"Cthulhu Loves You"--seen on license plate
Here's another collection of chiefly web-related
sites. I cannot vouch for the reliability of any site nor for its permanency
(a link dies unexpectantly). Also, I have occasionally put a humorous site
with the subject it seems connected to.
Since there will be discrepancies between my paper
and online versions--and there is the redundant fact that one is paper
and one online--I have given my online pet its own name, The Limbonaut.
This is a word that Steve Sneyd attributed to Edgar Allen Poe in an essay
by him that recently appeared in Ibid. Regrettably, an electronic
combing through of all Poe fiction and poetry has not yielded the word,
so I conclude Steve is the originator.
Groups--Conventions--Philosophy--Religion--"Lovecraft"--Genealogy--Legends--Games--Crime--Education--Music--
Audio--Art--Comics--Theatre--Film--Television--Video--Radio--Text--Translations--Biography--Criticism--Homes
and Haunts--Writers (Influence)--Parodies--Popularity--Cthulhu--Necronomicon--Computers--Science--Collections--
Publishers--Contemporaries--Related
Review: The Annotated Lovecraft(s)--A
College Course on HPL--New Titles
The H.P. Lovecraft Message Board is alive.
There is a detailed report of the 1999 Necronomicon among the diary entries of Andrew Kuchlin at Confusingly, the entries read from newest to oldest. ***** Jody Trout repeated his 1999 NecronomiCon "Mathematics and the Mythos" talk at Dartmouth in January of this year. ***** There's an Élder Party Convention 2000 held at Innsmouth, Massachusetts.
Timo Airaksinen's The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft earns a book review in Reviews: Library and Information Science Research, an electronic journal. Find out why reviewer Terry Skeats finds this "a most frustrating and unsatisfying book."
Published this year is Ken Dowden's European Paganism: the Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge), which contains pagan and Christian primary source material, translated and annotated. ***** The history of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Rochester, NY mentions "Brother Lovecraft" (circa 1870). ***** Joseph Morales has an online essay entitled "H. P. Lovecraft and the Myth of the 20th Century" about the religious value of the Mythos.
According to Abney Park Cemetery Trust a John Lovecraft, 61, died 08 November 1875. The cemetery is located at Hackney/Stoke Newington, London, England. ***** The writer Joe Murphy (Cthulhu's Heirs, etc.) has three dogs, Lovecraft, Dickens, and Lafferty, and two cats, Plato, and Kafka. A dog named this! But justice reasserts itself in HP Lovecraft's Homepage, this HPL being feline, named by his "meowmie" (Donna) and "fafur" (Max) after one of their favorite writers. ***** For those parents who may wish to give "Lovecraft" as the first name to their baby daughter, they will find out that the name means "an expressive, fun-loving nature" etc. Along these lines, David Langford writes in his Ansible "Joe McNally found a website using gematric analysis to deduce personalities from names, and enjoyed such insights as: `Your first name of Nyarlathotep has given you a pleasant, easy-going, friendly nature. Personal contacts are important to you'" ***** Through "Ancestry.com" I found the following addresses: CW Lovecraft (Lynn, MA); CZ Lovecraft (San Jose, CA); Christopher G. Lovecraft (Pasadena, CA); H Lovecraft (Endicott, NY); HP Lovecraft (Lake Forest, Canada); JG Lovecraft (Princeton, NJ).
Index to the Genesee Country Family File site lists Sidney J. Lovecraft as the father of Electra M. Perry. ***** There is a list of 14 interred Lovecrafts in the Mt. Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York. ***** The Rochester Images database will include 22,000 photographs of Rochester, both past and present. ***** The Hoopes family states it is related to HPL. ***** A search at "Genealogy.com" for "lovecraft" came up with results from 1851 United Kingdom census records. Given names were Eleanor, Elizabeth, Sarah, and William. There were also a few names from the American census. The 1790 U.S. census I searched at "Ancestry.com" yielded no results for the name, but a soundex came up with two hits, which I wasn't able to view.
Was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" responsible for an inchoate urban legend about a family with batrachian leanings? Find out at "The 'Lincoln Legend' A 'Forme Fruste' Urban Legend" by T. Peter Park.
A reviewer considersAlone in the Dark (Developer and Publisher: I-Motion (1993)) a very influential game, "perhaps the first true action/adventure as well, with action-oriented combat mixed in with puzzle solving." Inspired by Lovecraft's works, it had a supernatural private eye who lived in the 1920s.
***** "'Dark Corners of the Earth' is based on the Cthulhu Mythos found in many stories by H.P.Lovecraft, and currently scheduled for release in 2001." According to CNET atmosphere will be emphasized. Read the rest at ***** Writer and publisher John Tynes talks a lot about the Lovecraftian in an "Out of the Box" interview.
"Parallels Between Recollections of Repressed Childhood Sex Abuse, Kidnappings by Space Aliens, and the Salem Witch Hunts" by Ronald C. Johnson appeared in Issues In Child Abuse Accusations (vol. 6, 1994), published by The Institute for Psychological Therapies. One part of the article states that the Necronomicon has become involved "in ritual satanic abuse" and is believed in by some law enforcement officials. I'd question whether this book is "satanic," a closely Christian concept. ***** An April 1999 Boston Globe article associates students who are Goths with those types who have carried out school massacres. The paper notes that this group reads Lovecraft and Poe. ***** On ABC's 20/20, an interview (in February) with the divorced wife of a white supremacist leader led to a question about why she had married her husband. She answered, in part: "He was the only person I'd ever known who'd read H.P.Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe."
"Literature and Culture" of the 20th Century is taught at the University of Iowa. Its instructor states "This course surveys 20th century fiction and film that has brought a neo-Gothic sensibility--a perspective colored by the grotesque, the horrific, and the magical--to bear on the modern world." The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one text used. ***** From the Bachelor of Arts program catalog of DePaul comes a course entitled "Shadows Out of Time: Modern Horror Fiction," whose description begins "Very few authors can boast that they have inspired and encouraged a generation of writers. Fewer still can say they have inspired two or three such generations. H.P. Lovecraft is one of those select few who, even 63 years after his death, inspires, encourages and educates writers of weird fiction and horror the world over. This course will cover Lovecraft the man, his life and the times in which he lived. . ." ***** A course at Central Connecticut State University "shall investigate both the dark and light sides of mysticism in works by the Persian poet Rumi, William Blake, Herman Hesse, H.P. Lovecraft, and Jorge Luis Borges." ***** The course, "The Development of the Modern Gothic," at St. John Fisher College, requires reading from him as well as other writers. This college is located in Rochester, New York, home of many Lovecrafts. ***** The online campus of Miskatonic University is dedicated to HPL and his circle. ***** Sweden's Lund University offers an online course, "Cult Fiction," which includes texts by HPL and Tolkien. ***** He is one of the writers examined in the 1998 course "American Gothic," at Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. The professor was C(arol) Senf! ***** He is in the fall 2000 course "American Gothic Tales" at the University of Pennsylvania. ***** A summer 2000 course on the "American Gothic" at the University of Utah has him among the authors to be read. ***** St. Lawrence University had a course called "Fear and the Inexpressible: The Fiction and Non-Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft" taught by Sidney L. Sondergard, who tells me the course will be offered in 2001. Is this the first course exclusively dedicated to HPL? (See below for more information.) ***** A PowerPoint presentation on social science numeric data has the "correlated contents" sentence as an epigraph. The author told me the quote was germane to the subject, and it was not because of HPL himself. ***** "The Academic Term Papers Catalog" offers for sale a 9 page biographical account.
German artist and musician Peter Frohmader has composed soundtracks for videos by H.R. Giger. His "Nekropolis Live" uses text from "On the Mountains of Madness" [sic]. He has illustrated HPL. ***** "Lovecraft" is a heavy metal band from Argentina. And various sounds by "The Lovecrafts" can be heard at their site. Yet another group with the name states on their homepage: "Lovecraft is a jazz quartet based in the greater Baltimore area." I wonder if the late jazz enthusiast and Lovecraft friend Willis Conover had some influence on the choice of name? Then there's a review of perhaps another Lovecraft. ***** C.J. Rebel is a fan, as is Karl of Nile, and Axel Ermes and Forma Tadre find HPL an inspiration. So too Mark E Smith, lead singer and lyricist of The Fall. ***** Lead singer Davey Havok of AFI puts HPL in the number three position of his top ten "List of Things I Think People Should Be Aware Of." ***** The U.K. band Bal-Sagoth has drawn some of its inspiration from HPL and REH. Most of the lyrics in the French album Halloween-Laz were based on HPL's poems. ***** Kataklysm is another Lovecraft-inspired band. ***** David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" is interpreted by Jonathan Greatorex as HPL inspired. ***** The band Auberon has dedicated one song to him. ***** Zeke has been inspired by "The Horror at Red Hook." ***** Endura's Great God Pan album has, according to one reviewer, a Lovecraftian feeling to it. ***** Lovecraft's "Cheshire Cat" was among the top 20. (Unfortunately, I've lost the rest of this factoid. Could "Cheshire Cat" be a song by a group called LoveCraft's Adjectives?) ***** Jackal's Truth Dominus Silvae has a spoken part from HPL in Greek. ***** "Mobius Trip" is "The Unofficial Homepage of H.P. Lovecraft," the band from the sixties. ***** According to one site the band Rudimentary Peni began in the late 1970s and most of its songs have a connection with the writings. ***** The Greek group Hypnos has a tribute to him entitled Arcane Moon, and the French Goo Goo Blown has an inspired track in their Planète du Son (Planet of Sound). ***** The artist Nyarlathotep has "Dreams in the Witch House" and "All Mimsy Were the Borogroves" ready to be played as MP3s. ***** Ghost singer/guitarist/leader Masaki Batoh owns his books. ***** For those of you viewing this online, there's a photo of a 12 Piece Boy's ZoboBand, circa 1900. HPL states he was a member of such a band in the excellent Lord of a Visible World. ***** A "Gothic horror sound poem" by Zachar Laskewicz is based on "The Music of Erich Zann." ***** The album Zann is "a compilation of music dedicated to scaring monsters away." ***** Reanimator Records includes Jackson Phibes Old Devil Moon 7 with 3 HPL-inspired songs.
A cassette of "The Dunwich Horror" with Ronald Colman (from the radio show Suspense) is available for sale. ***** Two French tape titles adverted to under the Lovecraft name are Le Masque De Cthulhu (The Mask of Cthulhu) and Le Monstre Sur Le Seuil, (The Lurker on the Threshold).
Rebecca Kemp has rendered "A Faceless God" and Anita Moore's has pencil and drawings.**** There is a drawing of Cthulhu by its creator. It accompanies "Party in Leng Tonight," which I presume to be an audio of "Party Songs of the Cthulhu Mythos." ***** For sale are pictures on two switchplates (they cover your wall light switches) and plastic license plate frames (for alumni of Miskatonic University). ***** Margaret Brundage is interviewed by R. Alain. ***** There are examples of Virgil Finlay work and Sidney Sime's. ***** Three illustrations by Steve Fabian (from "Rats," "Outsider," and "Whisperer") have been made available through Meade Frierson, known for his 1972 festschrift, HPL. ***** The Museum of Latin American Art presents the first US museum exhibition of Peruvian artist, Gerardo Chávez, whose early phase was "inspired by hallucinatory dreams (he was particularly inspired by the eerie, bizarre, otherworldly imagery in the tales of American writer H. P. Lovecraft) [and] he created Daliesque creatures - grotesque, drippy, gooey, usually very obviously sexed and lasciviously involved." ***** A commentator on sculptor Claude Needham writes "The aesthetic of Needham's oeuvre frequently touches worlds that are as alien as Lovecraft's tales of the underworld." Examples of his work are available. ***** The 1936 covers of Astounding Stories feature both HPL stories here. ***** A short paragraph in It Goes On The Shelf wonders if Virgil Finlay had a debt to Australian artist Norman Lindsay (Tom Cockcroft is a proponent). The side by side illustrations are persuasive.
Shirow states of his manga Orion "Even native [Japanese] speakers may have different reactions to the multiple meanings I've built into the story through the Japanese characters. For example, in Japanese, the nine-headed beast called a naga which appears in Orion could be read "kutoryu" in kanji (Chinese characters), which could then be corrupted to Cthulu [sic], which is obviously a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's octopus-shaped mythological creature." ***** The comic Lori Lovecraft deals with the Hollywood adventures of a starlet. It's written by Spawn animator Mike Vosburg. ***** Giantkiller writer/artist Dan Brereton calls both HPL and REH two of his favorite and most inspirational artists. ***** H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu is a 1994 comic that features "The Festival." ***** Lovecraftian Comics has a list of adaptions and links to essays.
Reunion (with a character named Augustin Lovecraft) opened at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC on March 7, 2000. ***** Who or what murdered Charles Dexter Ward? The Cthulhu Killings is a mystery show that can be booked for an evening or weekend at ***** In Edmonton, Canada the play "The Illumination of Marshall McLuhan" had a squid-suited actor playing Lord C'Thulu, who "attempts to infiltrate Baffin Island Camp 23 and poison the minds of McLuhan's followers, the so-called 'Children of the New Order,' " to quote the Edmonton Sun (27 April 2000). ***** "Garth Marenghi" (a pseudonym) made a hit at the Edinburgh Festival with his play Fright Knight, (aka Garth Marenghi, Fright Knight) which is headed for the West End of London. This horror pastiche involves a pulp writer who has lost his muse. The playwright is an admirer of Lovecraft and Poe. (The Independent, 29 August 2000). According to the Evening News (Edinburgh), he has written "24 novels (all sadly now out of print), which are considered macabre masterpieces by connoisseurs of horror writing." My hunch is that this is a jocoserious reference to the character or persona of the play.
The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft reviews more than 30 films and has interviews with Roger Corman, John Carpenter, etc. ***** "If one author truly represents the very best in American literary horror, it is H.P. Lovecraft." --- John Carpenter ***** In an interview, Re-Animator scriptwriter Dennis Paoli states, "Lovecraft is more impressionistic, shooting for a certain effect, for his prose to have that effect on you as opposed to the story to carry you through." ***** Is Bleeders (written by Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett) "an uncredited and loose adaption" of "The Lurking Fear"? O'Bannon has directed The Resurrected (based on Charles Dexter Ward). ***** "The Best Movie H.P. Lovecraft Never Made" is by Paul T. Riddell ***** Eldritch Images - The Films of H.P. Lovecraft is advertised. ***** The Haunter of the Dark is a movie in the making. You can advise the filmmakers how it ought to be done at ***** Get a feeling for what HPL watched as a youth through "America at Work, America at Leisure 1894-1915," a project by the Library of Congress (), whose site has 111 films made between 1894 and 1915, with more to be added. The films are about fire fighters, ice manufacturers, paper boys, etc. They can be found by keyword and some are playable on computer in QuickTime, RealMedia, and MPEG formats. ***** George Clayton Johnson, known for some fine Twilight Zone episodes, has a chapter in his All of Us Are Dying--a title also of a TZ episode he wrote--about a proposed movie on HPL's life. The 1999 book is from Subterranean Press. ***** The H. P. Lovecraft film festival for the first time comes east and lands in Salem at the Peabody Essex Museum. "'It's a natural for us,' said Donna Thorland, the museum's interpretation manager. 'He loved Salem and its architecture. He did research at the old Essex Institute and set one of his stories, `The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,' there.'" (From the Boston Globe 2 September) This museum last year had Lovecraft and Poe stories told there for Hallowe'en. ***** The Oscar'd American Beauty has a scene with Kevin Spacey and Wes Bentley discussing Re-Animator. And Stuart Gordon should have been (done?) filming Dagon in Spain by the time you receive this. ***** Get a look behind the scenes and in front for Nyarlathotep. ***** In one link on the "The Unofficial Robert Bloch Homepage" (see below), Bloch states that Stanley Kubrick asked him to suggest a story that could be made into a movie, and Bloch gave him a title by Fritz Lieber. Apparently, Kubrick finally decided instead to make Barry Lyndon. This association also suggests why Kubrick could evoke Lovecraft's name in his discussion of The Shining.
One episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys refers to the Necronomicon. Check the transcript. ***** Anime scriptwriter Chiaki J. Konaka is a fan. ***** Paul Darrow has starred in a pilot for a Mythos series (I presume) . ***** According to "Beth's Days of Our Lives Page" this soap featured in the 1980's a "magazine," Salem Today, which had a "Betinna Lovecraft" (Eugene Bradford), who had a column for people with romantic complications. ***** The annual memorial service for HPL at Swan Point Cemetery (Sunday 2 April) was televised by Providence station WJAR-TV. ***** Will there be a comedy/horror show called Speaking of the Unspeakable, which has Lovecraft's themes and settings? See the "back story" for this.
A parody of Lovecraft's writings has become a video called SOTU, whose script is available to all unfortified eyes.
Radio personality Ken Nordine has worked with the band H. P. Lovecraft and read "The Rats in the Walls" on a television show.
Read "Cool Air" or "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." ***** The University of Minnesota Library's Literary Manuscripts Collections has correspondence or story manuscripts.
There is a list of translations into French. ***** "The Dunwich Horror" is in a French bilingual edition, with English and French on opposing pages. It's published by Gallimard, who has done the same thing for Ray Bradbury works.
In the "UFO Roundup" it is told that Susie, "daughter of the notorious Whipple V. Phillips," spent some of 1908 in White River Junction, Vermont, which Joseph Trainor mentions is connected with Charles Fort. ***** Donald Clarke has made available a long biography. ***** A letter to Locus (which I nicknamed "Tuchus" for its backwardness in carrying the HPL centennial convention &c), August 2000: "Dear Locus, I am researching H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, the pulp magazines and early SF fandom. I have been searching for some time for a few old SF fans including William Frederick Anger who had correspondence with HPL and visited Clark Ashton Smith. I have been unable to locate him, his colleague Louis C. Smith, a Wilson H. Shepherd (who was associated with Donald Wollheim and printed some of Lovecraft's poetry), John J. Weir, J. Chapman Miske, or a William Miller Jr., who was an associate of James Blish and who was apparently responsible for introducing Sam Moskowitz to fandom." --Christopher O'Brien (cmobrien@telpage.net)
A history of the word "cacography" includes its usage by Lovecraft at "World Wide Words." ***** There's a page about Andrew Rothovius. ***** There's a long article in Metroactive entitled "Return of the Weird," by Zack Stentz. It is partly a review of Lovecraft: A Life. ***** The Southwest/Texas Popular Culture--American Culture Associations had on the program of this year's conference, "Luminous Glamour: The Tales of H.P. Lovecraft." It was presented by Marieann T. Woodward of Bowie State University. ***** The March 2000 schedule of the The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts had the following: "Session 49. The Lovecraft Mythos; Chair: Keith Silva, University of Vermont; Mark Sutton, University of South Carolina, 'This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine': An Ethical Use of the Rhetoric of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos"; Jack M. Haringa, Clark University, Drafts from the Moon Pool: The influence of A. Merritt on H. P. Lovecraft" ***** In a review of a book Patricia White states "Most dictionaries define an eidolon as a phantom or an apparition and cite the H. P. Lovecraft line: 'The putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation.'" Does anybody know of any legit dictionary that has this? ***** "The 'Art' of H.P. Lovecraft" by J.G.W. Russel is an essay discussing him as an artist. ***** Daniel Ust also considers his art and finds in it a "sense of life." ***** "The Origin of Lovecraft's "Black Magic" Quote" by David S. is available at Nightscapes. ***** S.T. writes in The Scriptorium. ***** "Essentially, there are two ways to claim that the world of everyday reality, the world of the realistic novel, is inadequate to human needs: the first is to claim that a higher world of religious or political ideas and ideals is more important, more relevant; while the second is to claim that the inner worlds of the human mind, its subjective experiences, have primary value. Lewis and Macdonald embody the first view; Kafka and Lovecraft the second." From George P. Landow, "And the World Became Strange: Realms of Literary Fantasy", The Georgia Review, Volume 33, Number 1 (Spring 1979): 28. ***** A 3 sentence review by Angus Clarke in the 26 August issue of the London Times finds The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories seriously wanting, leaving a person "not so much horrified as concerned for the writer's mental health." ***** What an impressive main title is this: "T'aint No Sin To Take Off Your Skin"; but the subtitle is properly academic, Corporeal Integrity As Metaphor and the Politics of Monstrosity in Modern and Postmodern Horror Literature and Film. It sounds to me as if the main title came from a Manly Wade Wellman story, but Sid Steinberg told me "I recognize the title as an allusion to lyrics from The Black Rider, a collaboration between William S. Burroughs, Tom Waits and Robert Wilson. As I recall, the lyric goes, 'T'ain't no sin to take off your skin, / And dance around in your bones.'" Be that as it may, the work is a doctoral dissertation by Jay McRoy, and the complete text is available. The chapter entitled "Chaos and Hybridity: Monstrous Embodiment in Selected Short Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft" makes such a startling pronouncement as "While suspicious of most forms of government, including totalitarianism, Lovecraft shared many of Hitler's racist and antisemitic views." ***** Likewise, the full text is provided for "Undead Races and the Revenge of the Colonized" by Annalee Newitz, and the work includes the illustration by Hugh Rankin for "The Dunwich Horror" (it's Wilbur's twin). The author incorrectly attributes this as coming from the cover of Weird Tales (April 1929). ***** Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-century Paris by Robin Walz (University of California Press, 2000) deals with the influence of fantastic popular fiction upon the French surrealist movement. I don't know if HPL appears. ***** Two recent titles are Gothic Horror: A Reader's Guide from Poe to King and Beyond edited by Clive Bloom (St. Martin's, 1998) and A Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter (Blackwell, 2000). Punter has done several works about the Gothic.
For some reason, a UFO mailing list carries the story of the 1997 grave vandalism.
Asked of Jack Williamson: "Have you ever had a story published, and afterwards wished you could go back and have another crack at it?" JW: "I've had stories published that really shouldn't have been published, certainly. Back in those hard times, I wanted to write for the horror magazines, which were new and paying good rates. I wrote "The Mark of the Monster," which was too heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. It was rejected by the horror magazines. I sent it to Weird Tales. They accepted it and published it with a cover picture [May 1937]. The readers panned it heavily. I wish that it had never seen the light of day." ***** The puffery for a book by Rikki Ducornet claims that she writes in the "tradition of Borges, Bruno Schulz, Angela Carter, and H. P. Lovecraft." ***** Fritz Leiber had "H.P. Lovecraft Meets Fafhrd" in no. 15 (1992?) of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine. ***** "Necroscope News, the Official Brian Lumley Newsletter" is available. ***** Mort Castle's In Memoriam (Dark Tales Publications) is "a tribute to Ernest Hemingway, Robert Bloch and H.P. Lovecraft." ***** Go to for a postcard mentioning John Bellairs and HPL. The site is dedicated to Bellairs' Gothic work. ***** Adam Niswander discusses his Mythos writings. ***** Horror writer Douglas Clegg has a free e-mail serial novel sponsored by Cemetery Dance Publications. He claims Nightmare House will have echoes of M. R. James, Machen, Blackwood, and HPL. ***** Tim Powers loves him. ***** As a youth John Barth "had a special love for supernaturalists such as H. P. Lovecraft, John Collier and Abe Merritt," according to Blair Mahoney, while the young F. Paul Wilson felt the same way about HPL. ***** Gary Hulbert had the poem "Lovecraft" in the Spring 1986 issue of Beloit Poetry Journal. ***** Ralph Vaughn "has written three books combining the literary universes of Sherlock Holmes and fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft, all published by Gryphon Books" and he is working on a fourth. He is preparing "Lovecraft in the Comics," to be presented at the 8th Annual Comic Arts Conference in July 2000. ***** Ramsey Campbell is interviewed by David Mathew at ***** Simon Hawke's last book in the "Wizards" series is The Wizard of Lovecraft's Cafe, (Questar 1993). ***** The late Dale Mullen, founder and editor of Science Fiction Studies, "once solicited and received a tale from Lovecraft," according to David Hughes. ***** Christopher Golden, who has published works on vampires and, appropriately, on Buffy, mentions Lovecraft's influence among many others. ***** Don Webb has a story about Lovecraft's skull (is nothing sacred?). ***** Thomas Ligotti Online has news, interviews, fiction, etc. ***** Author of technothrillers Joe Massucci names Michael Crichton, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, Alistair Maclean, Tom Clancy and H.P Lovecraft as writers he likes and have inspired him. ***** There's a Jack L. Chalker checklist. ***** Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Candy, etc.) is asked about his influences and he replies in part, "Well, very early on the influences of Edgar Allen Poe and the whole school of horror and the supernatural like H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany." ***** Mary Gentle alludes to him several times in an interview, and he is an influence on fantasy writer K.G. McAbee. ***** William Browning Spencer (Résumé With Monsters) is interviewed. ***** Commissioned to write James Bond novels, Raymond Benson claims to like him.
What if HPL had written Sherlock Holmes? This is the premise in one story (by Paula Volsky) of the 15 "as written by" works in The Resurrected Holmes: New Cases from the Notes of John H. Watson, M.D. (1997). Volsky has also appeared in Eternal Lovecraft. ***** "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" is the tune, but the lyrics are for "I've Just Seen the Great Cthulhu" by Rich Brown ("Pardon my noise, but I've just seen the Great Cthulhu," etc.). ***** It's not Fungi from Yuggoth, but a "Dr. Lovecraft" (aka Dan Higdon) has written a poem, "Dunwich, Twowich, Redwich, Bluewich." A sample stanza:
"And here we have some things from Yig.
With tattered wings, they chew on wigs.
They got the wig of Mister Biggs.
But that's not all, I'm sad to tell.
You see, they got his head as well."
He also has an HPL/Dr. Seuss work, and others. ***** "H. P. Lovecraft Barbie collector's set (includes Innsmouth-Lookin' Barbie, Pickman's Supermodel Barbie, Mi-Go Plastic Surgery Barbie, Great Barbie of Yith, and Barbielathotep; mail-in offer for Shoggoth-Eaten Skipper and Cthulhoid Ken " ***** I don't know if the story is a parody, but the title is "Pickman's Modem," written by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Oddly, its venue is Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (February 1992); "oddly" because its namesake was reportedly not a fan. ***** "A Gothic Night Before Christmas" has one of "eight skeletal creatures that might have been deer" named Lovecraft. This site has many "Night Before Christmas" parodies.
H.P. Lovecrafts Bibliothek des Schreckens 1 has been nominated for Best Original Anthology and for Best German Series by "Phantastik.de," a German SF&F news Web site, according to SciFi Wire. ***** At Hotmail the nom de plume of "Lovecraft" has been chosen by at least 121 people. ***** On Alltheweb it is possible to search 25 languages. On 24 January I searched each, using the term "lovecraft," and here are the results, in order of frequency.
English 19821
French 1315
Italian 1153
Spanish 1145
German 1032
Portuguese 212
Swedish 198
Polish 101
Czech 96
Hungarian 92
Dutch 67
Danish 62
Finnish 60
Catalan 49
Greek 25
Norwegian 17
Slovenian 9
Icelandic 4
Estonian 3
Romanian 2
Bulgarian 0
Hebrew 0
Latvian 0
Lithuanian 0
Russian 0
Draw whatever conclusions you like. ***** A Boston Globe reporter was speaking of the Rhode Island Hall of Fame. "Tarzan Brown is a member, and Gabby Hartnett and Princess Red Wing and the guy who designed the water system, but not Lovecraft. Why? Well, Providence is a city without taste." (February 1989)
"The Collect Call of Cthulhu" script by Michael Reavis is available. "The episode is a tongue-in-cheek collision between the Ghostbusters and Lovecraft's famous "Cthulhu Mythos." ***** According to a review, Dark Lost (Tor) by Mick Farren involves Cthulhu. ***** There's an illustration of the Cthulhu mouse pad. ***** There's a web complement to Chris' bibliography: "The Cthulhu Mythos: A Guide". Managed by Joseph Morales, it indexes the writings of the first generation of mythosians: Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Long, Bloch, Derleth, Kuttner, Duane W. Rimel, J. Vernon Shea, and Richard F. Searight. ***** Second prize for creating scenes in cereal goes to "The Mighty Cthulu," by Sharman Armstrong and Erin Culley-LaChapelle. Several pictures are on view.
Entitled "The Simonomicon & Me," this is the story of the publication of a book calledNecronomicon.
An example of computer translation from English to another language, then back to English, is illustrated in three examples, one being "The Lurking Fear." ***** "The Shadow Over The Internet" by Steven Salemi is a parody with the MacIntosh as its target.
There is a epigraph about angles ("The Dreams in the Witch-House") on a science and mathematics page. ***** "[Alfred Russel] Wallace's work is consistently cogent and logical. Even his writings on some of his more eccentric causes bear these hallmarks. In defending spiritualism - a position that inevitably attracted the scorn of the scientific establishment - he disputed Hume's definition of a miracle as a 'violation of the laws of nature'. Wallace pointed out that such a definition presupposes knowledge of those laws - knowledge that Wallace the scientist knew to be incomplete at best." London Review of Books ***** In Italy a computer technical manager has named his equipment after locales and characters. ***** At a 1984 conference on polyhedra the Boston Globe reported (29 April 84) "Polyhedra can become as complex as the spectacular 'yog-sothoth' constructed by publisher George Olshevsky and mathematician Bruce Chilton. A yog-sothoth (named for one of the most powerful demons of science fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft) is the most complicated uniform polyhedron. The model displayed by Olshevsky and Chilton consisted of 3060 pieces and took 11 years to build." On his site Olshevsky mentions there are other designs with Lovecraftian names. ***** Did "Cool Air" and other tales influence cryogenics? See "Lovecraft, Scientific Horror, Alienation, and Cryonics" by Steven B. Harris, M.D. The site is listed on several cryogenics pages.
The Rare Books & Special Collections, Northern Illinois University Libraries includes manuscript material, mostly correspondence, in its Lovecraft collection. ***** John take note. Mansfield Library states: "The one Lovecraft book we own is in Special Collections because, although it was published only about 50 years ago, it's already so brittle that reading it a single time would totally destroy it. We keep it around to show people as a horrible example of what will happen to most of the rest of our collection unless we are able to get money to deacidify our books." ***** There's a description of Stanford University's 8,000 holdings of the Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection at where, like the young Lovecraft, you can read about Nick Carter and other heroic souls. Full-texts are included. Incidentally, the first Nick Carter work appeared in the year of Lovecraft's birth, and the 1890s have been called " the last great decade of the dime novel." I guess the dime novel begat the pulps which begat the comics.
There is a purported HP Lovecraft Historical Society Press, but I clock it as a hoax. (The file name should not cast suspicion on Peter.) There's also a Miskatonic University Press that sells the fan publication "The Arkham Advertiser." ***** Strange Aeons is a Scottish fanzine and also a CD with John B. Ford, Ramsey Campbell, &c, who are writing and recording prose and poetry for a forthcoming Lovecraft tribute. SeeRedsine Horror & Dark Fantasy Magazine from Australia. ***** A website for Whispers Press advertises Whispers' final issue.
Jean Ray's Malpertuis is available in English from Atlas Press. ***** The Abilene Reporter-News and Reporter OnLine has a 1996 interview with the reporter Jack Scott, who was on the scene at the time of Robert E. Howard's suicide. Scott ran the suicide story "as the banner on the newspaper's front page, with a reprint of one of Howard's recent tales on the back page." Also online is Dr. Howard's letter to HPL telling about the death of his son. Howard-inspired pix while there is a bibliography of his work. ***** "A Jaundiced View of America: Robert W. Chambers and The King in Yellow" by Scott D Emmert appeared in Journal of American Culture (July, 1999), p. 39+. ***** "They are tales of horror, of hallucinatory nightmares, of stubborn ghosts & full-blooded witchcraft, scarecrow women, burning babies ..." writes rbadac in an article about a figure whom I have never associated with the genre: Dylan Thomas. If you wish to know this aspect of his writing, read "Dylan Thomas's Sullen Horrors." ***** Nicholas Roerich received prominent mention on C-SPAN today (9 September), and also his museum. In 1933 he was sent off by vice-president Henry Wallace to learn about drought-resistant plants in Asia--unknown to the public, he was requested to locate a Shambala, an earthly paradise. Not on C-SPAN--it was stated in more than one casual source that he suggested the Great Pyramid be added to the U.S. dollar bill. (I mentioned several years back that the pyramid and eye was a possible source for the closing words of "The Haunter of the Dark.") ***** From a 1975 issue of Twibbet comes Edmond Hamilton on HPL: "I never knew Lovecraft, no. I had a little correspondence with him...Price would write to Howard, and Howard would send me Price's letter, and then I would send it on to Lovecraft, and that sort of thing, you know. We had sort of a round robin correspondence going. I'm sorry to say that I didn't keep all that correspondence, because it'd be worth publication today." Hamilton also discusses Farnsworth Wright and others. Also, note that Price's reminiscences are to be published by Arkham House. ***** There's speculation that eminent scientist Stan Thompson had the Weird Tales story "Sport for Ladies" in the April 1924 issue, when he would have been 12 years old. ***** "The Unofficial Robert Bloch Homepage" has lists of his movie credits, books, essays, etc., and it has interviews and essays about him and his work. ***** Read a lengthy study of "The King in Yellow: An Introduction" by Christopher Thill. ***** Matthew Baugh has bibliographies of Seabury Quinn's and Manly Wade Wellman's occult detectives. ***** A 544 page Time and the Gods (Dunsany) has been published and is reviewed by Charlotte Mitchell in The Spectator (27 May 2000, p. 33). ***** "Dunsany's Corner" (no longer active) has a big bibliography on the Lord, encompassing works by him (stories, poems, essays, letters) and about him; plus titles based on his works and artists associated with him. ***** ". . . it is safe to say there never would have been a Dunwich or an Arkham had there never been a Deephaven or a Dunnet Landing."--Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Quoted from "Sarah Orne Jewett & the Ghost Story with a note on her influence on H. P. Lovecraft," itself an excerpt from Lady Ferry & Other Uncanny People, the Complete Supernatural Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Ashtree Press), edited & with an introduction by Salmonson. I think her opinion about Dunwich and Arkham is an example of wish-fulfillment rather than actuality, the same sort I believe is used to suggest HPL's importance by stating such and such was influenced by him. ***** "Emil Petaja, a prolific and talented science fiction writer, died of a heart condition in San Francisco on Thursday [17 August] at the age of 85. As a Montana teenager, Mr. Petaja found his calling after stumbling upon a copy of Weird Tales magazine." Source: The San Francisco Chronicle 19/08/2000 ***** Ash-Tree Press has announced the entire supernatural opus of M. R. James will be published. ***** A site about Frank Belknap Long has a charming sketch of Randolph Carter by Long.
There's a book review of Charles Beaumont's A Touch of the Creature. ***** Dead Things: In Darkness and In Light by John B. Ford is available from Broken Tree Books. ***** See author sites for Peter Cannon and Stanley Wiater.***** Published: Julius Schwartz, with Brian Thomsen (afterword by Harlan Ellison). Man of Two Worlds: My Life In Science Fiction and Comics (HarperEntertainment, 2000).
Review: The Annotated Lovecraft(s)
Being in part (like 99%) a wiseacre I have the invariable dissenting comments about the two annotated Lovecraft books, much as I value them. The first is my irritation at their number of typos. I don't recall them from the first volume, but if they are like the second, then Houston, we have a problem. For a so-called pro publisher Dell has let slip some really bad ones. In this age of spell-checkers there are non-words in here, so I don't know what is up. ("At first I ignored such refereneces"; from "The Thing on the Doorstep, " p. 266). Some of the slips could change the text reading. Was Edward Derby tipsy when he confessed, "'You mush know what I hinted in the car'" (p. 266)? To my mind, at least, a title with the word "annotated" suggests a scholarly edition, so the textual integrity should be reliable. But it ain't.
It is ironic, since S.T. has inveighed against the corrupt text of the original Arkhams, which he subsequently made right. In some ways the typos here are more slovenly than those in his great H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. They are in HPL's canonical works which S.T. had corrected for the Arkhams, from which the annotated works are a step back.
Neither S.T. nor Peter Cannon (co-author in the second volume) are responsible for this shoddiness, but unfortunately by association it does tarnish the patina of their scholarship. They are responsible, however, for the annotations, and here I have caught two mistakes. Others may easily have slipped by me. The first is in At the Mountains of Madness. The footnote on continental drift theory states its originator, Alfred Wegener, was a "German geologist" (The Annotated Loveecraft, p. 278). Rather, he worked as a meteorologist and had an interest in geophysics. This difference is important, because it meant his theory was less likely to be accepted; not only was the proposal heterodox, but it was offered to geologists by someone outside that profession. It is human nature to look askance at the outsider or disturber.
In "The Horror at Red Hook" (More Annotated Lovecraft) a mention of "The Dublin Review" is footnoted as a "fictional periodical" with a suggestion that perhaps the Dublin Magazine is meant (p. 128). The Review is actual. It began in 1836 and was continually published until 1961. Its existence can easily be verified, for there are holdings of it in several hundred libraries. This second type of mistake is more serious, affecting the credibility of the scholar out of proportion to the committed gaffe.
Another issue is that some terms (e.g., "foetor") are repeatedly defined from story to story, whereas other terms--that I think should have annotations--are not. This is less a complaint than an observation, and it is a recognition that a subjective factor influences a scholar's choice of what to annotate. Recently, it has occurred to me that the epigraph to "The Dunwich Horror" would profit by an explanation; how does it fit in with the story's theme? But the example I particularly have in mind is an oddity I have passed over many times before without recognizing it.
In "The Haunter of the Dark" a scene takes place after Blake's visit to the church, as reporters intrude into the Haunter's sanctuary: "They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with pits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around" (p. 302 in More Annotated). This is a curious sentence because of the use of "pits," and I wanted an annotation, but there was none.
Is the meaning that rotted cushions and satin pew-linings have been made into the shape of "pits"? It seems unreasonable for the entity to create pits, especially since there is no narrative follow-up. Moreover, the phrasing "pits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around" seems grammatically suspect for someone like Lovecraft. I tried to see if the word was being used in another sense, so I checked with the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) and an old Merriam-Webster (unabridged). I found nothing that fitted.
Could this be a typo? I wrote John Stanley, Brown University curator of the Lovecraft collection. I wanted an unbiased viewpoint, so I asked him if in Weird Tales (Dec 1936; p. 549) the text read "... with pits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around"; I did not elaborate. He replied that the story's appearance contained the sentence as described. He went on to say that it also appeared in the first five printings of The Dunwich Horror and Others (1963-1981) as well as the "corrected" sixth printing (1984; p. 108), with its Robert Bloch introduction. "Since Bloch might still have had the manuscript in his possession at that time [when ST consulted it?], the wording probably is faithful to HPL's original text." John told me HPL presented the manuscript itself to Bloch, who sold it in a private transaction to an unidentified party, probably in the '80s. All supporting evidence I could find confirms the text as I have given it.
In my investigation I was at the stage of exhausting the approach that "pits" had a definition other than the obvious. One night as I lay in bed, my course set toward sleep, I was tossing the problem about, and the solution came to me. "Pits" was a typo, despite the evidence, and I believed (as I continue to) I had the correct word. Now you may say, and rightly, that hunches are not a compelling reason to re-write the sentence. I can't give much of a defense. I do not believe that HPL would deliberately write the word as it is, for his style avoids such tricks with language, and the figurative uses he employs in his stories are appropriate and logical. As ST replaced omitted text in At the Mountains of Madness because he believed it was an "oversight" by Lovecraft, I suggest a similar situation arose here. Perhaps Lovecraft didn't notice the mistake--made by him or the Weird Tales' printer--and later overlooked it in his copy of the story, possibly because he was affected by his final illness. All these years I've re-read the work I've glided by it, shrugging it off as a small peculiarity at most.
For the first, and probably last, time here is the sentence as it should have been since the story's debut: "They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave plowed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around." Accept this reading and the sense of the sentence coheres. Physical "bits" rather than metaphorical "pits" are "scattered" due to a chaotic, wrecking force. The word "curiously" then emphasizes the arrangement of the destruction, whereas otherwise the concept of "pits" is the object.
With the frequent reprintings of HPL, I hope this sentence may at last be corrected. As for the Annotated Lovecrafts, perhaps one day all the books in the series will be combined and corrections made.
What follows is a letter from Professor of English Sid Sondergard of St. Lawrence University. He responded to a letter about whether the title I saw in a curriculum catalog represented a Lovecraft course:
"Yes, 'Fear and the Inexpressible: The Fiction
and Non-Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft' was a semester-length course I taught
for credit in our English Department. I've attached an electronic-copy
of the syllabus to this e-mail, so you can see how we proceeded. [This
is available on my web version, which I've named The Limbonaut.] It was,
by all objective standards, an absolute success--the students were actively
engaged every class session in thoughtful discussion of complex issues,
and at the heart of it was a firm belief that Lovecraft is an important
American writer, both in terms of his influence on subsequent writers (as
well as on those in his own contemporary circle) and in terms of the intrinsic
quality of his written work.
For students who knew only of Cthulhu, it
was a revelation to study HPL's poetry; for those who had heard of him
only in the context of horror fiction, it was exciting to discover the
high quality of his "travel" non-fiction. I wanted to guide the students
toward thinking like Lovecraft, so I had them attempt fiction in Lovecraft's
voice (and to jump-start storylines for the fictionally-impaired, we used
the Mythos collectable card game to generate scenarios), and this was an
exciting approach to literary analysis for all of us (though, of course,
it had to be accompanied by objective examination of choices made/avoided
in the imitative pieces, of course).
Since you ask about HPL and the canon--I must
hasten to add that some of my colleagues were (to say the least) skeptical
about the value of such a course. But when I explained not only the
scope of HPL's literary influence, but his value as a reflection of (and
on) post-WWI American ideology and values, they conceded that a course
focusing upon him sounded intriguing and useful for students. HPL
is
an important figure in the landscape of twentieth-century American fiction,
whether critics wish to dismiss him as a pulp writer or not--and such dismissals
suffer from a woeful lack of information about the full range of his literary
output (ask such critics about what they think of HPL's sonnet sequence
and all you'll receive is a blank look: 'His--what?'). "
Professor Sondergard also mentioned the possibility that publication was imminent for a journal essay by him which included "refutation of the vexing (but seemingly insistent) claim that rises from time to time concerning HPL's purported racism." I'll give the citation as soon as the item is accepted.
Since I recently got two new titles that I have begun
to read, and lack the time and ambition to do them justice now, I'll treat
them superficially.
Most significant is Lord of a Visible World
by ST and David. It belongs beside ST's H. P. Lovecraft, which it
is close to in importance. How exciting to discover new facts about the
epistolarian author through his own words. There's a review of it already
in Library Journal, and the quote on its back cover is from Kirkus
Review, so it is ahead of that book review silence which everywhere
greeted the monumental H. P. Lovecraft, save perhaps from the New York
Review of Books. It is a must for every Ofian.
Arkham's Masters of Horror is the other
title. Like John I have read the essays first. I very much was involved
by them because of their heavy load of gossip. I was happy to see that
Derleth the editor emerged as a paragon--level-headed, kind, honest, helpful,
as based on his correspondence. His importance is re-affirmed and growed.
Unfortunately, among the criticisms the book
invites are through its number of typos, though not comparable to the bumper
crop in More Annotated Lovecraft. Beside words or phrases left-out,
there are some problems with numerical facts. Obviously, E. Hoffman Price
was not born in 1988, as is featured prominently at the beginning of his
chapter. And what year did Donald Wandrei die? The text states one year,
the chapter heading gives another. For gosh sake Arkham House, what has
happened to your quality? I know it is not limited to you but to book publishers
in general. Pride and professionalism have been turned away.
In memoriam: L. Sprague de Camp
This has been the 30th issue of The Criticaster (October 2000, mailing 112) by S. Walker. Published simultaneously on the Net as The Limbonaut: A Correlation of Lovecraftian Contents on the Web. I also have a brief Lovecraft page.
The Criticaster: 29;
28;
27;
26;
25;
24;
23;
22
The Limbonaut: 2;
3;
