I’ve noticed that the 2001 edition of Lovecraft’s Poetry, The Ancient Track, is getting harder to obtain, so I thought I mention it here, since the previous collected poems was back in 1963.  This is the volume edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Nightshade Books.  While I enjoy Lovecraft’s poetical works, I do not consider myself much of an expert on them.   They reveal an interesting facet of Lovecraft’s work since from an early age he had designs on being among the great poets.  Weighing in at more than 500 pages, it is the most complete compendium of all of Lovecraft’s surviving poetry.  Several sellers can be reached through Amazon, and it goes for about thirty dollars.  So, if you’re completing your Lovecraft collected works, you may want to catch this one before it goes out of print.
Archive for category Lovecraft
Vanishing Poems
Dec 27
A Cool Reading
May 19
I just had a chance to listen to Audio Realms recording of At The Mountains of Madness, read in unabridged form by Wayne June.  It’s on four CDs and racking in at 4h45m it’s perfect for a long plane trip.  There are no special tricks, no musical accompaniment or special effects, just Wayne June’s magnificent voice reading the tale as our narrator, Professor William Dyer, as he unfolds his tale of adventure and ultimate horror in the Antarctic wastes.  The story is riveting and June’s reading is most effective as the near mad narrator, desperate to tell his tale.  At USD $27.95, it’s about on par with typical audiobook prices, though it can be downloaded for half that from Audio Realms online distribution site, TheAudioBookshop.Com (USD $13.98).  Whether as a CD or download, it’s well worth the price.
Unforgiven
Jun 7
I finished rereading L. Sprague De Camp’s biography of HPL, Lovecraft: A Biography. Reading it some 25 years later is an interesting and somewhat refreshing experience. De Camp has been often criticized by HPL fans for his frank and almost drumming investigation of HPL’s xenophobia and other potential psychosis. Many feel he hurt HPL’s reputation by calling attention to what can easily be perceived as elitism, racism, antisemitism, etc., but in examining the text fully I think De Camp successfully shows that his extreme dislikes and even rages against Jews, Blacks, Catholics, Italians, Celts, Asians, and in fact anyone not of New England Protestent stock is truely a mental disease which he struggled with up to the end of his life. I think the text and quotations of Lovecraft’s letters bear out he had a mental illness, classed as xenophobia which represents a patent fear in general of anyone not of his own race, family, or tribe. To HPL’s credit, and De Camp brings this out, HPL repudiated many of these beliefs. After all, he married a Jew and numbered more than one Jew among his closest friends.
I think some other biographers have often tried to whitewash the negative traits of HPL’s personality, either by excusing him as being from a different era, or suggesting that HPL simply made racist remarks purely for shock value, which he did not truly believe. I think De Camps research, collected information from friends, and HPLs own words shows how the insular and isolated developed opinions and beliefs that were both unsupported by fact, but obviously generated great fear in the insecure writer from Providence.
De Camp also makes much of discussing Lovecraft’s failures of responsibility, including failures to his wife, his craft, and ultimately himself. As working writer who made his career in fantastic fiction, De Camp, is very unsympathetic and unwilling to forgive how HPL choose to live his life (e.g. that HPL fled from the possibilities of being a professional author and instead took on the pose of an impoverished aristocrat, who merely wrote fiction as a “amature” hobby.)
Here, I feel that De Camp is a little harsh and unforgiving that HPL did not make the choices that would seem to have led HPL to write more and be more successful. But that assumes that HPL was destined or responsible to living a conventional life of a professional author and that his choices should have been De Camp’s. HPL lived a unique life of his own making, fraught with the poverty, errors, joys, and successes he chose to live. De Camp’s biography makes that abundantly clear.
The HPL Picture Book
May 20
Here’s a fun little book.
Graphics Classics has put out a collection of illustrated HPL stories. A 140 pages of graphic fun, it has the Shadow of Innsmoth, Herbert West, The Cats of Ulthar and others. Some of the drawing styles are little crude, and it is in black and white, but it still fun to look at the visual interpretations by artists Simon Gane, Pedro Lopez, Matt Howarth, and Richard Corben. Its available for less ten dollars from Amazon.
Philosophical Biography
Apr 23
I haven’t been through S.T. Joshi’s work on HPL’s life in a while, so I decided to undertake his massive tome, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. Joshi’s work stands as the definitive effort to fully integrate and set the record straight on many points of HPL’s many facets. He comes off as a little of an apologist for some HPL’s greater errors on matters such as class and race, but he at least effectively deals with these issues and extensively works though HPL’s New York odyssey. What brings Joshi’s biography into its own is his exhaustive work to correlate HPL’s life with his philosophy and the influences on HPL’s work. It’s a facinating read at nearly 700 pages and is by far the most effective biography I’ve read of HPL to date.
