Black Gate

The sleepers wake: attendees start the fourth day of Necronomicon

In the usual life cycle of a con, Sundays range from DOA — they expired sometime in the dark of night and when the sun rises all one finds is an empty, sun-baked dusty street with flies buzzing desultorily on piles of yesterday’s horse dung — to a lively old age that becomes more fragile as the day goes on. Checkouts at the hotel desk are consistent, though a good number leave luggage for later retrieval. But as the 8AM session on Thursday was well-attended, so too the 9:30 session Sunday morning about the correspondence between our man Lovecraft and Robert E. “Conan the Barbarian” Howard filled most of the seats. From this one must conclude Necronomicon’s Sunday will be on the lively side, and no dusty, abandoned street.

Letters constituted a major venue for communication between notables during this time period, and some — alas, not all — made it a practice to retain these letters. As a side-note: a loss to present-day scholarship on Lovecraft occurred when Lovecraft’s spouse burned the letters she’d received from him over the years of their acquaintance, courting, and marriage. And when we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the letters aren’t short little hello-how ya doin’-what’s up affairs, but lengthy epistolary conversations on weighty matters relating to writing style, what constitutes a good and required text for reading, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of publication in the fraught world of the pulps of that era.

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The glorious Vendor Hall at Necronomicon

As Necronomicon enters the full adult stage of its four day life, wee Thursday toddlerdom and energetic Friday late-teens giving way to brawny, wide-shouldered, keen-eyed prime of life. Today sees peak attendance, as day-trippers flock in to swell the ranks of shoppers on the Vendor Hall and help pack the seating in panels and presentations.

The Armitage Symposium organizes traditionally academic panels at Necronomicon, a nice way to draw a distinction between them and more traditional fan-oriented panels, and also a much nicer thing to put on one’s academic vita (like a resume) than the name of a fictional book that contains… stuff.

In The Surpassing Despair Which Flows from a Loss of Identity: Postcolonial Historiography and Race in Lovecraftiana, four academics presented papers on topics that fit under the awkward umbrella of the panel name. I could do a whole post about the art of crafting panel names for collections of academic papers, but whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy would I do that to you?

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There’s nothing like a well-run ‘con, and veterans of the circuit know the feel of competence, from the preliminary materials and communications to the execution of the event on site. Chief character of this con? The Biltmore Graduate hotel. Still proudly wearing the Biltmore name, this fine building shares con duty with the Omni Hotel here in Providence, Rhode Island. There’s even a Time Machine.

Bright and early, a strong crowd gathered for New York State of Mind: Lovecraft’s New York Period, a panel assembled, far as I can tell, to give a platform to David Goodwin and his book Midnight Rambles: Lovecraft in Gotham. Goodwin and his fellow panelists discussed New York City’s influence on Lovecraft, not shying away from that author’s oft-discussed racism and how his exposure to a variety of immigrants from around the world changed the writer.

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