S. T. Joshi

My heart generally sinks when I pick up a genre anthology - I usually end up severely disappointed and not a little resentful at the pot-boilers I have had to wade through - but this is a wonderful exception.

Not that it is perfect. Lovecraftian stories do not easily translate to the American South West and California and it is usually, though not always, a mistake to set such stories in deserts and sunshine.

We can also do without literary experimentation in a genre where the forms are well show more set, and everything depends on clarity of story line and on an atmosphere that must not need too much hard work to take in.

But there are surprisingly few lapses of this type and I must put this down to superb editing by the estimable S T Joshi who has made Lovecraftian studies his own over several decades.

Of course, Lovecraftian is not Lovecraft. Derleth is not Lovecraft. Anything that follows is going to be derivative so our judgment has to be solely on what gives new insight into cosmic horror.

Perhaps the best way forward is to give praise where praise is due. There are 21 stories and most of them are excellent.

Caitlin Kernan's opening 'Pickman's Other Model (1929)', which is not exclusive to this anthology, is perhaps closest to Lovecraft himself though clearly comes from another type of mind - it is no pastiche.

Pickman also appears in an offering from that stalwart Brian Stapleford who gives us a finely tuned and allusive piece soaked in his knowledge of the literature.

Another genre master Ramsey Campbell also takes his mission seriously in what amounts to a masterfully learned piece, not without humour, brilliantly showing a descent into madness and a horrible fate.

Michael Cisco's 'Violence, Child of Trust' gets away with a bit of narrative experimentation, saying little that is not suggestive, but what is being suggested is the stuff of our deepest nightmares.

The anthology really gets going with Michael Shea's 'Passing Spirits' which is more existential than cosmic horror. We cannot be sure if the Lovecraftian elements are caused by a brain tumour.

Laird Barron's 'The Broadsword' is genuinely horrific with Lovecraftian themes being directed at bloody effects that cause genuine discomfort.

'Tunnels' by Philip Haldeman makes similar effective use of place as unstable. Barron gives us that American meme, the sinister hotel, and Haldeman forces us to worry about instinctual forces beneath us.

The murder of a child and their fear will always tug at us. Barron's tale and 'Howling in the Dark' by Darrell Schweitzer play here with the borderline between madness and psychopathy to great effect.

W H Pugmire's Gothic fantasy is also genuinely disturbing in the way we find in some East European symbolic literature or the works of Ligotti. It is indescribably mournful and sinister. I strongly recommend it.

Nicholas Royle's 'Rotterdam' is deceptively pedestrian compared to the other tales and is perhaps only indirectly Lovecraftian but it still works as a picture of murderous psychosis in a frustrated man.

Jonathan Thomas' 'Tempting Providence' has moments of excessive literariness and description but it builds up to an exciting climax that does what cosmic horror should do - unsettle us about reality.

Norman Partidge's 'Lesser Demons' was probably my favourite because of its creative subversion of the all-conquering zombie meme into an invasion of ghouls and lesser demons. It works. I wanted more.

Perhaps my second favourite was a wry and very British tale of English town life by Michael Marshall Smith that beautifully suggested the monstrous beneath the normal and our preference for simply not knowing.

None of these stories represent pastiche and some manage to do something very difficult - show a wry humour about the horrible without making the horrible any less horrible. Very twenty-first century.

Just because I have not mentioned something does not mean that it is not good. This is a superb collection and Joshi, the authors and Titan Books are to be congratulated. show less

S. T. Joshi produced a two volume definitive biography of HP Lovecraft in the mid-1990s but was forced to cut around 150,000 words for reasonable commercial reasons at the time. This later 2013 edition from Hippocampus Press returns the lost text and adds new scholarly findings.

To say this work is magisterial does not do it justice. It is the result of decades of scholarship by the foremost academic interpreter of the weird in English literature. It seems unlikely that it will ever be show more bettered as a guide to the facts of the matter.

It took a very long time to read. Perhaps the full version is almost too detailed (one would not be too surprised at the appearance of a breakfast menu on a particular date) but I would not have wanted anything else.

Joshi paints a very different picture of Lovecraft from the mythology that has surrounded him from people who assume that the works are the person and who project their own eldritch fantasies on someone they can barely know. His legacy was also victim as much as beneficiary of Arkham Press.

This is a man who lived for well over forty years in straitened circumstances and yet managed to have a full and interesting life, who was far more complex than we might expect and who, like everyone, changed over time whilst retaining an essentially unchanged core of personality.

This is relevant in particular in relation to his 'racism' (we have a similar problem with, say, Heidegger's Nazism) - the detachment of a person from their time, the imposition of absolute moral standards and the failure to realise that the 'crime' in question was localised and temporary.

In fact, Lovecraft comes across as, well, a really nice guy, essentially kind, thoughtful, intellectually curious, loyal to his many friends who were largely loyal to him, perhaps self-doubting at times, asexual and more than a little unworldly - far more saint than devil.

Where Joshi scores is in positioning Lovecraft as a man of his place and time - small town East Coast America when it could still be seen (just) in traditional Anglo-Saxon terms and where an educationally aspiring popular culture created keen opportunities for friendly correspondence.

Lovecraft managed to combine an early nostalgia for Britain and pre-colonial America which made him an instinctive traditionalist (although this moderated with the years) with a startlingly modern scientific materialist concept of the cosmos.

All small towns tend to have coteries of aspirant writers, poets and artists, mostly of limited capacity. It is Lovecraft's luck that history allowed a mind clearly more interesting than most the opportunity to craft a unique approach to genre fiction thanks to the appearance of 'Weird Tales'.

Amateur writers from across the country connected through what we would call fandom today and the correspondence columns of commercial pulp fiction (the same phenomenon helped kick start America's contribution to science fiction and fantasy).

This was not the highly lucrative popular cultural phenomenon of today, dependent on big capital and modern technology, but a networked pan-American culture of enthusiasts writing in hand or in very basic forms of print with the commercial pulps and 'journalistic' societies acting as the glue.

When someone visited another writer, travelling across country, they might stay for a few days or more seeing the sites, exchanging ideas and putting a face to a letter, much as we might drop in on someone known only from Facebook if we happened to be in their town.

Lovecraft was generous and people, often in just as much a straitened circumstance as himself, would be generous to him. He travelled quite widely on the East Coast of his country as well as to the Deep South and could be called reasonably cosmopolitan if we add his Anglophile literary knowledge.

His sense of location is part of the appeal of his stories. This sense of location derived from an active fascination with historical topography - an antiquarian approach that allows us often to identify the buildings in stories with buildings that existed, at least in his time.

Although Joshi is a scholar of texts, this work is restrained in dealing with Lovecraft's output (indeed, I found Joshi often curt and quite critical of the man's work) but this is right. This is a book about a man, his life and his connections. It is also a reference work as much as a biography.

Although we care about the work, the effect of Joshi's intelligent, caring, restrained and thoughtful approach is to make it clear that Lovecraft was a lot more than his more obvious output and that it is the man that matters. You leave the book with a very different conception of who HPL actually was.

There is a concluding chapter which reviews the subsequent construction of the Lovecraft mythos and assesses Lovecraft most honestly in the light of the preceding story of his life. One conclusion is that perhaps his letters may become, in literary terms, as or more important than his stories.

So, all praise to this fine scholar who seems to have abandoned youthful enthusiasm for restrained scholarly assessment of a significant figure in Western popular culture and who has single-handedly recovered him both from those who manipulated his image for gain and from the over-enthusiastic.

After Joshi's magnum opus, it is impossible to take Derlethian fantasies, or indeed a lot of early Lovecraftian pastiches, quite so seriously and perfectly possible to see Lovecraft's menacing style and cosmic approach to horror as of literary and cultural consequence on its own terms. show less

In his short “Introduction”, S. T. Joshi again reminds us that the point of his anthology series is not to present Lovecraft pastiches that just mention the gods, places, and books of the Cthulhu Mythos. It’s to explore human insignificance in a cosmos unbounded in time and space; wonder and terror in obscure locales “lashed with age”; horrors from outside infesting our mind, body, and spirit; and parallel worlds just out of sight.

He meets his goal pretty well, but, while not show more pastiches, a lot of these tales are retellings or follow ups to Lovecraft stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what a reader wants from a book with this title. There’s not a really bad story in the bunch, but a couple are slight.

As far as horrors outside the body, a minor theme running through this collection is horror inside the body. A lot of characters in these stories are cancer ridden.

Donald R. Burleson’s “Dimply Dolly Doofey” certainly almost entirely eschews Lovecraft references though it’s kind of a version of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”. Rather than some backwoods sorcerer, we get a very unsympathetic 17-year old methhead and her baby. It’s not a normal baby either. But you kind of expect that when the child’s paternal grandfather preaches the virtues of chemicals to prepare the blood of his son so his mate can bear a child who will open the way for the Old Ones’ return. Methhead Cindy decides she’s not really into this kind of things so swaps her inhuman child for a doll at a store. And an unfortunate family purchases it there.

Apart from the New Hampshire setting, there’s nothing binding Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)” to Lovecraft. (Though I suppose it might have been inspired by Duane W. Rimel’s “The Tree on the Hill”, ghost written by Lovecraft.) This being Kiernan, we don’t even get the sex of our lonely science journalist narrator who becomes fascinated by a local tree blasted by lightning centuries ago and the stories around it. It’s a fine story, a rumination on the infinite regressions encountered in a search for ultimate truth. Having just read Brian Stableford’s anthology of French and English Decadent stories, I recognized this as operating in the decadent mode, specifically the feeling of impuissance and deranged senses

Like Kiernan’s story, Jason V. Brock’s “The Man with the Horn” doesn’t go into any territory with Lovecraft signposts though the title alludes to T.E.D Klein’s “Black Man with a Horn” and the story shares motifs with Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”. Like Kiernan’s story, its narrator is also socially isolated. Many of the stories in this book have characters who have little, if any, connection with anyone else in society. When you think about it, Lovecraft’s own stories, however sociable a man he was, don’t have a lot of references to family and friends in them.

Brock’s narrator’s has lost all her relatives and her husband and lives alone next to the odd Mr. Trinity who plays his horn every afternoon and then leaves for several hours. She and her dead husband got the apartment cheap because the former inhabitants disappeared. (Rumor has it they died or were imprisoned in the Czech Republic.) She comes into possession of a letter addressed to Trinity who none of the apartment buildings inhabitants has ever seen. It is full of strange writing and odd pictures of strange animals. (Brock may have been thinking of the Voynich Manuscript.) She gets interested in Trinity and seeing if she has retained some of her sex appeal. One day the door to his apartment is open, and she enters. The story gets surreal and very weird then and reaches a crescendo with H. R. Giger-like elements.

Donald Tyson’s excellent “Waller” is both Fortean and Lovecraftian. Yes, we are property. This story has a cancer ridden man, distant from his wife and daughter, thrust from our world to a higher level, a truer world where he discovers that tumors are sort of a cash crop. It’s both strange and heroic.

Also well done is Mark Howard Jones’ “The Turn of the Tide”. No socially isolated characters here. Quite the opposite. Our narrator, a painter, invites his lawyer nephew Ed and Kate, ward of the narrator’s ex-wife, to a beach house for a holiday. Kate becomes both men’s lover. But nature seems to be changing – maybe into something better argues Kate. Jones hints, but doesn’t diagram, those change in this atmospheric tale.

Apart from a reference to a Sentinel Hill, there is nothing of Lovecraft’s figures or places in Don Webb’s “The Megalith Plague”. In the few Webb stories I’ve read, he seems fond of mixing humor with cosmic horror. The plot of the film The Wicker Man is the template here, and the movie is explicitly referenced. Our narrator is a “doctor”. Oh, he has a medical degree, but he doesn’t seem too skilled or ethical given the many malpractice suits he has against him in Las Vegas. He’s avoiding them by returning to the small Texas town of Flapjack where his great-grandfather was also a doctor.

When grandpa died, he was buried with a couple of odd stones, “Druid style”, at the foot of his grave. In the town we meet Richard Scott, local crazy guy with a criminal past and enough of an inheritance to buy his way out of trouble. He’s also sort of the narrator’s cousin. After an unfortunate accident with pesticide, the narrator ends up in the hospital, mentally deranged. But Richard visits him and tells him about the new megalith building craze in town started up by the finding of a manuscript called How to Worship God Correctly. Auto theft, arc welding, craziness, and mayhem ensue.

While I’ve read Darrell Schweitzer’s tale of interdimensional travels, “Spiderwebs in the Dark”, at least twice before, I’ve never reviewed it. This story uses a typical Schweitzer (he said it, not me) plot: a narrator falling under the spell of older man. Here the spell is cast by famed writer Walter Stephens who visits the narrator’s Pennsylvania bookstore. Besides numerous and dubious stories of literary celebrities he’s met, he introduces the narrator to the real Necronomicon and the idea that the universe is connected by lines of force, “spiderwebs”, that enable quick travel to various worlds and alternate timelines including some “fictional” places like Kadath. Naturally, it all ends up badly. To be honest, I’m still not sure if there isn’t an inconsistency in the plot. And I honestly don’t care. I liked this story that warns us that Lovecraft’s gods aren’t the only dangerous and powerful beings in the cosmos.

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr’s “Down Black Staircases” may be set in Kingsport, RI, but it is really the idea of a nightmare lurking behind the façade of our world that links it to Lovecraft. And it’s not even a nice façade here. A man on the way to see a beautiful woman for a weekend of wild sex has a flat tire outside of town. From there, he takes a metaphorical tumble down a nightmarish staircase of urban squalor and predators and the terrifying cult of Neas. This is an effective story, and I liked it much better than other Pulver I’ve read. True, the present-tense sort of stream of consciousness narrative is a bit too arch and full of narratives to be realistic, but it’s an artificial style that works here.

Simon Strantzas’ “Thistle’s Find” brushes against explicit Lovecraft’s work not with a place but by including ghouls. Owen, our very low life narrator, has a problem. Since his last place was raided by the police, he needs another place to stay. So, it’s off to visit Dr. Thistle. “Doctor” is strictly a nickname, but Owen has known him since he was a weird kid and Thistle was his weird neighbor. Thistle is a clever scientist though, and he’s glad Owen dropped by because Thistle has a marketing problem, and he need’s Owens help. The mad doctor has snatched a ghoul, specifically a female ghoul, from another dimension, and he thinks men will pay to have sex with her/it.

And, as you would expect, we’ve got a few Lovecraft stories transplanted in time and space.

Mollie L. Burleson “Hotel Del Laco” is an enjoyable, if slight retelling of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” except, startlingly, set in the New Mexico desert. A man traveling through Ambrose, New Mexico stays the night in the very small, run-down Hotel Del Laco. There is no lake nearby – at least when he arrives. But conversations with the lobby clerk and a local in the bar make him uneasy. Something strange is going on in town, and he gets to learn what it is that night. Surprisingly, things go a lot better for him than the hero of Lovecraft’s story.

Lovecraft the man and writer, an avatar of those tenebrous black wings of infinity, chaos, and unwilling trepanning of the soul shows up in a few stories.

He’s off stage in Richard Gavin’s “The Hag Stone”. It’s what Lovecraft mentioned chipping off a gravestone in a Dutch Reformed Church cemetery in Brooklyn. He put under his pillow in the hopes that something of the earth would pour into his dreams. So, we get one of those stories which postulates Lovecraft practiced magic. We also get a sort of a takeoff on Lovecraft’s “The Hound”. Our narrator hears bit of Lovecraft lore from an occult lecturer at a book store where he instantly meets the love of his life, Pamela. She tries Lovecraft’s trick with a bit of stone. Oh, it works. Magic happens. Pamela claims she saw a smudged face in the room. Out the stone goes, but that’s hardly the end of things. Pamela goes blind, and our narrator ends up as yet another lonely character in this collection. This is sort of a metaphor for how the void from outside is really the void we bring into our lives when we don’t stand by the ones we love.

When you’re an angry, overweight, and resentful accountant trapped in the rut of a crappy job and a loveless marriage, things might seem to look up when the busty, young, and attractive new woman in the office takes notice of you. Then she had to introduce you to Lovecraft. That’s the set up for Sam Gafford’s “Weltschmerz”. Next thing the narrator knows, he’s watching strange YouTube videos of the woman performing rites in the woods.

Using Lovecraft and his settings, but certainly like nothing Lovecraft wrote, are a couple of stories.

I’m not sure if the decadent, sensuous prose of “Underneath an Arkham Moon” is just W.H. Pugmire’s or his co-wroter Jessica Amanda Salmonson. It’s a simple tale of two freaks from an old Arkham family meeting again. One is a man with no arms, just fingers from his shoulder. That’s Ambrose. The narrator, a woman, has a shriveled Siamese Twin growing out her back. They decide to go into a legendary local building where a strange creature live. The narrator fancies it for sex. This story revels in the characters inverting ugliness for beauty among its characters. But, while artfully told, I didn’t think it had anything special at its core.

There’s another cancer plagued character in Lois Gresh’s “Necrotic Cove”. She’s our narrator Cassandra, and, before she dies, she wants to go to that cavern with her lifelong friend Tatiana. While there is a transformation of bodies — we get explicit mentions of the Old Ones and Yog-Sothoth, the story is really about a friendship going necrotic after some brutal personal revelations.

And, of course, we have a few sequels to Lovecraft tales.

Peter Cannon’s “China Holiday” nicely combines the sinister Deep Ones from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” with modern Chinese corruption. The narrator is a food writer who goes on a trip to China with his wife whose maternal grandmother was a missionary in China before World War Two. His unease starts when he glimpses, behind a curtain, a rather odd terracotta warrior at the Emperor’s Tomb. And then there’s the cruise director who tells him a story about what his grandfather, a U.S. Marshall, saw in Innsmouth. How many Lovecraftian authors give us a terrifying incident in an outdoor toilet or the sinister side of giant Chinese hydroelectric projects?

And, finally, we have two stories that are sequels to Lovecraft’s non-Mythos story “From Beyond”.

Brian Stableford does his usually fine work on “Further Beyond”. Shortly after the events of Lovecraft’s story, David Dearden, the narrator for both tales, is hired by Rachel, Tillinghast’s widow. She needs to dispose of Tillinghast’s machine and fend off three men who want it. Dearden has been suffering from migraines and hallucinations since the events of “From Beyond”, the result of his pineal gland being over stimulated. (For once in fiction, we get a fairly accurate description of the agony of migraines and that narcotics don’t do much for them.) Stableford uses many of the same ideas and motifs that he did in his August Dupin series written around the same time period and which I’ll be reviewing: mesmerism, the idea of many different dimensions and universes existing in what we perceive as empty space and that those universes are crammed with entities. The various characters interpret climactic events quite differently. For Dearden, there are revelations that allow no rest. And the fates of Rachel and David at the end are yet another example of social isolation in this anthology.

Jonathan Thomas’ “Houdini Fish” is a modern tale with interesting emotional notes of resignation and apathy. No one’s trying to destroy Tillinghast’s machine. It’s been uncovered when Tillinghast’s house is torn down. Our narrator is the archaeology professor who found it, and the Houidini fish are actual fishes he keeps seeing in odd places like soap dispensers. They glow with the same purple radiance the machine did. When people start disappearing in odd ways, our professor comes to the conclusion that the machine is causing it. But Delacroix, a police detective, thinks there’s no weird science involved in those disappearance. He thinks the professor is a murderer. And are those fish the problem or something else?

It’s a fine anthology with an unusually high ratio of good stories and worth a purchase for the selective fan of Lovecraftian tales. show less

'His uniquely nightmarish vision of a fragile humanity lost in the incalculable vortices of space and time, expressed in prose that is rich, dense, and evocative, seems to resonate over the generations. While so many writers of the past have dated themselves by focusing on transient social concerns, Lovecraft conveyed the existential angst of human beings who find themselves simultaneously attracted and terrified by the vastness of the cosmos.'

All in all, here's a solid, short biography of a show more man who quietly revolutionised horror/ weird fiction; an author who, in any any case and as far I am personally concerned, remains probably one the greatest American prose writers alongside Edgar Poe.

On the one hand, this short biography (and oh boy! It is short!) is straightforwardly organised, as each chapter focuses indeed on clearly divided parts of Lovecraft's life. This makes for an easy, chronological approach showing him morphing not only as a person but, also and as a result, as an author. The fact that the writing style is very engaging makes it even more of a fascinating page-turner. On the other hand it is, also, a welcome debunking of a few silly, persistent myths. For instance, Lovecraft was certainly not the deep recluse who we may think he was (it was somehow true but to a certain extent only...) and the Cthulhu Mythos as we came to know it was certainly not how he understood and so designed it originally (ours has more to do with the work of August Derleth who, in many respects, would betray Lovecraft's vision...).

Having said that, and for all my liking otherwise, I had my few disappointments.

There are, of course, a few divergence in taste. S.T. Joshi doesn't shy away from being very critical of some of Lovecraft's work whereas, personally, I admire them all. I therefore found myself cringing more than once at his blunt opinions of some of his short stories, as some of them remain, despite their predictability, unoriginality and/ or overdone tone, quite high in my personal esteem.

More troubling perhaps was, however, his seemingly shrugging off of Lovecraft's racism; besides not dealing whatsoever with some of his other very bigoted views Now, he doesn't deny it; he doesn't dilute it; and he certainly doesn't excuse it. Nevertheless, he seems to don't make it a central piece in assessing Lovecraft's work whereas, re-reading Lovecraft these days, I personally am deeply struck by how his stories reflect somehow the worst fears then 'en vogue' among a certain intelligentsia (racism and the fear of miscegenation of course, but also eugenics and the so-called 'degeneracy theory'...).

In the end, I still highly recommend it for a quick but insightful overview. Regarding my personal reservations, I am aware that, not only other biographers have taken a different approach by, on the contrary, insisting on Lovecraft's racist views but, also, that S.T. Joshi wrote extensively to counter-balance them. My next step, then, will be to familiarise myself of such other biographers besides tackling the author's massive Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft. show less