; the author faithfully revised the book in light of my comments. I thereupon supplied a blurb for the book. I see that the publisher has managed to get endorsements from several other authors and critics, including W. H. Pugmire, Richard A. Lupoff, and Jason V Brock.

I continue to work on various projects, including routine copyediting for a number of exciting new books to be published by Hippocampus Press next year, including John Shirley’s collection of Lovecraftian stories, Lovecraft Alive; a 300-page selection of the best poems by Michael Fantina (I think the title of this will be Alchemy of Dreams, but am not certain on the point); Don Swaim’s fascinating historical novel about Ambrose Bierce, The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce; and so forth.

I am also preparing an ebook of my Modern Weird Tale, which will not only have the chapters that McFarland forced me to excise for space reasons (those on Les Daniels, Dennis Etchison, and David J. Schow—these were included in The Evolution of the Weird Tale), but also some other matter here and there that in my judgment makes the book quite a bit stronger. I am not sure when this ebook—along with the three others I have prepared, The Weird Tale, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft, and H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West—will be released by Hippocampus, but I imagine they will come out early in 2016.

And, of course, we are all awaiting with bated breath the appearance of David E. Schultz’s landmark edition of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth! I have seen various drafts of this book and can assure you it is a knockout—and this is even without having seen the 36 illustrations (one per sonnet) that Jason C. Eckhardt has drawn. We still hope this book can come out later this year from Hippocampus—so stay tuned!

September, 1, 2015 — NecronomiCon and Its Aftermath

Well, NecronomiCon Providence (August 20–23) has come and gone, and it was a tremendous event. I fear, however, that it didn’t get off on a very good start, as the opening ceremonies featured a surprisingly lifeless and mechanical summary by Leslie Klinger of the basic facts of Lovecraft’s biography (do we really need such a recitation at such an event?), followed by a rather windy and confused polemic by Robert M. Price in which he suggested that Lovecraft would by some miracle be aligned with contemporary conservative thought and be opposed to affirmative action and political correctness! Whatever the validity of Price’s remarks (and to my mind they don’t have much validity, given that Lovecraft had become a socialist by the end of his life), this was surely the wrong place and time to air them.

But once the convention actually got underway, things got better. While I did not sit in on very many panels aside from the six that I was on, these proved to be pretty lively—especially the ones on Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany. The panel on Lovecraft and Religion was also stimulating. I would have liked to listen to more of the sessions of the Armitage Symposium, but I sat in on only one—on Lovecraft and Ancient Rome, moderated by Dennis Quinn.

Otherwise, I was able to find the time to visit the dealer’s room repeatedly (especially the Hippocampus Press table, which had an abundance of new publications), and talk with all manner of interesting colleagues—Steven J. Mariconda, Donovan K. Loucks, Lois H. Gresh, Jason & Sunni Brock, William F. Nolan, Sam Gafford, Jason C. Eckhardt, Rusty Burke, Mark Finn, Scott Connors, and many others. I was interviewed by two individuals—one for the film magazine Cineaste and the other for a very prominent magazine I shall not mention yet, since the article that this person is planning to write is not certain to appear.

Just before I left for the convention, I was pleased to receive several books from PS Publishing. One of these is the long-awaited The Dulwich Horror and Others by David Hambling, one of the most striking volumes of Lovecraftian fiction to be written in recent years. I wrote a foreword to it. I have two copies of this book, so I would be happy to dispose of one of them at the price of $20. I also received two copies of a slim volume of Lovecraft’s Weird Poems (poems published in Weird Tales), edited by Stephen Jones. If anyone wants my spare copy, I’ll be happy to let it go for $10.

Hippocampus Press, as I mentioned, has released a number of new titles (including my revised Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos), but I have no spare copies of these as yet. As soon as they arrive, I’ll let you know!

Another interesting publication is the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s edition of the letters of Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, titled The Spirit of Revision (http://store.cthulhulives.org/products/the-spirit-of-revision-lovecrafts-letters-to-zealia-reed-bishop). This most attractive volume is the result of the unexpected discovery of a cache of previously unknown letters by Lovecraft to Bishop, and sheds fascinating light on their relationship and on Lovecraft’s revisory work as a whole. I wrote a rather hasty but, I trust, informative introduction.

Another very curious publication is a small booklet, The Providence Pals, featuring rare work by members of that august group of young whippersnappers—including Marc A. Michaud (who made a surprising and welcome appearance at the convention), Jason C. Eckhardt, Steven J. Mariconda, myself, and numerous others. It was published by Sam Gafford’s Ulthar Press. I do not see the book on the publisher’s website, but perhaps it will be there in due course of time. It contains some quite scarce writings by yours truly, including a poem (!), “To H. P. Lovecraft” (1977), two humorous short stories, “Scherzo in D-flat” (1975) and “Fact and Fiction” (1980), and two autobiographical essays, “Random Memories of Noreascon II” (1980) and “Life Is Not a Hideous Thing” (1982). Choice works for the Joshi completist!

While in Providence I did do a bit of research at the John Hay Library—and also met the new curator of the Lovecraft Collection, Christopher Geissler. One of the things I looked at (in conjunction with Scott Connors and Martin Andersson) was an array of periodicals (mostly devoted to poetry) owned by Clark Ashton Smith. There was some thought that these magazines might contain previously unknown works by Smith, but there were only one or two such items. But among the more interesting finds was a thoughtful essay by Francis T. Laney on “The Fantasy Poet” (Raven, Fall 1943), which I may reprint in Spectral Realms, and a lengthy article by Robert Barbour Johnson (author of the superb Lovecraftian story “Far Below”) on “Can We Live without ‘Fantasy’ Fiction?” (New Frontiers, December 1959), which I may reprint in Weird Fiction Review and/or in a volume of Johnson’s collected weird fiction that I am now planning.

Another interesting upshot of the Providence trip is that a colleague of the great comic artist Alan Moore asked me to give him a call, since he (Moore) doesn’t have e-mail or even a computer. I was happy to make the call to England, and spent some 30 or 40 minutes in an engaging talk with Moore, who flatteringly holds my work in high regard. He promises to have his publisher send me copies of his ongoing Providence graphic novel, which looks like a most tempting item.

But now, back to work! David E. Schultz and I are close to completing our edition of Lovecraft’s Letters to J. Vernon Shea and Others (also including the letters to Carl Ferdinand Strauch and Lee McBride White), and I am also approaching completion of my next volume of miscellaneous essays on weird fiction, Varieties of the Weird Tale. Both of these books will be published later this year or early next by Hippocampus Press. Lots of other things to work on—too many to mention here!

August 11, 2015 — Variorum Lovecraft Is Here!

Momentous news! My copies of the Variorum Lovecraft (officially titled H. P. Lovecraft: Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition) have arrived! They are a beauty to see, to say nothing of the (off and on) forty years of work that went into them. I have about 7 or 8 sets that I would be happy to peddle to interested customers for $150 for the three-volume set. (The list price is $180.) I fear this offer will have to be restricted to US customers, as I would have to a prohibitively high additional postage fee for overseas shipping. This will indeed be the standard text of Lovecraft’s original fiction for the foreseeable future. The print run is currently restricted to 750 copies in hardcover; at some unspecified later date paperback and ebook editions will become available—but probably not for at least a year.

Other interesting developments have also been occurring. I have now seen the cover design (and read the proofs) of The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume 2, due out soon (no later than October) from Titan Books. This contains many fine tales, one of the best being a novelette by Jason C. Eckhardt, “The Hollow Sky,” that I am urging Jason to turn into a full-length novel. (I am also encouraging Jason to assemble a volume of his collected weird tales for Hippocampus. He has written a number of pungent and engaging stories over the years—he is far more than just a supremely talented pictorial artist!) Here is the cover design, for those who are interested.

Cover of Madness of Cthulhu 2

I am also happy to see the appearance of Innsmouth Nightmares, edited by Lois H. Gresh, a new anthology of all-original Lovecraftian fiction from PS Publishing (http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/innsmouth-nightmares-hardcover-edited-by-lois-h-gresh-2750-p.asp), which has a new story by yours truly, “Some Kind of Mistake.” (The title is derived from that poignant line from Arthur Schopenhauer, “Human life must be some kind of mistake.”) I fear I received only one copy of the book, so people will have to order it from PS Publishing or from some possible venues in the US that may be carrying the book (I would suggest trying the book dealer Gavin Smith or Subterranean Press). There will be a publication party for the book at the NecronomiCon (August 20–23), but I have a panel at the time of the party, so I will probably not be able to attend.

The July/August issue of the American Rationalist features (aside from my review of Kevin M. Kruse’s trenchant study One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America) a review by my neighbour, Jim Dempsey, of Mike Huckabee’s unwittingly hilarious treatise, Gods, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. I was planning to review this book myself, but I simply could not bring myself to undertake the task, so I thrust it on to my hapless neighbour. To add insult to injury, I was compelled to abridge the review pretty heavily for space reasons. So I am happy to present the full review here—which reveals the priceless asininity of Mr. Huckabee for all to witness! Jim is one of the keenest political and economic minds of my acquaintance, and it is always bracing to listen to him. I believe he has a blog, but to my mortification I have never peeked at it!

July 24, 2015 — New Hippocampus Books Have Arrived!

I was thrilled to find, upon returning from a brief visit with my mother in Muncie, Indiana, a sheaf of new books from Hippocampus Press. These will all debut at the NecronomiCon (August 20–23), and I am glad to have them in hand now to offer to any interested customers on the usual terms:

In order to “move” these titles, I can offer a discount on the books (not including Dead Reckonings) as follows: 2 for $25, 3 for $35, and 4 for $50. Come and get ’em!

I am also pleased to note that K. A. Opperman’s splendid poetry collection The Crimson Tome is now available for pre-order from Hippocampus (http://www.hippocampuspress.com/mythos-and-other-authors/poetry/the-crimson-tome-by-k.-a.-opperman). Publication is imminent, although I do not believe the book will be ready for the NecronomiCon. Nevertheless, it is one of the most scintillating books in the entire realm of contemporary weird poetry, and will doubtless create a sensation when it appears.

I can also mention the appearance of my second book of the year—my edition of an omnibus of David Case’s weird tales in Centipede Press’s Masters of the Weird Tale series (http://www.centipedepress.com/masters/davidcase.html). Unfortunately, I do not have any spare copies to offer to customers.

As a final plug, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to a crowdfunding effort being undertaken by my colleague Drew Ford, an editor at Dover Publications: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/speculate-01-a-comic-book-short-story-collection. This venture sounds fascinating, and I urge all to contribute to it.

Our trip to Muncie was surprisingly pleasant, although we did little but eat my mother’s wonderful Indian cuisine and take a dip in the pool at the Best Western where we were staying (a hotel that in other regards was sadly deficient). My mother is doing surprisingly well as she approaches her 88th birthday (October 17—also the birthday of Lovecraft’s mother!), although her mobility is limited by arthritis and plantar fascitis. But she carries along valiantly. We didn’t have much time (or, more likely, energy) for any exploration—not that there was much to explore. We did drive by my old school, Burris Laboratory School (which I attended from 7th to 12th grade), as well as Westview School, where I attended 6th grade and which is only a block or two from my house. I plan to drag Mary to my 40th (!) high school reunion next summer!

July 15, 2015 — Ebooks, CDs, and Old-Fashioned Print

As always, many things are going on—although I don’t seem to have a great deal to show for it in terms of actual publications. I have now received an actual copy of the book in which my essay on Guillermo del Toro appeared: John W. Morehead’s The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), pp. 11–21. I was flattered that my essay was the first in the book, following the editor’s introduction.

Speaking of introductions, I have now written one for Ann K. Schwader’s forthcoming book of poems from P’rea Press, Dark Energies. I do not yet see this book announced on the publisher’s website, but I understand it will be out for the NecronomiCon. So it shouldn’t be long! It is a remarkable and bountiful collection of vivid and terrifying poems by an author who is very close to the pinnacle of contemporary weird verse.

I was thrilled to receive a deluxe 2-CD package containing a reading of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle and other matter, just issued by Fedogan & Bremer (http://www.fedoganandbremer.com/products/pre-release-fungi-from-yuggoth-deluxe-2-disk-set). I believe the Fungi reading—superbly done by John Arthur, with music by Mike Olson—is a reissue of the very first item ever issued by the publisher, back in 1987. But it is the material on the second disk that will be of even greater interest. Here we find, for the first time (so far as I know), recordings of the two Harold S. Farnese piano/vocal pieces based on Lovecraft’s “Mirage” and “The Elder Pharos” (two of the sonnets from Fungi from Yuggoth). We have two versions of each of these items: first, a piano solo rendition (by Daniel Evan Walczak), and a vocal rendition (by soprano Maria Jette) with piano accompaniment. On top of this, we have Farnese’s piano piece “Elegy for H. P. Lovecraft” (1937), Alfred Galpin’s exquisitely moving “Lament for H. P. Lovecraft” (I still recall listening, many years ago, to a tape of Galpin himself playing this piano solo), Jonathan Adams’s choral arrangements of “The Ancient Track” (first published in the Lovecraft Annual) and “Sunset,” as well as other rare and interesting items. You can’t go wrong picking up these wonderful CDs!

Speaking of the Lovecraft Annual, this year’s issue is ready to go to press. It is, I believe, an exceptional issue, containing all manner of highly informative pieces that actually advance our knowledge of Lovecraft. Included among them are Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s detailed genealogical study of clergymen (!) in Lovecraft’s ancestry; Donovan K. Loucks’s account of how he found the exact location (and later, a photograph) of the Joseph Curwen house; Todd Spaulding’s examination of the French response to Lovecraft, from Jacques Bergier to Michel Houellebecq (this was a condensation of his recently completed Ph.D. dissertation, on which I was proud and flattered to be one of the “outside authorities” and participated in his oral defense via Skype); and much other interesting material. Lovecraft’s complete letters to his neighbour, Marian F. Bonner, are included (complete with reproductions of his delightful drawings of cats in the margins), and I took the liberty of including my long response to Charles Baxter’s odious article in the New York Review of Books. Steven J. Mariconda has a long review of the Variorum Lovecraft—which should be available within a few weeks.

I have lately been engaged in the surprisingly enjoyable task of preparing four of my older titles—The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Starmont House, 1990), A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (Starmont House, 1996), and The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001)—for eventual publication as ebooks from Hippocampus Press. I am finding that these books actually hold up pretty well—in fact, I will say in all frankness that I think they are quite brilliant!!! I’m beginning to wonder whether I was a better critic in the late 1980s and 1990s than I am now. Actually, I think that these books—especially The Weird Tale—allowed me to write my first extended discussions of such writers as Machen, Dunsany, and Blackwood, writers whose work is so rich and substantial that it provides tremendous fodder for the literary critic who can read them comprehensively and sympathetically. And the two Lovecraft-focused books also allowed me to talk about this author in far greater compass than I had been able to previously (A Subtler Magick was the product of the publisher’s request for a radically expanded version of my tiny H. P. Lovecraft monograph [Starmont Reader’s Guides, 1982]). I’m not sure when the ebooks will emerge, but I hope they will come soon. And we are also planning ebooks of such things as Donald R. Burleson’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Greenwood Press, 1983), Peter Cannon’s H. P. Lovecraft (Twayne, 1989), and perhaps other titles.

June 26, 2015 — Work and Travels

Apologies for the long silence! Things have been crazy around here, as always. I had intended to write something before I left on our Danube cruise (June 12–22), but didn’t get the chance. Anyway, that cruise was most entertaining, as we canvassed the cities of Passau (in Germany), Linz, Salzburg, Vienna (in Austria), Bratislava (capital of Slovakia), and Budapest (Hungary). Naturally, we had only a day or so in each city, and in most cases that was a criminally insufficient time to explore the given city’s ancient treasures. I particularly regret not spending more time in Vienna (where I wished to pay homage to Beethoven, who is buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery, but was unable to do so) and Budapest. I now see that Antonio Vivaldi was also buried in Vienna, after his death there in 1741. According to Wikipedia, his funeral took place in the exquisitely Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral (which I saw), and he was buried near Karlskirche (which I did not see).

But now I’m back to projects. As I’ve mentioned, the Variorum Lovecraft is now at the printer and should be available in late July or early August. The appearance of this edition will finally increase my year’s total of books from a pathetic one (Black Wings IV) to four. I can think of several other books that will appear later this year: my edition of Lovecraft’s Letters to Robert Bloch and Others (Hippocampus); The Madness of Cthulhu 2 (Titan); my edition of the weird works of David Case (Centipede Press); possibly my edition of the stories of Dennis Etchison from Centipede (I am not listed as “editor,” but in fact I did edit the book and will list it among my books). My revised Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos will also be out, but I will of course not consider that a new book, since it is merely a revision and expansion of the 2008 edition. I see that the David Case book is now listed as forthcoming in July: http://www.centipedepress.com/masters/davidcase.html.

What else is going on? Well, plans for the NecronomiCon is already gearing up, and I see that I am on “only” 7 panels, rather than the 12 I appeared on (to my exhaustion) in 2013. Others, such as Robert M. Price and Leslie Klinger, will appear on 11 or 12—more power to them! I have just been interviewed by Tony Pacitti of the Providence Monthly, which will presumably have an article on Lovecraft and the convention in its August issue.

Speaking of interviews, I was just interviewed on film by Darin Coelho for a documentary he is planning on Clark Ashton Smith. Darin came up to Seattle to interview Wilum Pugmire and myself, and he seems well positioned to do a fine documentary in due course of time. On July 17, Kirk Whitham will interview me for a documentary he is preparing on Ambrose Bierce.

I am just finishing up my edition of Bram Stoker for the Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction. It will include the complete texts of Dracula (text graciously provided by Leslie Klinger), The Jewel of Seven Stars, and the stories “Dracula’s Guest,” “The Squaw,” “The Judge’s House,” and “The Burial of the Rats.” A most entertaining volume. I was intrigued by the textual problems surrounding Jewel of Seven Stars. There was an abridged version published in 1912 in which Stoker radically rewrote the ending to make it more cheerful; but I rejected this ending (and other changes Stoker made) and stuck to the original 1903 text.

I am renewing a push to complete (or at least continue) work on my treatise on the detective story, Varieties of Crime Fiction. I recently wrote a chapter on Dashiell Hammett and got well into a chapter on Raymond Chandler before my cruise. I hope to finish it and then write a chapter on Ross Macdonald (a dozen of whose books I read with general enjoyment recently) before moving on to some recent writers, such as P. D. James, James Ellroy, Ruth Rendell, and Sue Grafton. All this has been a refreshing break from what would otherwise be a non-stop dose of weird fiction.

May 22, 2015 — Variorum Lovecraft Done!

I am delighted to say that work on Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition is now all but complete. Derrick Hussey, the publisher of Hippocampus Press, has been incredibly diligent and meticulous in going over all the texts (as well as my own textual notes) and has saved me from countless errors. It appears that my own records of textual variants were not at all as accurate or coherent as they should have been (but remember that I started doing this work as a callow eighteen-year-old freshman in 1976!). But now the work is done, and all that remains is to look over the final proofs before sending them to the printer. Derrick vows that this will be done on or before June 1, which means that the three-volume edition should be ready by mid-July. I am a bit mortified that we first announced the edition as appearing in late 2014—but the long delay is well worth it, trust me!

I have recently been told that my edition of Edward Lucas White’s weird tales (first published as The Stuff of Dreams by Arcane Wisdom in 2013) will be reprinted in paperback by Dover. Glad to hear it! I continue to work on my anthology of weird tales by women writers, tentatively titled The Cold Embrace (after a story by Mary Elizabeth Braddon), for Dover. Even though the deadline is not until October, I hope to finish it before Mary and I go on our cruise down the Danube (June 12–22).

Speaking of Mary, she gave me a fright a while back by contracting pneumonia—on her birthday (May 9)! We had to rush her to the emergency room at the University of Washington Medical Center, where they kept her for seven hours before decreeing that she needed to stay overnight. In fact, she ended up staying in the hospital for four days, chiefly because her oxygen intake was quite low. But she is now out and recovering well. Nevertheless, during the past two weeks I have (as Lovecraft once said when his aunt, Annie Gamwell, had to go to the hospital for a mastectomy) “been a sort of combined nurse, secretary, market-man, butler, & errand-boy.” But, as HPL also added, it was no doubt far worse on the patient than on me!

I am in receipt of an interesting publication, Windy City Pulp Stories #15, edited by Tom Roberts. Evidently this is a booklet (actually, a full-size book of some 204 pages) containing all manner of essays and other matter pertaining to Weird Tales and also designed to commemorating the 125th anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft’s birth. It contains my article “Lovecraft and Weird Tales”—which is nothing less than a revised version of my somewhat combative introduction to H. P. Lovecraft in “The Eyrie” (Necronomicon Press, 1979). But Joshi collectors need not seek out this item, as the essay is already in my Lovecraft and a World in Transition (2014).

I am also in receipt of proofs of Nicole Cushing’s first short story collection, The Mirrors (due out from Cycatrix Press in a month or two), which I copyedited and for which I wrote a foreword. There is striking cover art by Zach McCain, and the book, even in this somewhat preliminary state, exhibits the fine production values of the publisher, Jason V Brock. An item well worth purchasing when it appears!

I have just sent in the final manuscript of The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume 2 to Titan Books. I imagine it is on schedule to appear in October. I cannot recall if I have previously supplied the table of contents, but here it is:

I am just about finished editing my immense collection of Robert Aickman’s stories for Centipede Press. Regrettably, the book will not contain much, if any, matter from a recent volume of Aickman miscellany just published by Tartarus Press under the title The Strangers and Other Writings (http://tartaruspress.com/aickmanstrangers.htm). But I suspect this volume does not contain anything of truly earth-shattering quality or importance. Anyway, my edition—which I imagine will come in at more than 400,000 words—is plenty big enough on its own!

May 3, 2015 — Black Wings V Finished!

I am happy to announce the completoon of Black Wings V—a volume that I do feel is one of the better books in this series. Here is the official table of contents:

That last item is, of course, a poem—following the pattern established in Black Wings IV by Charles Lovecraft with his striking sonnet sequence based on “The Lurking Fear.” Wade’s poem is a more general riff on the “forbidden book” theme.

I was pleased to have the contributions of two British writers. John Reppion had written one of the more notable stories in Salomé Jones’s Cthulhu Lives (Ghostwood Books, 2014), and he delivered a powerful story set in a small town in England. David Hambling always does good work, and his story here is along the lines of those that will (I trust soon) be released in his PS book, The Dulwich Horror and Others. Jason C. Eckhardt’s “The Walker in the Night” is a poignant evocation of the figure of Lovecraft himself, stirringly set during the great hurricane that struck Providence in September 1938.

Pete Crowther, the publisher of PS Publishing, has given me the go-ahead to assemble a Black Wings VI, but I will not begin work on that book for several months—and, of course, it will again be by invitation only. After that, I may take a break from the Black Wings series and compile a general weird anthology, which I am inclined to title Apostles of the Weird.

I was pleased to receive a copy of a striking book by Sammy Maine, titled Necronomicon: Dark Fantasy, Digital Art and H. P. Lovecraft (London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2015). I wrote the foreword to it. This is a vivid art book with all manner of striking illustrations derived from the work of Lovecraft and his successors. It appears the book is only available for sale in the UK (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Necronomicon-Gothic-Dreams-S-T-Joshi/dp/1783613203/ ), but perhaps copies can be obtained from various US dealers.

I was somehow not notified that a “signature review” of a reprint of Gore Vidal’s pseudonymous novel Thieves Fall Out (1953), which I wrote for Publishers Weekly, had appeared in the February 9 issue. I see it is available online: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-78116-792-2. This is a book that Vidal wrote during a period when (in his view) the New York publishing community was prejudiced against him because he had come out as gay. It has been reprinted by Titan Books—which I hope will allow me to set up my own imprint of weird/horror titles. My agent has forwarded to Titan a long list of titles (mostly reprint) that I have proposed for my series.

Hippocampus Press is preparing a revised version of its Ten Years of Hippocampus Press, 2000–2010, covering the first fifteen years of its existence as a publisher. It certainly does contain an impressive list of titles, and I am writing brief notes on each of its publications to give some background on them. The publisher, Derrick Hussey, has apparently found that such a booklet is a good publicity tool, so we hope to have it ready at least by the NecronomiCon II convention (August 20–23), if not much earlier.

Speaking of conventions, I enjoyed CthulhuCon in Portland (April 24–26), even though I felt a cold coming on as we drove down from Seattle and ended up spending most of the three days in bed. But I managed to participate in various functions, including a very lively panel on weird poetry (with Wade German, W. H. Pugmire, Jason V Brock, and Evan Peterson). This convention was a spinoff of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, which will take place in early October. It will also feature a substantial number of panels and other events beyond the films it will be showing. I'll keep open the possibility of my attendance.

Work continues on many fronts—my edition of Robert Aickman for Centipede Press; a new volume of W. H. Pugmire’s stories (mostly reprint but some original) for Centipede; final work on the Variorum Lovecraft (which should be out around late June or July); reading proofs for the Dennis Etchison volume (Masters of the Weird Tale) for Centipede; and so on and so forth. Never a dull moment!

April 13, 2015 — A Tribute to Caitlín R. Kiernan

I am happy to announce that I am assisting in the preparation of a major volume of stories, essays, and other matter as a tribute to the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan, who I regard as the leading writer of weird fiction of her generation. I will be working closely with Caitlín and her partner, Kathryn Pollnac, on the book, which will be published in 2016 by Centipede Press. Kathryn and I will be the officially designated editors of the book. We have an impressive lineup of authors and artists who have expressed an interest in contributing, but I am not at liberty to mention any of their names at this time. Since it is a Centipede Press publication, readers can be assured that it will be a superb-looking publication with the highest standards in design, layout, artwork, and other elements. We intend to title the book Below the Wide, Carnivorous Sky: A Tribute to Caitlín R. Kiernan.

I am also happy to have received, at last, some copies of Black Wings IV: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (PS Publishing). I believe it is one of the most successful of the books in this series, with outstanding tales by Fred Chappell (“Artifact”), Richard Gavin (“The Rasping Absence”), Ann K. Schwader (“Night of the Piper”), Jonathan Thomas (“We Are Made of Stars”), John Pelan & Stephen Mark Rainey (“Contact”), and much else besides. Regrettably, I only have 2 spare copies to offer to my customers. The list price in the UK is £25 (about $40), so I will be happy to let these 2 copies go for $35 on the usual terms.

I am also wrapping up Black Wings V, which has plenty of interesting material in it also. I am undecided what to do next: whether to go ahead and compile a Black Wings VI or to compile a general anthology of weird fiction (tentatively titled Apostles of the Weird). I will ask my publisher, Pete Crowther of PS Publishing, what he prefers.

I continue to do more work for Dover Publications, which has now signed me up to assemble a volume of weird tales by women writers. There have been several such volumes in the past, but I hope that my research into the history of supernatural writing (embodied in Unutterable Horror) has given me some insights into lesser-known tales and authors. The compilation begins with Mary Shelley (there is nothing short by the “queen of the Gothics,” Ann Radcliffe) and ends with Virginia Woolf (“A Haunted House,” 1921)—for of course all the material has to be in the public domain.

Dover has generated a cover for the edition of Maurice Level’s Thirty Hours with a Corpse: here it is!

Cover of 30 Hours with a Corpse

I was saddened to hear of the death last week of Sherry Austin, the outstanding author of subtle and superbly written weird tales such as Mariah of the Spirits and Other Southern Ghost Stories (2002) and Where the Woodbine Twines (2006). Hippocampus Press was planning an omnibus of her weird work, and we hope to proceed with this volume, which will include the material in the two books just mentioned along with several uncollected tales.

April 6, 2015 — Lovecraft’s Influence on Matheson

Work continues here at its usual hectic pace, chiefly focused on preparing my immense edition of the complete “strange stories” of Robert Aickman. But an interesting new discovery pertaining to Lovecraft has been passed on to me by a colleague, Stephen Spector. Mr. Spector was kind enough to send me an old science fiction magazine, Marvel Science Fiction (November 1951), which contains a rare and (until recently) unreprinted novella by Richard Matheson, “Mountains of the Mind.” The importance of this item rests in the fact that it clearly betrays the influence of Lovecraft, chiefly in its hints of a race of entities called the “Great Ones” who appear to have controlled human development over the millennia—an idea that clearly evokes “The Shadow out of Time.” There may also be echoes of At the Mountains of Madness in other parts of the tale. The story has indeed been reprinted in Matheson Uncollected, Volume 2 (Gauntlet Press, 2010), but is otherwise very difficult to find. To be frank, it is not a stellar piece of fiction, although it does develop a cumulative power as it goes along. But given that this may be the only story by Matheson that unequivocally shows an influence from Lovecraft, it remains noteworthy. Congratulations to Stephen Spector for the discovery!

I see that three more volumes of the Illustrated Lovecraft have come out from PS Publishing: Volume 4 (The Shadow out of Time), Volume 5 (The Shadow over Innsmouth), and Volume 6 (At the Mountains of Madness). All the volumes, aside from containing spectacular illustrations by Pete Von Sholly, contain interesting ancillary matter that makes them well worth securing. Volume 4 has essays by Paul Montelone, Pete Von Sholly, and W. H. Pugmire. Volume 5 reprints two key stories that influenced HPL’s tale (“The Harbor-Master” by Robert W. Chambers and “Fishhead” by Irvin S. Cobb), along with original essays by Pete Von Sholly and Robert M. Price. Volume 6 reprints the hard-to-find story “In Amundsen’s Tent” by John Martin Leahy (from Weird Tales, January 1928) that clearly influenced HPL’s novella, along with original articles by Pete Von Sholly, Robert M. Price, and myself (a brief discussion of the Leahy story). I regret that I have no spare copies of these books to sell to customers.

For no accountable reason, I have received from Greenwood Press two copies of the Hippocampus Press paperback reprint of An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (2001), which I wrote in collaboration with David E. Schultz. As I believe that this is a pretty useful resource for Lovecraftians, I would be happy to part with these copies for $15 each on the usual terms. Come and get ’em!

I have completed the assembly of my next collection of essays, Varieties of the Weird Tale, due out next year from Hippocampus Press. The great majority of the contents come from essays or introductions that have appeared in a wide range of books and magazines. Some of the earlier pieces have been revised to some extent, but most are pretty much identical to their original appearances. To some degree the volume can be considered a pendant to Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), since I go into much greater detail on certain authors and works that I could only treat relatively briefly in that treatise. Here is the final table of contents:

***

Maybe I should hold a contest to see if readers can identify where all these items originally appeared!

March 19, 2015 — Black Wings III Paperback Arrives

I am at last in receipt of the paperback of Black Wings III, which Titan has (absurdly) retitled Black Wings of Cthulhu 3. My copies arrived quite a bit after the contributors received theirs—the editor is always the last to know! I have several spare copies available for sale, and would be happy to dispose of them to interested customers for $15 each.

Speaking of books, I find that sales of the Hippocampus Press books I offered last time have not exactly been robust. So I am forced to hold a kind of fire sale even at this early date, just to get the books out of here. In other words, I am happy to offer the books at a price of two for $25 (or, if you wish one book and one copy of the second issue of Spectral Realms, you can have them for a total of $20). I can assure you that you will not be disappointed by any of the items in question!

I am also in receipt of a copy of That Is Not Dead, a new anthology of Lovecraftian fiction edited by Darrell Schweitzer and issued by PS Publishing (http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/that-is-not-dead-hardcover-edited-by-darrell-schweitzer-2671-p.asp). This volume contains my story “Incident at Ferney,” in which Voltaire encounters Nyarlathotep! The story isn’t quite as silly as this description makes it sound; in fact, I think it rather good. I believe it is the first publication of a work of fiction by me in quite some time—maybe since the appearance of my novel The Assaults of Chaos (Hippocampus Press, 2013). I have now been invited to write stories for two other Lovecraftian anthologies, although I am not certain of my ability to write anything suitable for one or even both of these. Also, I am contemplating the writing of some novel-length works, both detection and horror. We’ll see if they come to anything.

I have now begun in earnest the editing of the collected weird tales of Robert Aickman for Centipede Press’s Masters of the Weird Tale series. This project is proving to be most entertaining, and I believe it will be the first time that Aickman’s tales will be presented in chronological order by date of original publication. The Tartarus Press edition of Aickman’s Collected Strange Stories (1990) attempted a chronological arrangement, but didn’t get it quite right.

I am also working on a large volume of Théophile Gautier’s weird and fantastic tales for Dark Renaissance Books. This volume should be done soon, although I have no idea when it—or the previous books I have assembled for this publisher (the weird tales of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, E. Nesbit, and [in one volume] Irvin S. Cobb and Gouverneur Morris)—will appear.

I have fashioned the rough contents of a new collection of essays on weird fiction, to be entitled Varieties of the Weird Tale. This will include essays I have written over the past decade or more on all manner of authors (Bierce, Dunsany, Leiber, etc.), as well as some introductions to my editions of various authors. The book should appear sometime next year from Hippocampus Press.

PS Publishing should be receiving copies of the hardcover edition of Black Wings IV any day now, and they will presumably reach me a week or two after they do so. I will then be able to offer my spare copies for sale to interested customers. I have almost finished the compilation of Black Wings V and hope to pass it on to the publisher (for release in the spring of 2016) within a month or so.

March 3, 2015 — A Sheaf of Books from Hippocampus Press

I have at long last received several of Hippocampus Press’s recent titles, and I am happy to offer them at slight discounts from the list price, as follows:

The collections by Smith and Hughes are full of interesting matter; Hughes in particular has one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations of any writer I’ve ever encountered, and his stories are unfailingly piquant and memorable. The Tyson book is a pair of Lovecraftian novellas, both exceptional. Aronovitz’s short novel and Kent’s full-length novel (set entirely in rural Appalachia) are also works that you are not likely to forget. So feel free to snap these up on the usual terms!

I received my copies of Spectral Realms only yesterday. It is an exceptional issue, with poems by such notable writers as John Shirley (2 poems!), Gemma Files, William F. Nolan, Jason V Brock, John C. Tibbetts, W. H. Pugmire, Mike Allen, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Adam Bolivar, Michael Fantina, and several others, along with the first part of Leigh Blackmore’s exhaustive essay on the poetry of Leah Bodine Drake.

Hippocampus is gearing up to publish a number of interesting books for the NecronomiCon II convention (Providence, R.I., August 20–23), among them Antonis Antoniades’s novel The Necronomicon, my revised Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos, story collections by Ann K. Schwader (Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror), Jonathan Thomas (Dreams of Ys and Other Invisible Worlds), and other volumes.

One of these is Lois H. Gresh’s Cult of the Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales, which I have just finished going over; I also wrote an introduction for it. It is an exceptional collection of her tales, and I am proud to note that I myself published a number of them in my own anthologies.

We are also working on a collection of Donald R. Burleson’s essays on Lovecraft, as assembled by Phillip A. Ellis. This will also be a superlative book and will bring back into print many of Burleson’s splendidly illuminating articles. Burleson will, I believe, be the Critic [or maybe Scholar] Guest of Honor at NecronomiCon II.

I was pleased to renew my contract for my compilation of Lovecraft’s Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H. P. Lovecraft, first published in 2010. The book will remain available from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0578052482/). I do believe this is a fine collection of material, containing both essays and letters that show Lovecraft to be a pioneering atheist thinker and polemicist. Well worth securing!

I was tickled to see that Black Wings I has been translated into Czech (http://www.laser-books.cz/knihy/ant01.html#stjckc). I am hopeful that this will be only the first of several foreign-language editions for this series; indeed, I believe a Spanish version is in the works. I am also waiting on tenterhooks for the massive two-volume German edition of I Am Providence, the first volume of which is, I think, imminent.

Speaking of Black Wings, I am still waiting for (a) the paperback edition of Black Wings III (retitled by Titan Books as Black Wings of Cthulhu 3), which some contributors have apparently already received, and (b) the hardcover of Black Wings IV from PS, which should appear any day now. Naturally, I will let readers know at once when these volumes reach me, as I should have at least a few copies to sell.

February 27, 2015 — Robert Dunbar on Lovecraft

My attention has been drawn to yet another attack on Lovecraft, this time by one Robert Dunbar (https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/7724333-hatecraft). I had a bit of difficulty figuring out who Robert Dunbar is, for by some regrettable accident he has not yet been made the subject of a Wikipedia entry. It turns out that Mr. Dunbar has written a few supernatural novels recently, along with a “literary” novel and (Gawdelpus) some poetry. Ordinarily I would let this item pass in merciful silence, but it presents such juicy targets for rebuttal that I cannot resist a response.

Dunbar opens with yet another criticism of Lovecraft’s prose style. He quotes the celebrated final paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu”:

“Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”

In regard to which, Mr. Dunbar writes plaintively: “Does that passage truly inspire anyone to read more? Anyone who hasn’t sustained a cranial injury?”

Well, as a matter of fact, my own judgment (derived from reading a fair amount of the great literature in English, Latin, Greek, French, German, and other languages) is that this is not merely good prose; it is superb prose. I am getting to the point of thinking that anyone who doesn’t think Lovecraft a fine prose writer is simply an ignoramus—someone who simply doesn’t know anything about prose. It is as if you’ve put a dunce cap on your head and said to the world, “I don’t know the first thing about good writing.”

What is more, I would be willing to bet any amount of money that such writers as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, and dozens of other contemporary writers in the weird fiction field have also found this passage powerful and effective. These and many other writers have all been significantly influenced by Lovecraft and are happy to admit it. Straub, indeed, edited the 2005 Library of America edition of Lovecraft that (pace Mr. Dunbar) officially and permanently placed him in the ranks of canonical American writers.

What does Mr. Dunbar have to counter these authorities? He puts forth one Peter Damien, who writes that Lovecraft is “a godawful writer. He was so bad. I really cannot stress this enough.” I had even more difficulty figuring out who Peter Damien is than in ascertaining Mr. Dunbar’s identity; amusingly enough, a Google search ends up confusing him with Peter Damian, a Catholic priest in the 11th century! All I can ascertain is that Mr. Damien is some kind of bloviator who enjoys spouting off on all manner of subjects he appears to know little about. And yet, Mr. Dunbar quotes him as some eminent authority on prose style (and of course his meticulous and well-reasoned comment proves that he must be!).

As for me, I will repeat one more time the views of a real critic (and a real writer), one Joyce Carol Oates, who I trust is eminent enough even for Mr. Dunbar. What does she say about Lovecraft’s prose? “Most of Lovecraft’s tales…develop by way of incremental detail, beginning with quite plausible situations…One is drawn into Lovecraft by the very air of plausibility and characteristic understatement of the prose, the question being When will the weirdness strike? There is a melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft’s most passionate work, like ‘The Outsider’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the reader’s memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded.”

But let’s keep the focus on Mr. Dunbar. If he thinks Lovecraft is such a bad writer, he must think that he himself can do better. Let’s see if he can. I take a passage at random from the author’s novel Wood: “Rosaria almost felt sorry for him. After all, Miss Whatsis could be snippy and officious, even toward him, or especially toward him. (Except when they imagined themselves to be unobserved.) He just stood there, grinning, and Miss Whosis had already started yammering at him.”

This is supposed to be good prose, in contrast to Lovecraft’s? I would call attention to the clumsy slang of “snippy” and “yammering,” the ungrammatical sentence-fragment enclosed in the parenthesis, and in general an utter lack of rhythm, music, and modulation. No wonder I can barely stomach reading much contemporary prose (with rare exceptions such as Ramsey Campbell, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and a few others)!

It is breathtaking that Dunbar is prepared to dismiss the entire field of weird fiction as “anti-literary.” Surely an odd assertion about a field that has seen contributions by such writers as Daniel Defoe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, and dozens—perhaps hundreds—of others who strike me as being tolerably literary. (Question: If the genre is so anti-literary, why is Mr. Dunbar dabbling in it? Maybe he is trying to uplift it into some level of “literariness”! Judged by the passage I quoted above, he isn’t doing a very good job of it.)

It should be no surprise that Dunbar fills himself with righteous indignation about Lovecraft’s racism. It now appears that any defenders of Lovecraft are giving him a “free pass” on the subject. How so? I myself (who am surely one of his chief defenders—not to mention a person of colour, which Mr. Dunbar emphatically is not) have stated in my biography that racism is “the greatest black mark on Lovecraft’s character” and gone into considerable detail about how racism affected his life, work, and thought. Just because I don’t get hyperventilated and self-righteous when talking about the subject, or because I don’t append every single utterance I make about Lovecraft with, “Oh, and by the way, Lovecraft was a racist,” it would appear that I am giving him a “free pass.” Are we giving a free pass to Jack London for not constantly harping on his “yellow peril” screeds while we read The Call of the Wild, or on T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism while reading The Waste Land, or on Roald Dahl’s racism and anti-Semitism while reading Someone Like You? (And let’s not even approach the adjacent genre of science fiction. There is abundant evidence that such figures as John W. Campbell, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein, and Orson Scott Card were and are racists of a much worse stripe than Lovecraft—but no one is advocating not reading them anymore.)

And why stop there? Why not ban other writers for their erroneous opinions on other subjects? Lord Dunsany was politically conservative and a member of the idle hereditary aristocracy—so of course we must not read A Dreamer’s Tales. Ambrose Bierce was a vicious misogynist—so of course we must not read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Edgar Allan Poe was a drunkard and a pedophile (he married his 13-year-old cousin, for Gawd’s sake)—so of course his poetry and short stories are off-limits.

The details of Mr. Dunbar’s analysis (I use the word loosely) of Lovecraft’s racism leave much to be desired. He quotes the luminous Charles Baxter as saying (in reference to Leslie S. Klinger’s New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft): “Klinger notes that Lovecraft’s support of Hitler’s eugenic programs, including the ‘racial cleansing’ advocated by Ernest Rüdin and others, is well known.” This is wrong on two counts; first, Klinger made no such assertion, and Lovecraft in fact did not endorse the Nazi eugenic scheme. A letter to Robert Bloch (22 November 1934) goes on at some length on the subject, but this passage is representative: “The complexity of the laws governing organic growth is enormous—so enormous that the number of unknown factors must always remain hopelessly great. We can discover & apply a few biological principles—but the limit of effectiveness is soon reached. For example—despite all the advances in endocrinology & all the experiments in glandular rejuvenation, there is no such thing as a permanent or well-balanced staving-off of senescence & dissolution. … What is more—there really is no one idea of racial excellence. Even if the principle of eugenic control were accepted by a nation, there would remain a constant struggle among various factions advocating different goals of development. One group would advocate the cultivation of this or that group of emotions, or the establishment of this or that blood mixture, while another would campaign ceaselessly for a directly opposite result. Thus the Nazis in Germany want to get rid of every trace of Jewish blood, while other groups believe that the highest intellectual qualities in all races come through prehistoric & forgotten infusions of Semitic blood! Amidst such a confusion of objects, what single policy could ever gain an effective ascendancy?”

How odd that rational passages like this are never quoted by Lovecraft’s detractors!

The other strange thing about Dunbar’s screed is his odd assumption that everyone who “defends” Lovecraft on the racism issue must be politically conservative, while those who exhibit noble sanctimoniousness on the subject must be politically liberal. I hardly imagine that my liberal bona fides are in much doubt, given how liberally (pardon the pun) and enthusiastically I lambaste conservatives in the pages of the American Rationalist, or in such of my books as The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong (2006). But I am not blind to liberalism’s flaws, and one of its worst is, I fear, exactly the kind of political correctness that gets all hot and bothered about the views of an author nearly a century dead while not doing much to combat real evils we face today. If Mr. Dunbar is so outraged at Lovecraft’s racism, I wonder what he would say if, fifty years from now, our own society is crucified for its oversexed, violence-ridden, thoroughly misogynistic culture—as, indeed, it should be. And if Mr. Dunbar thinks that we collectively have dealt with racism a great deal better than Lovecraft’s generation did, he simply isn’t paying attention to what is going on in this country or around the world. (Dunbar ought to consider himself lucky that no one will bother to probe the skeletons in his closet when he is dead. Does he deny that he has any skeletons?)

What is more, Dunbar reveals not the faintest awareness that Lovecraft himself became (except on the issue of race) not merely a liberal but a socialist—one who enjoyed lambasting the Republicans of his era as hidebound reactionaries. One such passage, written late in life, should suffice:

“As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’ …) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

Those words are truer now than when they were first written.

Dunbar also seems inclined to the seriously erroneous view that weird fiction as a whole is somehow a “conservative” or even a “reactionary” genre. I have no idea why or how he could have come to such a view. His own understanding of politics seems about as crude and undeveloped as his understanding of literature. My own acquaintance with the leading writers of this field confirms that a substantial majority of them are politically liberal. But why that should have any bearing on our evaluation of their purely literary merits is a query that I happily admit I fail to understand.

To wrap up. I unhesitatingly declare H. P. Lovecraft not merely a good writer but a great writer—great in his management of prose, great in his imaginative scope, great in the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of his fiction, and great in the effective construction of a tale that allows it to become so compellingly readable. His influence is now perhaps greater than that of Edgar Allan Poe, and on its purely intrinsic merits his work is superior to that of every writer in the history of weird fiction with the possible exception of Ramsey Campbell.

And as for Lovecraft’s politics, I think it would be vastly better if a certain amount of rationality and understanding could be brought to bear upon the subject. Self-righteous indignation may make one feel momentarily virtuous, but it accomplishes little else. As an atheist I am not much inclined to quote the Bible as an authority, but one pungent utterance does strike me as appropriate in this context: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

I wonder why Lovecraft’s detractors don’t just give up. Their foolish screeds are so easily refuted that there is really no sport in it anymore. And yet, they seem unable to resist the temptation to reveal their ignorance and prejudice for all the world to see.

February 16, 2015 — Many Projects in the Works!

Things seem to be even more hectic than usual these days, and I am having difficulty keeping track of—let alone working on—the multitude of projects I have committed to completing. But before I go into that, I am happy to see the appearance of a superb article on Lovearaft by a real critic (one Michael Dirda, formerly the editor of the Washington Post Book World and a critic always sensitive to the value of genre fiction), who appreciates Lovecraft (and, ahem, me) as they deserve. Don’t let the whimsical title fool you; it is a splendid piece, and its appearance in a most noteworthy venue (the [London] Times Literary Supplement] will get the sour taste of Charles Baxter’s article out of our mouths: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1512314.ece.

On the downside, I was saddened to see Scarecrow Press/Rowman & Littlefield cancel my series, Studies in Supernatural Literature. The sales of the published titles have been pretty anaemic, and the publisher is generally cutting back on the number of titles it publishes. I was not really sorry, for I had encountered more difficulty than I had expected in coming up with viable titles—and I was not enthusiastic about signing up books on such popular but inferior writers as Stephen King (although Stefan Dziemianowicz, who had thought of submitting a proposal on him, would no doubt have done a splendid job) and Dean R. Koontz. Some titles that have been contracted—e.g., a monograph on Richard Matheson by June Pulliam and Tony Fonseca, and an anthology of essays on Weird Tales edited by Jeffrey Shanks—will be published; others have been dropped. One of these—Gary William Crawford’s monograph on Robert Aickman—may be picked up by Hippocampus Press. I was particularly sorry to see that John C. Tibbetts’s book on Peter Straub was cancelled, but I imagine John can place this with an academic press.

I was pleased and surprised to receive a copy of David J. Schow’s The Shaft, now available in a beautiful hardcover edition (a reprint of the 1990 UK edition from Maconald) by Centipede Press: http://www.centipedepress.com/horror/shaft.html. I received only one copy of this book, so interested readers will have to purchase a copy for themselves. I had made a strong pitch to the publisher to reissue this book, which I regard as one of the finest novels of the “horror boom” of the 1970s–1990s; and I scanned the text for the publisher, since the author did not have an electronic file available. The next step is to ensure that the book is picked up in paperback, since the limited Centipede Press edition will no doubt go out of print in short order.

I was amused to see the publication of The Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing), an amusing fake book catalogue featuring descriptions of many of the “forbidden books” invented by Lovecraft and others, assembled by Nate Pederson. The catalogue contains contributions by a remarkable number of prestigious writers, including Ann K. Schwader, Darrell Schweitzer, Donald Tyson, Don Webb, F. Paul Wilson, Gemma Files, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., John Langan, Matt Cardin, Michael Cisco, Nick Mamatas, Ramsey Campbell (on The Revelations of Glaaki, of course), Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, Simon Strantzas, and W. H. Pugmire. I wrote the foreword. A most engaging compilation! Again, I received only one copy, so I hope readers will hasten to purchase it from the publisher (http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/the-starry-wisdom-library-jhc-edited-by-nate-pedersen-2564-p.asp).

Speaking of PS, I see that Darrell Schweitzer’s anthology That Is Not Dead is announced as forthcoming (http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/that-is-not-dead-hardcover-edited-by-darrell-schweitzer-2671-p.asp). This contains my immortal story “Incident at Ferney,” depicting the encounter of Voltaire with Nyarlathotep! Absurd as it sounds, I think the story came out reasonably well. Black Wings IV (http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/black-wings-iv—-new-tales-of-lovecraftian-horror-hardcover-edited-by-st-joshi-2625-p.asp) is also listed as forthcoming and should be available at any time. I have also heard that the paperback (from Titan) of Black Wings III (retitled Black Wings of Cthilhu 3) is available; indeed, I saw Wilum Pugmire’s copy the other day. But I have not received any copies myself as yet.

I was delighted to have done a light copyedit of Nicole Cushing’s story collection The Mirrors, which should appear from Cycatrix Press in time for the World Horror Convention in Atlanta in early May. It is a splendid volume with some remarkable tales in it. I was pleased and humbled to have written the foreword. Don’t hesitate to pick it up when it comes out!

Apparently a number of new titles from Hippocampus Press have appeared, but I have not received any copies; the moment I do, I will make them available for purchase to interested customers. We are planning a number of provocative titles to appear for the NecronomiCon II convention in Providence, R.I., in August, among which will be a revised version of my Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (2008), now retitled The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. I have just finished preparing the index, although I do not know whether cover art has been completed, or even begun.

Another hugely important title to appear later this year from Hippocampus will be nothing less significant than David E. Schultz’s long-awaited annotated edition of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth. Aside from the fact that every poem in this 36-sonnet cycle will be illustrated (I believe there are six different illustrators, each tackling six sonnets), Schultz’s commentary may cover some 200 pages and illuminate both the literary sources of each poem but their influence on subsequent works by Lovecraft. This is a project that has been more than thirty years in the making. I remember seeing a draft of it when I first met Schultz in 1986, at Steve Mariconda’s wedding; and the project had been in progress before then. It will no doubt be the last word on this sonnet cycle!

February 5, 2015 — Dreams from the Witch House and Others

My colleague Lynne Jamneck is undertaking an exciting project called Dreams from the Witch House, an anthology of all-original Lovecraftian stories written by women. Lynne is undertaking an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for the project (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dreams-from-the-witch-house-women-of-lovecraft). Some nice goodies are being offered for contributions (see https://www.facebook.com/events/707915729307537/715125678586542). I’m confident the anthology will be a splendid one, so best to get in on the ground floor!

Speaking of anthologies, our Gothic Lovecraft volume received a late but splendid contribution by John Shirley, “The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner”—in which John perfectly mimics the style and manner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge while also producing a splendidly chilling Lovecraftian weird tale. Also, we have decided to go with Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “As Red as Red” (2010) over her story “Andromeda among the Stones” (2002). The latter, while a fine story, did not seem to us quite to reflect the fusion of Gothic and Lovecraftian themes we wished, and in any case it has been reprinted a number of times; but the former story is a brilliant evocation of HPL’s “The Shunned House” and its allusions to vampire activity in Rhode Island in the 1890s.

My article on Lovecraftian elements in the films of Guillermo del Toro is now definitely scheduled for publication in the volume The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro, which will be appearing this spring or summer from McFarland (http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-9595-5). Another essay of mine, on Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, has been sent back to me for some minor revisions. I can’t remember when the book containing it will appear, but I imagine I will know soon enough.

I have now read proofs of the PS edition of Black Wings IV (due out this month, perhaps) as well as the proofs of the paperback edition of Black Wings III (also due out this month from Titan Books—under the altered title Black Wings of Cthulhu III). My compilation of Black Wings V proceeds apace. But after that, I may take a break from Lovecraftian anthologies (although I am still negotiating with Titan for Cthulhu Noir) and compile a general weird anthology. My tentative title for such a book is Apostles of the Weird. The idea is to present as wide-ranging a volume as possible, to demonstrate the broad scope and parameters of the weird tale.

January 29, 2015 — Charles Baxter on Lovecraft—Again!

I was a bit surprised to see that a highly truncated version of my response to Charles Baxter’s article in the New York Review of Books has been published in the new issue of that paper (dated February 19, 2015). I had sent my response to the editors of NYRB and was told that only a 400-word letter could be published. (My full response was ten times that length.) I hastily prepared such a letter, but then never heard from the editors as to whether it would be published or not.

Adding to the bizarrerie, Mr. Baxter has appended a reply that addresses, not the letter as published in NYRB, but my full response! I am not particularly impressed by Mr. Baxter’s reply, which I will hereby subject to a sentence-by-sentence analysis:

Things get curiouser and curiouser. Another letter published in the NYRB issue is by one Mark Halpern. It addresses nothing in Baxter’s own article but attacks me for some perceived failings in my biography of Lovecraft—or, rather, one failing in particular, to wit: “Joshi must have been suffering from one of his rare moments of fatigue when it came to linking his subject’s attitude toward Jews and other sorts of non-Nordic immigrants to New York’s Lower East Side to the emotional source of Cthulhu and his like, because he writes not one word about the topic in his otherwise painfully detailed biography.” Well, lordy me! I confess to be guilty as charged—because there is little or no connection between Lovecraft’s racism and his creation of the “gods and monsters” in his fiction.

It is most curious how many recent critics (Charles Baxter, Laura Miller, and now Mr. Halpern) have put forth this view without providing the slighest evidence for it. Let us examine the physical properties of Lovecraft’s iconic creation, Cthulhu. When the narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu” first sees Wilcox’s bas-relief of the creature, he describes it as follows: “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.” Lovecraft’s description of the actual sight of Cthulhu by Johansen is deliberately vague, but we do have this: “The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own.” Uh-oh—Cthulhu is green! Maybe this means that he is a stand-in for “people of colour”! If you believe that, there’s a bridge nearby that I’d like to sell you.

It is true that the Cthulhu cultists in Louisiana do symbolise Lovecraft’s disdain of certain types of foreigners: they were “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.” Well and good; but this whole passage (the second section of the story) is largely an elaborate “info dump” whereby we learn the basic properties of Cthulhu and his “spawn,” as recounted by “old Castro.” I don’t see that there is anything specifically anti-Semtiic in the passage above. Mr. Halpern (who predictably refers to Lovecraft’s “pathological anti-Semitism”) will be surprised to learn that Lovecraft repeatedly declared his belief that Jews in both America and Europe were in several ways culturally superior to Anglo-Saxons—something that could certainly not be said of the Cthulhu cultists in Louisiana.

How about Lovecraft’s other “gods and monsters”? Azathoth? He is described in one story as follows: “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time …” Any racist implications there, people?

Yog-Sothoth, maybe? We hear of him as “a congeries of iridescent globes.” There must be a racist implication there somewhere, but—Gawdelpme—I just don’t have the critical acumen to detect it.

Shub-Niggurath? Well, she is usually mentioned in the same breath as “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.” Omigod!—black goat! All right, that’s it: she must be a stand-in for HPL’s disdain for black women who breed a lot! What else is possible? Well, wait a minute…HPL does describe her elsewhere as “a kind of sophisticated Astarte,” so I guess we can presume that HPL was prejudiced against the ancient Mesopotamians.

Nyarlathotep also seems very promising. He is first described as having the bearing of a Pharaoh. OK, no question about it—this must reflect HPL’s prejudice against Arabs! But it seems that Nyarlathotep emerged “from the blackness of twenty-seven centuries”—meaning that he emerged about thirteen centuries before the birth of Mohammad. But didn’t HPL describe him as the “Black Man” in “The Dreams in the Witch House”? Oh, wait—that was the standard designation for the leader of a witch coven. And HPL states specifically that the Black Man in that story was devoid of negroid features.

How about the fungi from Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness”? Well, they’re described as “half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto”; so unless we assume that HPL had a prejudice against mushrooms or crabs, I don’t see any racist undercurrent here.

The Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness? They are barrel-shaped creatures with starfish-heads and tentacles. Again I struggle to connect them with HPL’s racism. Anyway, aren’t they substantially superior to humans in intellect and many other qualities? What about those loathsome shoggoths? I suppose something could be made of the fact that they are immense, amorphous masses of black protoplasm …

The Great Race of “The Shadow out of Time”? They are huge, rugose, cone-shaped creatures who are also vastly superior to human beings, since they are virtually omniscient and have conquered time. Not much racism there, I fear.

I have repeatedly maintained that the only major story by Lovecraft based on racist presuppositions is “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” And (pace Mr. Halpern) I do in fact discuss this matter at length in my biography. Here is some of what I wrote there: “‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ is…clearly a cautionary tale on the ill effects of miscegenation, or the sexual union of different races…It is, accordingly, difficult to deny a suggestion of racism running all through the story.” There is much more to this effect, but I trust that will do.

Our valiant critics have also failed to notice the several stories in which various unsavoury characters are unmistakably Caucasian. This applies particularly to the aristocratic Dutch-American family in “The Lurking Fear,” the wealthy Anglo-American family in “The Rats in the Walls,” and even the “decadent” inhabitants of Dunwich in “The Dunwich Horror.” The Dunwich denizens are clearly a racially homogeneous (white) clan of backwoods New England farmers; there seem to be no ethnic minorities there. If one didn’t know who wrote these stories, one could easily conclude that their author was prejudiced against white people!

The plain fact is that most of Lovecraft’s “gods and monsters” are meant to symbolise the immensity—both spatial and temporal—of a universe where human beings occupy a derisively insignificant place. Their titanic power and anomalous physical properties are metaphors for the inscrutability of a universe where things may be very different from the way they are here.

Those hostile critics seeking to maintain some intimate connection between Lovecraft’s racism and the creation of these alien entities will have to put forth more than mere assertions to make their case. In my mind, the evidence is overwhelmingly against them.

January 19, 2015 — Gothic Lovecraft Done!

I am happy to announce that the anthology that Lynne Jamneck and I have been assembling for some time, Gothic Lovecraft, is now done. Here is a peek at the table of contents:

All the stories save the last are original, and every one is a powerful fusion of Gothic elements of various sorts with Lovecraftian motifs. A splendid book! It should be published by Cycatrix Press in time for the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY, which I will be attending (as will the publisher, Jason V Brock).

Meanwhile, I am mortified and dismayed that there has been so little interest in the Weird Fiction Review, whose bumper-crop fifth issue I announced last time. I have received very few offers to take my spare copies of the issue off my hands. So at great personal sacrifice I am offering the issue for a bargain price of $20. Come one, come all! And, when the issue goes out of print and begins commanding high prices (as it inevitably will), don’t say I didn’t give you a chance!

I am in the process of preparing the index and reading the proofs of my revised Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos—which is now retitled The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. Hippocampus Press hopes to have this book ready for NecronomiCon II this August, if not earlier. It has now been significantly expanded in size and may check in at more than 400 pages.

Proofs of Black Wings IV have arrived from the publisher (PS Publishing), and on the whole they look pretty good. PS had announced the book as being available in February, and let’s hope it is able to keep that promise. The signature sheets of the signed/limited edition are also beginning to circulate, so that edition may not be quite as delayed as the one for Black Wings III was. (As a matter of fact, I never even got a copy of the signed/limited edition, nor did any of the contributors.) I believe the paperback of Black Wings II will also come out pretty soon, maybe February or March.

I am contemplating the issuance of e-books of some of my older titles, specifically The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (1996), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). These books may or may not actually be in print (the first three in reprints from Wildside Press; the fourth from McFarland), but I have retained e-book rights. But since I no longer have electronic files of these books, such files will have to be generated—a tedious process. But I think it is worth doing. I shall probably let Hippocampus issue the e-books. Of course, in the process of preparing electronic files I shall probably do some revision. Indeed, I wish I could slap on a new title to A Subtler Magick, whose title and subtitle were determined by the publisher; but I suppose that is not possible.

I have been labouring with a cold/cough ever since my return from Vancouver, BC (January 8–11), where I attended the Modern Language Association conference. Actually, Mary and I spent as little time at the conference as we could, spending most of the time in exploring this most interesting city. I was on a panel discussion on “weird fiction” on Sunday, January 11. I was dreading the event, because I know from experience that this conference (attended almost exclusively by academics) can be and usually is insufferably pompous and stuffy; but our panel, to my surprise, went reasonably well. One young person professed considerable familiarity with both HPL and my work, and I encouraged him to attend NecronomiCon II. I also met the poet Wade German and his charming wife, and we had much lively discussion on various subjects as well as a nice tour of an anthropological museum. On our own Mary and I walked around Stanley Park and had a splendid lunch at the Fish House there. (Pardon us, HPL!)

I cannot leave my readers without commenting on the miraculous conclusion of the NFC championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. The game was going so badly for my Seahawks that I was going to give up watching—but Mary said she would watch to the bitter end, so I decided to stick to it. And I’m glad I did. I don’t recall a more remarkable conclusion to a game in all my fifty years of watching football. All I say, however, is that the Seahawks had better not make so many mistakes if they expect to win the Super Bowl in two weeks.

January 2, 2015 — Weird Fiction Review Arrives

I received copies of Weird Fiction Review No. 5 (2014) a week or so ago. Of course, it looks splendid from a purely physical perspective, but I believe the contents are also exemplary. It includes four separate interviews (Dennis Etchison on Ray Bradbury; Jonathan Johnson on Michael Aronovitz; Jason V Brock on Al Feldstein; Wayne Edwards on Stuart David Schiff); fiction by Brian Stableford, Jason V Brock, Donald Tyson, Jonathan Thomas, Robert H. Waugh, Darrell Schweitzer, and others; and articles by Dennis Etchison (on Forrest J Ackerman), Jan Vander Laenen, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and others; poetry by Wade German, Ann K. Schwader, and others; and columns by John Pelan and Danel Olson. The publisher, Centipede Press, states that the list price is $35 but is currently offering it for $25. I will follow suit and offer my spare copies for $25, which includes shipping for US customers.

Well, my threat—er, promise—to dig out my violin and play it at the Northwest Chorale’s play-along/sing-along of Handel’s Messiah on December 30 turned into a reality, and it was an enthralling experience. I was substantially assisted by three other violinists (one first violinist and two second violinists) who covered up my numerous mistakes and bad intonation. But I know the work so well (from a choral perspective) that I was able to “lead” the orchestra quite effectively. I was hoping that my wife, Mary, would take some pictures of the event, but she was ill and stayed home; however, some pictures taken by others have been forwarded to me, and I am hoping that my webmaster can make one of them visible here. I will, however, not repeat this undertaking or take up the violin on a regular basis: no time and no real interest!

S. T. Joshi rehearsing the violin

Continuing on the musical theme, I have heard a rough CD of our choir’s December 13 performance, and—aside from the irritant of a crying baby—it turned out reasonably well. We will be able to fine-tune the recording in various ways to make it better still, and there is a good chance that this one will in fact be offered for sale commercially, since I am securing permission for all songs that are still under copyright.

Mary and I took a brief trip to Los Angeles over the Christmas holidays to see my two sisters and their families. One December 26 I was please to make the personal acquaintance of two young poets, Kyle (K. A.) Opperman (whose The Crimson Tome will appear this year from Hippocampus Press) and Ashley Dioses (who has a poem in the new Weird Fiction Review and is likely to have a poetry book from Hippocampus sometime in the future). We engaged in several hours of lively discussion of poetry and other matters. Indeed, Kyle suggested to me that I encourage Leigh Blackmore to assemble a volume of the collected weird poetry of Leah Bodine Drake. Leigh has just written a long article on Drake’s poetry (which will appear in two parts in the next two issues of Spectral Realms)—an article that notes that, aside from the fabulously rare Arkham House book A Hornbook for Witches (1950), Drake also published a second poetry volume, The Tilting Dust (1956), which has some weird specimens. In addition, there is a third, unpublished poetry manuscript, Multiple Clay, among her papers at the University of Kentucky. I have just asked the library there for a copy or scan of this text. So I hope that a volume of Drake’s poetry, under Leigh’s editorship, can appear in the next year or two.

I am just now wrapping up my edition of the weird tales of Irvin S. Cobb and Gouverneur Morris for Dark Renaissance Books. It will be called Back There in the Grass, from the title of Morris’s most famous story. This is really a very interesting compilation, and the weird work of these two author is quite creditable. I think I will then proceed with an assemblage of the weird tales of Thomas Burke, a writer I have always admired. Jessica Amanda Salmonson seems to have assembled a pretty comprehensive volume of Burke’s weird tales (The Golden Gong and Other Night-Pieces [Ash-Tree Press, 2001]), but this book is long out of print and no doubt quite expensive. I may include the complete contents of Burke’s classic collection Night-Pieces (1935), even though not all the stories are weird; and there are other weird stories scattered in other collections that I will also include. After I assemble the Burke volume, I will put together a substantial book of Théophile Gautier’s weird tales.

Lynne Jamneck and I have pretty much completed our assembly of Gothic Lovecraft, and the volume has come out quite well indeed, with contributions from Lois H. Gresh, Orrin Grey, Nancy Kilpatrick, Lynda Rucker, Jonathan Thomas, Donald Tyson, Don Webb, and several others. This will be appearing from Jason V Brock’s Cycatrix Press later this year—perhaps around the time of the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York. I am also helping Jason assemble Nicole Cushing’s first short story collection, The Mirrors, which he hopes to bring out for the World Horror Convention in Atlanta (May 7–10). I am not sure I will be able to attend that event, as I would have to miss one of my choir performances (currently set for May 9 and 16).

So this year is likely to be a busy one!

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