Leiber and Lovecraft

Use of the terminal climax made it necessary for Lovecraft to develop a special type of story-telling, in which the explanatory and return-to-equilibrium material is all deftly inserted before the finish and while the tension is still mounting. It also necessitated a very careful structure, with everything building from the first word to the last.-Fritz Leiber, "The Works of H. P. Lovecraft: Suggestions for a Critical Appraisal"

Leiberian rather than Lovecraftian, "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" follows this structure, and makes nods towards "Pickman's Model." Hopefully, the following will not be an overstatement of the reasons for this.  
    Like that story, there's an overheard conversation where the photographer narrator is addressing an  offstage someone with inside, frightening information about his experiences with a horror figure, the Girl, who has served him as a model. In a way it flip-flops "Pickman's Model," as the narrator asks "Why hasn't she ever been drawn or painted?" and adds "Every blessed one of those pictures [i.e., illustrations, drawings] was worked up from a photograph." That is, she is represented only by photographs from life. The ending words serve as a confirmation or re-enforcement of what has in a sense already been stated about the Girl's inhuman appetites, making explicit a violation of the natural world.
    I suppose that if you look close enough you find Leiber is making commentary about consumer culture. In this case the consumption is more literal (and sexual) than figurative. The Girl consumes the life force whereas the ghoul contents itself with the physical corpse.

Comics
Family Circus, Tintin, Dr. Seuss have all been Lovecrafted by artists. It's the turn of Peanuts, where "The Music of Erich Zann" and other stories receive their comeuppance.

Conferences

In September 2012 the 10th Global Conference "Monsters and the Monstrous" comes to Oxford, England. *** In January 2012 Lyon France will have "Socialisations et Création Littéraire" ("Socialization and Literary Creation") where academician Samuel Coavoux talks about "Mauvais Genre: L'Engagement d'H. P. Lovecraft dans le Journalisme Amateur" ("Evil Genre: The Engagement of H. P. Lovecraft in Amateur Journalism"). 

Crime

Begun in 2001, the Italian literary magazine La Soglia has included monographic volumes about Conan, Dracula, Tolkien, Lovecraft and other fantasy authors. Its founder recently made the news for shooting dead two Senegalese street-vendor in Florence.

Criticism

The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) by John C. Tibbetts has interviews and conversations with novelists, filmmakers, artists, and film and television directors and actors. One section is titled "The Lovecraft Circle," and other subjects in the book are Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Forrest J Ackerman, etc. *** Tentaclii provides five scholarly citations (for books, a talk, a dissertation, and an essay). *** Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Baylor University Press, 2011) by W. Scott Poole makes several nods to HPL. *** "Monstrous and Haunted Media: H. P. Lovecraft and Early Twentieth-century Communications Technology (Historical Geography vol. 38, special issue, 2010) by J. Kneale examines the role of media technologies in the horror fiction. This is Kneale's second article on HPL to appear in Historical Geography.

*** "Lovecraft Through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates" (Postmodern Culture, January 2010) by P. MacCormack looks at the "philosophy of sorcery." *** Oliver Plaschka has a 2009 thesis from the University of Heidelberg, Verlorene Arkadien: das pastorale Motiv in der englischen und amerikanischen fantastischen Literatur: H.P. Lovecraft, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson [The Pastoral Theme in English and American Fantastic Literature: H.P. Lovecraft, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson]. HPL's Dreamland stories are used to explain his "ethic-aesthetic theory." *** Gothic Science Fiction: 1980-2010 (Liverpool University Press, 2012) has a chapter with a number of Lovecraft references, "The Superheated, Superdense Prose of David Conway: Gender and Subjectivity Beyond The Starry Wisdom" by Mark P. Williams.

*** Stefan Dziemianowicz and Theodora Goss disagree about "Intersectionality and Lovecraft." *** With a chapter on HPL, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary PreHistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012) by Michael Saler receives a review from Tom Shippey in the Wall Street Journal.

Fashion

Here's a t-shirt with the motto "I Lovecraft You."

Education

Every winter Dartmouth Alpha Theta--a coed fraternity with gamers and science fiction fans--builds a snow Cthulhu ("Snowthulhu").

Games

Miskatonic School for Girls is a card deck building game that takes place at a girls' boarding school.

Magazines
WeirdFictionReview.com "exists in a symbiotic relationship with S.T. Joshi's print journal The Weird Fiction Review but does not share staff."

Music
    His poetry is set to folk, jazz, blues, bluegrass, Dixie, and country music in the album Back to Lovecraft made by four Corsican artists (via SF Signal). *** One of the pieces played by Finnish pianist Risto-Matti Marin on the classical cd Piano Tales is "Shadow over Innsmouth" by Finnish composer Juho Miettinen. It is described as a "swirling, improvised-sounding keyboard phantasmagoria [that] suggests the gestures of a 21st-century Liszt" (Fanfare, November/December 2011, p. 211).

Science
    The Scientific American blog has a 17 December 2011 entry called "Geology of the Mountains of Madness" by David Bressan.

Theatre

Producer SidMarty [sic] Lovecraft will include in Ghost Stories Live! "Ghost Hunt" by H. R. Wakefield. December brings Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and a Lovecraft reading (not SidMarty's, the other one). *** North Olmsted Ohio's community theatre, Dover Players, is putting on Stories from the Witch House, a three-act which kneads together "The Dreams in the Witch House," "Cool Air," and "The Rats in the Walls" into a single narrative.

Influence

Smacking of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer as well as HPL, the story of Ramblin' John Hastur makes up Southern Gods (Night Shade Books, 2011) by John Hornor Jacobs.

*** "Emilia listened, astonished and incredulous, and wondered if this lunatic who talked like a character out of Lovecraft or Poe was the same father who believed that even God (especially God) was governed by the laws of reason."--Tomás Eloy Martínez, Purgatory: A Novel. I was listening on the BBC to a review of this Argentinean author's work when the reviewer mentioned that Jorge Luis Borges had written a short piece on horror where he took to task HPL for being too descriptive of his monsters. Actually, that depends on the monster, such as in "The Unnamable."

*** His quotes appear in Unwritten Rules of PhD Research (Open University Press, 2010) by Marian Petre and Gordon Rugg, Gentle Guide to Research Methods (Open university Press, 2006) by the same, and Using Statistics: A Gentle Introduction (Open University Press, 2008), by Rugg alone. *** Poet, publisher, and printer Jonathan Williams states in an interview (Against the Grain: Interviews with Maverick American Publishers, [University of Iowa Press, 2009], p. 195) he corresponded with August Derleth and was "very involved" with Lovecraft's writing.

Contemporaries

Years back in Fantasy Commentator there was an article about the science fiction author and poet with the pseudonym Lillith Lorraine. I had never heard of her, but she came to mind because of a book recently published about a Lillian Lorraine (1892-1955), a stage and screen actress known for her association with the Ziegfeld Follies. I wonder if the poet (real name of Mary Maud Dunn Wright [1894-1967]) took her name as a tribute to the actress.

I Am Providence
    p. 238 From a letter to Clark Ashton Smith: "In 1908, when I was 18, I was disgusted by my lack of technical experience; & burned all my stories (of which the number was infinite) but two". Today many writers would either recycle them or put them in the trash rather than burn them. Why did he choose such a melodramatic way (to my mind) of ridding himself of his stories? Maybe: there was no trash pickup in those days; this was a traditional way of getting rid of manuscripts for literary men; he wanted to make his decision irrevocable, for with burning there was no chance of having anything recoverable; burning had a symbolic, romantic, or aesthetic motive; he wanted a palpable way of showing his disgust.
    p. 246 From a letter to the Gallomo: "One June day in 1917 I was walking through Swan Point Cemetery with my aunt and saw a crumbling tombstone with a skull and crossbones dimly traced upon its slaty surface; the date, 1711, still plainly visible. It set me thinking. Why could I not talk with him [the man who had once lived], and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me?" S. T. includes the letter to explain the genesis of "The Tomb." He adds that Donovan Loucks identified the tombstone as being that of Simon Smith, an ancestor of Lovecraft's aunt Lillian.
    The passage better shows the seed for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In a sense HPL did live in his chosen age through Joseph Curwen, who in his first and second lives talks with-interrogates-the dead. Nomenclaturally "Simon Smith" appears in the story as the fellow wizard "Simon Orne" and as a colonial opponent, "Eleazor Smith."
    p. 253 S. T. hits the bulls-eye: "A case could be made that Lovecraft conceived--or, more precisely, executed--only a relatively small number of different plots or scenarios and spent much of his career reworking and refining them." Perhaps this obsessiveness is the mark of a genius.
    The summation about "The Tomb" and "The Transition of Juan Romero" clued me to an interesting similarity. In the former a witness observes that contrary to the narrator's statement, Jervas Dudley slept outside the tomb without entering it; and associates state that both the narrator and Juan Romero slept in their bunks rather than went out and entered the cave. Where is the truth? This game of what the narrator says versus the contradictory testimony of others would continue to be used. In some ways this is a continuation and evolution of the Gothic convention wherein the seeming supernatural is explained away, often through the perpetrator's motive of criminal deception (from The Mysteries of Udolpho to a surplus of Thriller episodes).
    p. 274-75 S. T. gives first-rate criticism about HPL's views on the nascent League of Nations.
    p. 281 HPL was a big frog in the "tiny world of amateur journalism." While it seems to me there ought to be figures designating the number of members-100? 1,000? 10,000?--I don't know if there are.
    p. 311-12 It is curious that both women who are romantically linked with HPL were, from the viewpoint of him and a lot of society, transgressors. Sonia was Jewish, whereas Winifred Virginia Jackson had been married and divorced from one black man and became the mistress of another, the eminent critic Stanley Braithwaite. It is doubtful that anything existed betwixt Lovecraft and Jackson or that he was aware of Jackson's history and situation. S. T. states that had he been aware "he would have dropped Jackson immediately even as a colleague" (p. 312). I wonder how much he would have been affected by the fact that she was a mistress, never mind the race element?
    p. 336 Since I assume the story is not a fabrication or an inaccuracy, I ask what became of the Abraham Lincoln letter that Alice Hamlet sent to Lord Dunsany, and what was its contents? Has it been published? And how did it first come into her possession?
    p. 338 HPL writes of Dunsany "His cosmic realm is the realm in which I live; his distant, emotionless vistas of the beauty of moonlight on quaint and ancient roofs are the vistas I know and cherish." The descriptor "distant" I understand, but I'm uncertain why he would write "emotionless," since the appreciation for beauty is emotional. Obviously he comprehends Dunsany in a special way.
    p. 338 In a letter C. L. Moore writes "No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried." In "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" Ursula K. Le Guin would echo this as the "First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy." Lovecraft's style is, I suspect, similarly catching.
    p. 339 It sounds as though-from S. T.'s argument-that the message of "The White Ship" is there is no place like home. While this is my favorite of his Dunsanian shorts-and probably second is "The Cats of Ulthar"--I'm hard put to rank the others, partly because I'm uncertain of all that are eligible. I guess "Polaris" is Dunsanian, but "The Strange High House in the Mist" bears a question mark.

p. 341 HPL states the origin of "The Street" came as a result of police striking. The State Guardsman who replaced them, he wrote, seemed "symbols of the strife that lies ahead in civilisation's struggle with the monster of unrest and bolshevikism." Presumably like many, he conflated immigration with ideologies such as bolshevikism, anarchism, etc. Off the top of my head I'd venture that this is his most political story. In its moral end, all the malefactors die as a result of collapsing buildings. It was written in 1919, and a year later came "The Picture in the House." Interestingly, this ended too with a building collapse, which similarly resolved the problem of evil without the implication of moral smiting. "The House" becomes transmuted in "The Horror at Red Hook" where there is "a collapse of several old brick buildings" on the foreign, sinister inhabitants. And the idea goes on.

A Life and Dreamer in Lovecraft's Providence Nightmare
     First there was S. T.'s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, the antidote to the de Camp Lovecraft, and you said it couldn't be topped. Then came the shorter but updated A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his Time, and you said, this is yet better. Then moving in the opposite direction was the expanded, two-volume I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft, and you said this not only answers my every prayer, but adds many I never thought of. And now there's: H. P. LOVECRAFT: NIGHTMARE COUNTRIES[!!!], which is even more ultimate, super-duper, empyrean, ne plus ultra, and magnifico. That is, until S. T.'s next biography(ies). Even death may die.

William Sloane and His Novels

In that year [1937] was published William Sloane's To Walk the Night, a novel written in a lively but solid modern style and with almost excessive restraint about the sojourn of an extra-terrestrial being on earth-and which also arouses a quite Lovecraftian mood of awe, puzzlement, and cosmic dread.-Fritz Leiber, "Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin"

    And so Leiber pushed me into reading the novel. Since this is a review that doesn't fear spoilers, I recommend you not read further, unless you don't mind endings revealed. Some words that should be written large from the quote are "modern style" and "excessive restraint" and "puzzlement." In small letters should be "awe" and (slightly larger) "cosmic dread."
    William Sloane knows both detective and fantasy pulps. The novel is posed as a mystery-what caused the mysterious incineration death of an astronomer, and why did the narrator's best friend commit suicide? The first is described early on, while the details of the latter are held until the later part. The curious widow of the astronomer, Selena, quickly marries the best friend. In the end the mystery is underexplained as the narrator, like a Philip Marlowe, offers a solution, which is inscrutably vouched for by Selena. As near as I can tell, she is a disembodied intelligence from another time-or dimension?-who has taken over the body of a female idiot. There is some similarity to "The Shadow out of Time" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (the alien intelligence living in that dull bulb, Joe Slater), as you may deduce.
    Unfortunately, to get from the intriguing beginning to the explanatory end you must endure the "restraint" of a narration that provides too little overt imaginativeness for a satisfying read. A thin-blooded fantasy, it suffers from mainstreamitis. The writing is slick, with allusions by the collegiate protagonist and his circle to Shakespeare--as in the book's title--Keats, and other litterateurs. The characters drink hooch and socialize in upper echelon circles and in general act like "sophisticated" people. There are a number of anecdotes about Selena's oddities, none enthralling but pointing to the possibly supernormal. She can see cards someone else is holding, averts a wreck by predicting a few seconds ahead that another car will be at a spot, seems to read minds, etc.
    At the end we learn that she has killed her first husband by utilizing some energy force. This is to prevent him from finding a mathematical formula that will reveal a physical truth; and for the same reason she wills the death of her current husband. You'd think that with such god-like powers she wouldn't have to visit this place at all. If you look into Conjure Wife, you'll see Leiber had an interest in possessed women (that is, in the sense of "The Thing on the Doorstep"), and that partly says why he thought highly of the book, as did others as a perusal of readers' opinions on Amazon shows. To get the best out of the work read about the first three chapters and the last three, to avoid the arid middle and enjoy where the strongest fantasy elements and action is.
    The story was reprinted with corrections in 1954 and, oddly enough, the next year serialized in both American and Canadian newspapers. Other genre work by Sloane was editing two science fiction anthologies as well as writing Back Home: A Ghost Play in One Act. Another title was his The Invisible Clue: A Mystery Play in One Act.

***

Sloane's second (and last) novel, The Edge of Running Water, is more conventional with a somewhat quicker pace. It is chiefly a mystery cake with a science fantasy topping. Told in the first person, a scientist comes to an isolated house to help an older colleague--an "electrophysicist"--on a secret experiment that seems to do with a machine that can contact the dead. While he is there an odd and unexplained death occurs. Most of the novel concerns hints about what the experiment is and how the victim died. In the end the experiment leads to disaster. Besides the structure of the story--as in To Walk the Night the narrator relates events that have already happened--are more specific Lovecraftian touches. So there's the themes of forbidden knowledge and of cosmicism in the first chapter: "That question [concerning the experiment] must never be answered. A year ago it would have seemed to me ridiculous to assume that there are some facts it is better not to know, and even today I do not believe in the bliss of ignorance or the folly of knowledge. But this one thing is best left untouched. It rips the fabric of human existence from throat to hem and leaves us naked to a wind as cold as the space between the stars" (p. 4 in the twofer The Rim of Morning, Including The Edge of Running Water; To Walk the Night [Dodd, Mead & Company, 1964).
     Also like a Lovecraft story, the occult angle is transformed to a science fictional one, for the machine, it seems, does not do what the older scientist intends, but as is hinted, tears open a dimension, describing the indescribable at first as a "point of blackness," even though "'point of blackness' is not a good description, and yet I hardly know what else to call it. There against the grayish-yellow of the room's faded wallpaper was a thing, suspended in the air as it seemed to me at first. It was in no way human. I have called it black and yet it was actually a colorlessness so intense (to define the thing in terms of its opposite), that it seemed to absorb the very glance with which I looked at it" (p. 256). Shades of "The Colour out of Space."
    Like Sloane's other novel, it's well-written, but it is also too low-key. At times it was a slow-motion ecdysiast who chooses an article of clothing to remove, then changes her mind. A key puzzle of the mystery angle were two pairs of footprints of which one ended in the river. As it turned out, both pairs were actually made by a suspect who returned to the house by swimming in the river at night. Very improbable.
    You Boris Karloffians already know that this novel served as the basis for the 1941 movie, The Devil Commands.

The (Shunned) House
    I don't know why Lovecraft was so imaginatively captivated by the Providence model for both "The Shunned House" and the poem "The House." Although a number of houses on Benefit Street and elsewhere have plaques with names of original owners and dates of construction, this one has a mock-historic plaque on it announcing that nothing of note had happened there.
    It was owned by colonist John Mawney, who participated in the attack on the Gaspee, mentioned in Charles Dexter Ward. Dr. John Concannon states "Lovecraft himself indicates the first owner was a William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter Harris, all dying of a mysterious poison-like death.  Lovecraft was incorrect, for according to Wayne Tillinghast, a fifty foot lot on Benefit Street was transferred from John Mawney to his brother-in-law, Stephen Harris (husband of Mawney's sister, Hannah) in January 1784." He adds, "On the other hand, H. P. Lovecraft must have known some of the house's history quite well for he did state the original owners of the land as being Huguenot, a sect from which John Mawney was descended."
    I wonder-if one were to build a map of Providence based only on the buildings mentioned in the stories, what would it look like?  

156th Mailing
    Ken (EOD Letter): As you know Earle Bergey did many more covers besides those for Tales of Magic and Mystery. A sample is available. *** I remember "The Shunned House" book being listed in the Arkham catalog, but the cost was out of my range. Now at $2000 plus, it remains so. *** Concerning his revisions and ghost-writing-I wonder if he suppressed his distinctive style in favor of a flatter, less-adjective-rich one, with the result that the stories have less edge?
    Graeme (Cyäegha): How do you pronounce that title? Should you ever decide to change format, I recommend larger type and two-column pages, which would improve readability. *** The poem "The Kenning of Ægir" should not be confused with "The Kenning of Ægir Beaver"-"It is/Tree gnawer/Dam builder/Lodge liver, etc."; nor "The Kenning of Ygor"-"He is/Frankenstein phantom/Unmonster maker/Humpback helper, etc."
    Leigh (Mantichore): If "Mantic Notes" predicted the outcome of a boat race, it should be called "Row-Mantic Notes" even though the winning vessel would not be a love boat.
    T. A. (Redux): You condemn non-action (related to maintaining the racist status quo) as similar to the instance of passing a burning building without doing anything about it. I'll draw an analogy. You pass someone on the street who is asking for a handout because he is out of work or homeless; do you invariably give them money?; for does not passing them by mean you are condoning their condition?
    Don and Mollie (The Morgan and Rice Gazette): I wonder what Ayn Rand would have said about the conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge?
    Fred and Dea (Kommati): I enjoyed the account of the New Mexico trip and was surprised that a shrine (in this case, D. H. Lawrence's) could be closed. (Fred, as I said via e-mail, I was sorry to hear about Dea.)
    John H. (Hesperia): I didn't read Edgar Rice Burroughs until my twenties, by which time I was little susceptible to that form of fiction. I think that it was either a John Carter or The Land That Time Forgot. The story-telling was on the clumsy side. The chronological sequence of my reading HPL, Howard, and science fiction is murky. It began circa my 16th year. Tolkien was one-two years later, and was less rewarding.
    Martin (Aurora Borealis): Is this translated sentence correct in that review of Skräcknoveller? "In addition the stories are arranged chronologically, so that it is impossible to discern a clear development." If chronologically arranged, the stories would show a development. *** No, I know of no reference by HPL to Wells' The Time Machine.
    T. E. (The Cosmicomicon): The Charles Addams impersonations were extremely well conceived. *** I do not see a real-life ship with sails, or travel on one, without thinking of William Hope Hodgson. Yet you are probably closer to the truth than me when you describe him as "forgotten." The 2006 Readercon recognized him with The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. Title typo alerts: not The House on the Borderlands; and it is The Boats of the "Glen-Carrig". As to "the detestable Swing Things"-sounds as though they've been summoned by Erich Zann. *** I cannot agree that HPL was influenced by Hodgson. People do come up independently with the same concepts (e.g., calculus being credited to both Leibniz and Newton). Hodgson's cosmic horror need not be original, for it could be influenced by the ending of Wells' "The Time Machine."
     S. T. (What Is Anything?): Wandering through your long outline of horror fiction history makes me realize that you can write faster than I can read.
All others: Thanks for allowing me the opportunity of reading your zines.

"A Good Imagination"
    I'm winding down my viewing of all Thriller episodes, most of which I have not seen. Early in the crime story "A Good Imagination" a private investigator pretending to be a book collector enters a book store and asks its proprietor-a suspected murderer-for The Insider and Others by J. P. Morgenstern that was published in 1939. This caught me by pleasant surprise. The author of the teleplay from his own story is Robert Bloch, which explains the playful reference to The Outsider and Others. However, I see no pun on Morgenstern/Lovecraft.

L. W. Currey
The online catalog of this publisher includes hundreds of Lovecraft items. Some of the choice ones are:
·         Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft's U.S. passport, dated 22 June 1932 ($3000).
·         One 1929 letter to a "Mr. Michael"-not mentioned in I Am Providence-is $8,500, another $4,000. Apparently, Michael was a youngster at summer camp who had written HPL for reading suggestions.
·         28 letters to Emil Petaja from 1934-1937 ($35,000)
·         52 letters and three letter fragments to Frank Belknap Long from 1920-1931 ($150,000). These may or may not be the same letters that several years back were offered for forty or fifty thousand, to my mind an incredible amount.
·         To quote the catalog, "Three canceled checks, one from The Frank A. Munsey Company, dated 29 May 1941, is made out to 'H. P. Lovecraft' and is endorsed on verso by August Derleth as both himself and 'Lovecraft'" ($100).
·         Again to quote the catalog: "'Pool, The'. Undated, but probably 1930. Extensive notes for a re-write of a horror story by Wilfred Blanch Talman about a huge ancient creature in a pool who is summoned from the underworld by human sacrifice. [With a transcription] made by Mark Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon, who, while serving his term of 20-to-life in Attica Correctional Facility in New York had struck up a correspondence with Jerry [sic] de la Ree based on their mutual interest in fantasy and science fiction" ($8,500).
·         Two 1934 letters to someone HPL calls "Arturo" [Arthur Leeds?] ($2,500).

From a Foreign Bookstore
      I recently discovered some Spanish language titles in Libri Mundi, a general bookstore in Quito, Ecuador. A paperback translation (published by Mestas) of "The Colour out of Space," "Dagon," and "The Shadow over Innsmouth" was in one volume, while another had The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Publisher Diada offered a large 3 volume boxed set of Obras Completas (Complete Works) for $126.75. El Necronomicon (La Factoria de Ideas) included writers in addition to HPL. A collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce (La Cosa Maldita) mentioned HPL on the back cover twice; one bracketing him with a number of other writers in this tradition, the other because of the Cthulhu Mythos. As near as I could tell, there were more Lovecraft volumes available than most literary classics as well as popular works, such as by Stephen King. At least when it comes to some Latin American bookstores, there is proportionately more HPL than in American.

Obituaries

Author of books on comics and horror, Les Daniels died in his home of Providence. His Brown University master's thesis was on HPL. *** Former EOD member and pioneer in Howard studies, Glenn Lord died on the last day of 2011.

Thanks for reading the 4869 words of the 71st issue of The Criticaster (February 2012, mailing 157 for the Esoteric Order of Dagon) by Steve Walker. Eventually published online as The Limbonaut (no 42).