Browsed by
Category: H.P. Lovecraft

Vintage Treasures: The Macabre Reader edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: The Macabre Reader edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Comments 7 comments


The Macabre Reader (Ace, 1959). Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice and the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. What to do with those long winter night hours? Curl up with a blanket, a warm beverage, and a good spooky book, of course.

My pick for tonight is Donald A. Wollheim’s The Macabre Reader, his 14th anthology, published as a paperback original in 1959 and never reprinted in the US. It’s still considered one of his finest anthologies, even today, and has both a fine reputation and the benefit of a good print run — meaning copies are still very inexpensive. There are plenty of reviews out there; here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites, by Dem Bones at Vault of Evil:

Thorp McClusky – “The Crawling Horror”: Hans Brubaker’s farmhouse comes under attack from a colourless jelly which devours rats, cats and cattle before turning [its] attention to human prey. His beautiful young wife Hilda and the local physician Dr. Kurt are the only people who believe his seemingly insane story and help him secure the place versus the shapeless creeping sludge. All is well until eighteen year old Bertha Brandt turns up on the doorstep in the middle of the night…

Zealia Brown Reed – “The Curse Of Yig”: Oklahoma, 1925. An ethnologists’ researches into snake lore amongst the Native Americans leads him to Guthrie Asylum… [and] the tragic history of settlers Walker and Audrey Davis, whose anxieties over her wiping out a nest of baby rattlers culminate in madness, manslaughter and monster births. A pulp classic with a killer ending, reputedly revised by H. P. Lovecraft.

The Macabre Reader contains stories and poems by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Henry S. Whitehead, John Martin Leahy, and many others — all under a killer cover by Ed Emshwiller. It’s perfect for a snowbound winter night.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Trail of Cthulhu by August Derleth

Vintage Treasures: The Trail of Cthulhu by August Derleth

Comments 15 comments
The Trail of Cthulhu-small The Trail of Cthulhu-back.jpg-small

The Trail of Cthulhu by August Derleth (Ballantine, 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

August Derleth is revered among modern fans chiefly for his singular accomplishment: founding Arkham House to publish H.P. Lovecraft. The fact that Lovecraft, who remained obscure throughout his life and was published solely in low-circulation pulp magazines like Weird Tales, is remembered at all is arguably due to the tireless efforts of Derleth and his fellow editors, who reprinted Lovecraft in quality hardcover editions and brought his work to a wider audience.

Derleth was also a prolific writer, and here his reputation is less steller. He chiefly wrote what we’d call Lovecraft fan fiction today, and his adventure-themed tales were often very far removed from the cosmic horror tone of his idol. Perhaps his most popular story cycle was The Trail of Cthulhu, a series of interconnected stories that chronicle the heroic struggles of Laban Shrewsbury and his associates against the Great Old Ones, especially Cthulhu. Perry Lake at Goodreads has a fine (and very concise) review.

Derleth never really understood Lovecraft’s mythos, with a cold, unfeeling universe and humanity as an afterthought. But Derleth did understand a derring-do adventure with good guys versus bad guys, and that’s exactly what he wrote here. Laban Shrewsbury is probably the only real hero in the Mythos and in him we see the terrible costs of staring into the Void. This book is a treat for all fans of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Hugo Negron offers a counterpoint that’s a little harsher, but equally on target I think.

…

Read More Read More

Analog Science Fiction, January/February 2020, Moby Dick, a Side-Quest, and HP Lovecraft

Analog Science Fiction, January/February 2020, Moby Dick, a Side-Quest, and HP Lovecraft

Comments 4 comments

Analog-Science-Fiction-and-Fact-January-February-2020-small

Part One: Analog

Back in the Before Times, I strolled, maskless and blissful, into Barnes and Noble and bought the Analog Science Fiction, January/February 2020 issue. It is a super-sized double issue with a reprint of a classic story from the 90s. I’ve read it in bits and pieces over the months and one tale stuck out at me — the cover story: “The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy” by Harry Turtledove.

Turtledove mines the classics with an enviable lack of shame in this Moby Dick pastiche. Is it even a pastiche? It is more of an abridged version, but with dinosaurs. Imagine if you had a test due on Moby Dick, but by some outlandish set of coincidences you lacked internet access and couldn’t even get your hands on an old copy of the Cliff Notes — hitting this story the night before would ensure you’d manage the test fine.

Honestly, while there wasn’t anything wrong with the story, it didn’t bring anything new to it, either. I mean, outside of the fact that they are dinosaurs.

…

Read More Read More

Weird Tales Deep Read: November 1934

Weird Tales Deep Read: November 1934

Comments 0 Comment
Weird Tales November 1934-small Weird Tales November 1934-back-small

Weird Tales, November 1934. Cover by Margaret Brundage (for “Queen of the Lillin”)

We’re back on more familiar ground with this issue of Weird Tales from its classic period. More familiar authors are represented, and although not every story is a classic the editors at least avoided any real stumbles this. The issue grades out to a 2.1, which all in all is pretty decent.

Both Howard and Lovecraft appear, although the Lovecraft tale is a reprint and the Howard is the last installment of a serial. E. Hoffman Price, Paul Ernst, and August Derleth, seasoned pulp veterans all, also contributed stories. Price tale’s is part of his Pierre d’Atois stories; , d’Atois, like another Frenchman who appears in a series of WT stories, is an occult detective. The Ernst is one of his slighter efforts. The Derleth is somewhat more unusual, although, as is common, also rather slight. We have to cover already trodden ground with two serials this time around. I’ve included the information on those stories for those who haven’t read all the posts in this series.

…

Read More Read More

The Ordinary is Ephemeral: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Battle Against Modernism

The Ordinary is Ephemeral: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Battle Against Modernism

Comments 10 comments

Weird Tales of Modernity-smallWeird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft
Jason Ray Carney
McFarland & Company (205 pages, $39.95 in paperback/$23.99 digital, July 26, 2019)

Jason Carney’s thesis in Weird Tales of Modernity is that, in their reaction to modernism, the artistic and literary movement that upended culture as it had been accepted in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Weird Tales Three — Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft — turned modernism on its head with innovations they introduced in their fiction. Make no mistake: the word thesis here is apt. Weird Tales of Modernity is a formal dissertation. Making use as it does of academic jargon, the book will not be for every reader.

Straightaway, for example, Carney introduces us to the term ekphrastic to make clear what the Weird Tales Three were expressing. Ekphrasis is the representation in language of a work of art. Any of us can do this; go ahead and write your own personal, detailed description of Cthulhu or explore how you react to Frank Frazetta’s artwork. Ekphrasis “acts as an organizing principle in poetry and fiction, making explicit the connection between art, storytelling, and life.” This definition is from Patrick Smith’s guest blog on the website Interesting Literature. Smith quotes Michael Trussler in defining ekphrasis as “a kind of ontological mixture that signals a world beyond the confines of the text.”

There we have it: ekphrasis “signals a world beyond the confines of the text.” We are now in Lovecraft’s frightening, paranoid, awakened world of the Cthulhu mythology — alive beyond the confines of the text — and Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne and Poseidonis, and Robert E. Howard’s brutal Valusia and Hyborian Age. As Carney says early in Weird Tales of Modernity, “When a literary artist, like [Clark Ashton] Smith, artistically describes or fictionalizes a work of art by transforming it into an unreal echo or shadow of the actual, that is ekphrasis.”

Carney devotes an early chapter to the history of Weird Tales and then two chapters each to the three authors of his study, introducing them and then exploring their artistic innovations. He begins his study with an examination of what he terms pulp ekphrasis. “In several of their enduring works,” he says,

Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith engage in a form of artistically inflected criticism termed ekphrasis. They do so by fictionalizing modernism, transforming the real artistic movement into an unreal shadow modernism, a strategic distortion of actual modernism. After many creative iterations honed over several stories — e.g., Pickman’s demented art, Malygris’s sorcery, the fell mirrors of Tuzun Thune — this shadow modernism becomes an inhuman technology that, functioning like a cognitive prosthesis in the virtual world of fiction, thereby reveals the secret truth of history: history is a cruelly accelerating process of deformation. The ordinary is ephemeral. History is an interplay of form and formlessness with formlessness terminally ascendant.

The ordinary is ephemeral. Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard were keenly aware of this truth and reacted to it in their fiction while other Weird Tales writers were moving right along in the modern world, writing their stories of scientifiction, offering narratives of ominous cults and mad scientists (with at least one nude woman per story),  or revisiting the tropes of Victorian horrors.

…

Read More Read More

Visit a Haunted Cyberpunk City in Punktown from Chronicle City and Miskatonic River Press

Visit a Haunted Cyberpunk City in Punktown from Chronicle City and Miskatonic River Press

Comments 5 comments

Punktown setting for Call of Cthulhu-small

Punktown: A Setting Book for Call of Cthulhu and Basic Roleplaying

Many many, oh-so-many years ago, I wrote an excited blog post about the planned final game release from Miskatonic River Press, which was slowly winding up operations. It was a Kickstarter-funded Call of Cthulhu setting book based on the setting for Jeffrey Thomas’s dark urban fantasy series Punktown. Here’s what I said, in part.

I’m a huge fan of Miskatonic River Press, and it’s great to hear they have something new in the works. They’ve produced some really terrific Call of Cthulhu products, including New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, Our Ladies of Sorrow, and their Roman-era adventure The Legacy Of Arrius Lurco…. if Miskatonic River has to end their illustrious publishing career with one book, I’m pleased it’s this one. I think Thomas’s dark-future urban setting will make a terrific locale for a rockin’ CoC campaign.

Well, it was not to be. The years rolled by, and Punktown never surfaced. The illustrious Miskatonic River Press finally closed up shop, and I silently grieved for another Kickstarer destined to never see the light of day.

Or so I thought. And then, just last week, I stumbled across a reference to it. Punktown did in fact exist, in PDF and print-on-demand formats, and it was being offered for sale at both DriveThruRPG and Lulu. It had stealthily been released in 2018 by designers Chronicle City and Miskatonic River Press. Praise Nyarlathotep!

…

Read More Read More

Weird Tales Deep Read: July 1933

Weird Tales Deep Read: July 1933

Comments 9 comments

weird_tales-July-1933-small

Somewhat fanciful Brundage cover for “Hand of Glory”

This is the first in a series of posts I’ve wanted to do for awhile now, a detailed look at a single issue of Weird Tales magazine where I do a short analysis of each story, the famous, the infamous, and the forgotten. Just to make things a little confusing, I rate these stories, unlike movies, on a 1-5 scale, with the lower the number, the better the story. You can look at these ratings as A-B-C-D-F, or Excellent – Good – Mediocre – Below Average – Poor.

I wanted to start with a memorable issue, so I chose the July 1933 entry, one of the best I’ve read so far. I’ll start with a short overview and then get into the specifics of each story.

This issue is at the beginning of the Unique Magazine’s (as it sometimes called itself) Golden Age (roughly the early to late 1930’s) with a total of four of the nine stories penned by what I like to think of as the Holy Trinity of Weird Tales writers, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. The ubiquitous Seabury Quinn is also present with one of his ninety-three Jules de Grandin stories, along with tales by early giants of science fiction Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson. Sheridan Le Fanu contributes a classic reprint. The final story is by Harold Ward, a fairly prolific pulp writer noted for complicated plots often bordering on the incoherent.

The Howard story is one of his slightest, but moderately effective. The Smith, set in what is probably the first shared-world universe in science fiction — the Cthulhu Mythos — is also rather slight, but vastly more imaginative. The Lovecraft story under his byline is one of his classic Cthulhu Mythos tales. His second story in this issue appears under the name of Hazel Heald, which requires a bit of explanation.

…

Read More Read More

Lovecraft in China: The Flock of Ba-Hui by Oobmab

Lovecraft in China: The Flock of Ba-Hui by Oobmab

Comments 4 comments
The Flock of Ba-Hui and Other Stories-small The Flock of Ba-Hui and Other Stories-back-small

Cover by Roger Betka

The Flock of Ba-Hui and Other Stories
Oobmab (translated by Arthur Meursault and Akira)
Camphor Press (254 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$14.99 paperback/$6.99 digital, February 2020)

Beyond the protective barrier of Europe’s vast libraries, Latinate languages, aristocratic bloodlines, and imperial armies, there lurks a malign chaos of ancient knowledge and alien science. To our Western eyes, this chaos is a universe of black magic and monsters but there is, alas, much more to it than that, when one considers the full span of inhuman evil that extends from ancient creatures long outcast, brooding and breeding sinister vengeance in the Earth’s depths, to the latest incursions by loathsome entities whose blasphemous technologies have carried them to this green and innocent planet from the mist-shrouded globes circling the farthest stars.

This is essentially Lovecraft country: a universe that has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Ever-fearful of dark forces from the outside, in daily life the American author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an enthusiastic exponent of modernity – the expansion of northern European cultures throughout the world to the disadvantage, even appropriation, even erasure, of indigenous and non-European cultures. As America itself blossomed into an imperial power, Lovecraft’s United Empire loyalism (which to be fair, was greatly mitigated in his later years) envisioned a USA that “must ever remain an integral and important part [as he wrote at age 24] of the great universal empire of British thought and literature.”

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft treasured his native New England not only for its green fields, stone churches, and stately mansions, but for the ways these things embodied the culture of an even-more-native England, a just and civilized seat of a white, English-speaking empire, an island across the sea that he felt linked to in spirit, although he never saw it in person.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch

Vintage Treasures: The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch

Comments 3 comments

Robert Bloch Panther editions-small

Panther edition paperbacks (1976). Covers by Anthony Roberts.

The Opener of the Way was Robert Bloch’s very first collection, published by Arkham House way back in 1945, when he was all of 28 years old. It contained 21 stories, all but two of which originally appeared in Weird Tales, including classics such as “Waxworks,” “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” and the Cthulhu Mythos tale “The Shambler from the Stars,” which inspired Lovecraft to write “The Haunter of the Dark,” his last work.

The Opener of the Way was to be Bloch’s only fantasy collection until Pleasant Dreams—Nightmares was published by Arkham fifteen long years later. Like most early Arkham House collections, it is a very expensive book these days. It has never been reprinted in the US, which hasn’t hurt its collectability any. Fortunately Panther reprinted it in the UK in 1976, splitting it into two paperback volumes: The Opener of the Way and House of the Hatchet.

Of course, those two paperbacks are now highly sought after as well (the set pictured above sold on eBay this summer for $72.51). Which figures. I only learned about the Panther reprints recently, and after a brief search tracked down a copy of The Opener of the Way paperback for $9.95, which made me happy. Here’s a look at the contents.

…

Read More Read More

Cover Reveal: The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham, edited by Leslie S. Klinger

Cover Reveal: The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham, edited by Leslie S. Klinger

Comments 2 comments

HP Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft

One of the most exciting books to cross my desk this summer was an advance proof of The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham. It’s the follow-up to Leslie S. Klinger’s monumental 928-page The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, published by Liveright in 2014, which Harlan Ellison called “an Olympian landmark of modern gothic literature.” Beyond Arkham is an absolutely gorgeous book, packed with 22 more Lovecraft stories, including several of his most famous, and 200 vintage photographs and illustrations. Liveright gave us an exclusive sneak peek of the final cover, and it’s truly a work of art. We want to share it with you below. But first, here’s the description.

No lover of gothic literature will want to be without this literary keepsake, the final volume of Leslie Klinger’s tour-de-force chronicle of Lovecraft’s canon.

In 2014, The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft was published to widespread acclaim― vaunted as a “treasure trove” (Joyce Carol Oates) for Lovecraft aficionados and general readers, alike. Hailed by Harlan Ellison as an “Olympian landmark of modern gothic literature,” the volume included twenty-two of Lovecraft’s original stories. Now, in this final volume, best- selling author Leslie S. Klinger reanimates twenty-five additional stories, the balance of Lovecraft’s significant fiction, including “Rats in the Wall,” a post– World War I story about the terrors of the past, and the newly contextualized “The Horror at Red Hook,” which recently has been adapted by best- selling novelist Victor LaValle. In following Lovecraft’s own literary trajectory, readers can witness his evolution from Rhode Island critic to prescient literary genius whose titanic influence would only be appreciated decades after his death. Including hundreds of eye- opening annotations and dozens of rare images, Beyond Arkham finally provides the complete picture of Lovecraft’s unparalleled achievements in fiction.

Ready? Feast your eyes on the beautiful cover for The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham, arriving from Liveright on September 24.

…

Read More Read More