Category Archives: H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft Letter to Publisher of Weird Tales

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H._P._Lovecraft,_June_1934For those of you who have an interest in H. P. Lovecraft, I came across this today via The Passive Voice.  It’s an 8 page single spaced letter housed in the Harry Ransom Collection at the University of Texas, where much Robert E. Howard material is stored.

James Machin was researching Arthur Machen when he decided to check on any H. P. Lovecraft material that might be in the archives.  There was one letter dated February 2, 1924, from Lovecraft to J. C. Hennenberger, the publisher of Weird Tales.  As you might imagine, it’s a long letter that touches on many things, including two unwritten novels by Lovecraft.  I’m not sure if this is an unknown letter or not.  I’m not an expert on Lovecraft, and certainly not Lovecraft correspondence, by any means.

The entire letter as well as Machin’s comments about it can be read here.

Howard and Lovecraft Letters A Means to Freedom Out of Print Tomorrow

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A Means to FreedomHippocampus Press sent out an email yesterday saying that the last day to purchase A Means to Freedom, the collected correspondence of H. P. Lovercraft and Robert E. Howard will be tomorrow.  After that, licensing agreements expire, and the book will be out of print and available only on the secondary market.  Where it will be much more expensive.  Here’s what they said.

Due to low stock and the end of our license term, the last day to purchase A MEANS TO FREEDOM: THE LETTERS OF H. P. LOVECRAFT AND ROBERT E. HOWARD will be Saturday, February 28th. After that date, this work will only be available on the secondary market, and not from Hippocampus Press. It’s been a good run and we have probably reached the intended audience, so a future reprint is unlikely.

So if you were planning on buying a copy, act fast.  Or be prepared to shell out the bucks later.

Blogging Northwest Smith: The Cold Gray God

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150px-Weird_Tales_October_1935“The Cold Gray God” adds a slight Lovecraftian element to the Northwest Smith saga.  First published in the October 1935 issue of Weird Tales, the story opens with Smith being accosted on the street of Righa, a city in the polar regions of Mars, by a fur clad woman.  Smith thinks she’s a Venusian, but she behaves in a way a Venusian woman wouldn’t.  Fro one thing, she touches him.  I couldn’t help but think of women in Islamic countries from the way she is describes.

Although he’s somewhat repulsed by her, there’s something familiar about her, too.  At her request, Smith accompanies her back to her house.  There he discovers she’s a famous singer who simply vanished a few years earlier.  She asks him to help her retrieve a box from a man who is frequently a notorious bar.  She tells Smith he can name his own price, hinting that he can have her it that’s what he wants.  Leery, Smith still accepts her offer, asking for ten thousand dollars. Continue reading →

Catherine Lucille Moore: Fantasy and Science Fiction Pioneer

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C. L. MooreNot to mention one of the most important writers of the past century.

Catherine Lucille Moore, better known as C. L. Moore, was born on this day in 1911.  She sold her first story, “Shambleau”, in 1933.  (review here)

In certain circles among science fiction and fantasy authors and fans, one can find a popular belief that women authors have been suppressed and had their voices silenced by The Patriarchy.  And That Has to Change.  While it is true that until recently more authors have been men than women, one has to wonder what parallel universe some of these people have fallen out of.  Either that or if what they’ve been smoking is home grown or Columbian imported.  Many of them act like they’ve never heard of Ursula K. Le Guin, Leigh Brackett, Kate Wilhelm, or Andre Norton, among others. Continue reading →

Clark Ashton Smith Turns 122

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ClarkAshtonSmithToday marks the 122nd anniversary of Clark Ashton Smith’s birth.  He was one of the Big Three of Weird Tales, the other two being H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (but then I probably don’t need to tell you that).

Like Howard, Smith was also a poet as well as a fiction writer.  (Yes, Robert E. Howard wrote poetry, some of the best I’ve ever read.)  Unlike Howard, Smith’s fiction has a complexity to it Howard’s lacked, especially in word choice.  Isaac Asimov went on record complaining that he didn’t like reading Smith because he had to keep looking words up in the dictionary.  (You see, kids, in the dark days before computers we had these things called dictionaries and when you didn’t know a word, you went to the dictionary and…ah, never mind.)  And if Asimov had to look it up, then you know it probably wasn’t on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

smithPortrait01In spite of the work involved at times, Smith is still very much a writer worth reading.  I’ll be tackling at least one of his collections later this year for the posts I’m doing at Black Gate on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.  There were four now highly collectible volumes of Smith’s work published as part of the BAF series.  In fact the very first BAF book I ever owned was Smith’s Hyperborea.  I’ve only dipped into Smith’s works a little, but he was a writer of wild imagination.  We could use more like him today.

I Look at The Spawn of Cthulhu

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Lovecraft Spawn Cthulhu frontMy latest post on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series at Black Gate is up.  It’s over The Spawn of Chthulu, edited by Lin Carter.  Here’s the link to it.

This a collection of stories centered around Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”.  All of the stories that follow have some connection to Lovecraft’s tale.  I take a look at all of them.  If you’re into Lovecraft, check it out.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “The Children of the Night”

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Howard HorrorThe Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook Kindle $11.59 Nook $13.99

I read this story for the first time recently in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection The Spawn of Cthulhu.  (The subject of my next BAF post for Black Gate.)  Just from the title, I could have sworn I’d read it before, but I think I would have remembered this one.

“The Children of the Night” was first published in Weird Tales in the April-May issue of 1931.  It’s an interesting little story in that it ties two of Howard’s series characters in with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Continue reading →

My Halloween Posts Creep into Other Blogs

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Blind ShadowsNot all of the things I’ve been reading for Halloween are getting reviewed here.  There have been two other posts that might be of interest to some of you.

The first post that went live was at Amazing Stories yesterday.  I had intended to have it ready to go a week earlier but an out of town wedding derailed my plans.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of pulp fantasy and horror, this is one you need to put on your radar.  There are a number of nice treats (and no tricks) in this novel.  It’s about a pair of former police partners.  One is now the sheriff and the other is a private investigator.  The book opens with the discovery of the body a former classmate of theirs.  He’s been ritually murdered.  Blind Shadows is a great combination of pulp, horror, and hard boiled adventure.

Lovecraft Sarnath frontI’ve been doing a series of posts at Black Gate for about a year now on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.  My goal was to have one completed about once a month, but that isn’t quite what has happened.  Things have been a little more irregular than that.

This afternoon, my latest went live.  It’s over H. P. Lovecraft’s The Doom that Came to Sarnath.  This is a collection of stories written as Lovecraft was transitioning from fantasy in the vein of Lord Dunsany to his better known work in the Mythos.  Many of these stories are quite short, but overall they’re an interesting read as they show a writer moving from imitation to his own unique voice.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to at other venues for Halloween.

Lizzie Borden vs Cthulhu

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MaplecroftMaplecroft
Cherie Priest
Roc, trade paper, 448 pgs.
ebook Kindle Nook ibooks
audio various prices

Well, sort of. Cthulhu doesn’t actually appear in this book, nor is he even mentioned by name. But a Cthulhu-esque (totally a word) miasma permeates the corners and recesses of the novel, gradually becoming more palpable and easily felt, driving to madness those to whom is it their ill-fortune to endure.

Excuse me.  I’m not sure what came over me there in that last sentence.  The prose in this novel is much (much) better.

The idea behind Maplecroft is at once both so brilliantly original and originally brilliant that I have to wonder that no one has thought of it before.  It seems so obvious.  Fall River is in Lovecraft country, or at least close enough to it as to make no difference, and the infamous events of 1892 are perfect for blending fiction with history. Continue reading →

Robert E. Howard in Lincoln County

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In June of 1935, Robert E. Howard and his friend Truett Vinson took a road trip through New Mexico, and on the way stopped in the town of Lincoln.  Howard was fascinated by the Lincoln County War.  It’s easy to understand why.  It was a horrible, senseless conflict fueled by greed and pride from which no one came out looking good.

A friend and I took a similar trip this past June.  We’d been talking about this trip for over a year.  Family considerations required him to move back to Kansas, so we knew we had to go or the trip would never happen.  We managed to find a couple of days when we could both get free and headed west.

After hiking in the mountains we made our way to Lincoln, where we stayed the night at the Wortley Hotel (Where No Guest Has Been Gunned Down in Over 100 Years).  The next morning, we toured the town before heading home.

Howard described his impressions of Lincoln in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft in a letter circa July 1935.  My intention of this post is to comment on some of the things Howard wrote about, supplemented with my own photos from the trip.  I didn’t know much about the Lincoln County War before we went, but I’ve learned a lot since then.  (I hadn’t read that portion of Howard’s correspondence at the time.) Had I known more, I would taken some additional pictures.

REH in LincolnWhile it’s not the most famous picture of Howard, the photo on the left has been fairly widely disseminated.  It was taken in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse.  Click to enlarge the image.  The sign says “The house from which Billy the Kid made his fast escape after killing his two guards Bell and Ollinger before ? 1881 being later killed by Sherriff Pat Garrett. Visitors Welcome.”

I’m not sure who the person on the left is.  It could be Vinson, but I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that it’s one of the locals.  I just can’t remember where I read it.  If I really did.

If that is one of the locals, it would most likely be Ramon Maes, who was the grandson of Lucio Montoya, one of the participants on the Murphy-Dolan side of the conflict.  (Billy the Kid fought for the McSween-Tunstall faction.)  Maes regaled the Texans with tales of the fighting and gave them the key to the building.  At one time it was the Murphy-Dolan store and bank, and after the Lincoln County War ended, it became the courthouse and jail.  When Howard was there, it was a storage building. Continue reading →