Jonathan Carroll issue we did ten years ago (#299, out of print, alas). Most of you probably know that he is one of the most stylish fantasists around, as a stylist, page-by-page, arguably the best fantastic writer going. He is essentially a surrealist, following a dream logic as the mysterious, possibly numinous wonders come on thick and fast, with an increasing sense of menace. Small-town police chief Frannie McCabe encounters a three-legged dog, which drops dead in his office. He buries it. The dog turns up again in his car trunk, then in a 400-year-old painting. There are loops in time. McCabe is hurled into the future to experience his own old age and death. It’s kind of hard to describe. If Woody Allen, Neal Gaiman, and Philip K. Dick had collaborated on a novel, the result might come out like this. Highly recommended.
Acolytes of Cthulhu edited by Robert M. Price. Fedogan and Bremer, 2001. 390 pp. Hardcover. $32.00. This is the latest in a series of what might be described as “neo-Arkham House” volumes from F&G, in which Crypt of Cthulhu editor Robert M. Price collects even more rare Cthulhu Mythos fiction, including items by Lovecraftian contemporaries and hangers-on, and even a few of the infrequent fictional efforts of leading Lovecraft scholars, such as S.T. Joshi, Peter Cannon, and Dirk Mosig, all of whom are indeed Acolytes of the Elder Ones. Old-time pulp contributors include Manly Wade Wellman, Edmond Hamilton, Charles Tanner, Earl Pearce, and HPL’s close friend and neighbor, C.M. Eddy, whose fragmentary “Black Noon” is based on an epic hike Eddy and Lovecraft took in 1923 to locate the legendary “Dark Swamp” near Providence. Price’s net is cast quite far. Some readers may be surprised to find Jorge Luis Borges in this volume, but, yes, the great Argentine author wrote a Lovecraft tribute of his own. In fairness, there are very few actual horror stories here. Most of the stories will make you smile, and remember Lovecraft fondly. Our favorite is Neil Gaiman’s charming “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.” The colorful Gahan Wilson dustjacket, showing various eldritch entities presenting a smiling HPL with a Valentine card captures the spirit of the book admirably.
The Gentleman from Angell Street: Memories of H.P. Lovecraft by Muriel E. Eddy and C.M. Eddy. Fenham Publishing, 2001. 66 pp. Trade paperback. $9.95. Exit Into Eternity by C.M. Eddy. Fenham Publishing, 194 pp. Trade paperback, $14.95. The Eddys were Lovecraft’s closest friends in Providence, who in some ways knew him better than anyone else. Mrs. Eddy’s main memoir, from which the first book (a collection of memoirs, photos, and tribute poems) is almost worshipful in its tone, the work of someone who knew all her life that she had been in the presence of a great writer. When Lovecraft got married and moved to New York in 1924, HPL’s aunts gave the Eddys some of his effects. Mrs. Eddy regrets that they eventually sold the marble-topped bureau, which might have become valuable as a Lovecraftian “relic,” and also mentions that she didn’t think Sonia Greene’s (the new Mrs. Lovecraft) signature would ever be worth anything, so they gave most of her postcards to HPL to their (the Eddys’) children as playthings! The best parts are the genuinely intimate glimpses Mrs. Eddy sometimes affords. Any well-read Lovecraftian will be able to see where biographers (particularly de Camp) have mined this. As for Clifford Eddy’s stories in Exit to Eternity, they are minor, albeit interesting for their associations with Lovecraft and the early Weird Tales. Eddy is best remembered for his collaboration with Lovecraft (or, precisely, Lovecraft’s revision of Eddy’s story) “The Loved Dead,” an over-the-top tale of necrophilia and madness which got Weird Tales banned in some parts back in 1924. (It’s not in this volume, but it is in Lovecraft’s The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, from Arkham House.)
The Book of the Dead by E. Hoffmann Price. Arkham House, 2001 424 pp. Hardcover. $34.95. This is a book we’ve been eagerly awaiting for decades, the collected memoirs and reminiscences by an active and successful pulp writer, who was the only professional to actually collaborate with H.P. Lovecraft as an equal (rather than as an amateur revision client), on “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” Price lived a very long and fruitful life (1898-1988). He saw a lot and knew a lot. He was the only member of the Weird Tales fraternity ever to meet Robert E. Howard. (His memoir of their meeting is included.) He also gives us first-hand glimpses of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, Edmond Hamilton, and other giants of a vanished age. It’s all very readable, a first-rate source for subsequent literary histories, and of interest to any fan of Weird Tales and pulp fiction generally.
Last but not least, there are two more tomes by “the indefatigable” S.T. Joshi, critic, scholar, and Weird Tales columnist. Lest we seem a tad nepotistic, let us say that we recommend them highly and list them quickly: A Dreamer and Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time, (Liverpool University Press, 2001, 422 pp. £44.95, hardcover; £17.95 trade paperback) is a synthesis of all the previous Joshi books on Lovecraft, with many points newly reconsidered. It is a mixture of biography and literary analysis, with an emphasis on Lovecraft as thinker in the context of his era. It’s a shame this one is so expensive, because it is the best introduction to Lovecraft we know, not as massive as Joshi’s HPL biography, and better than most anything else. In The Modern Weird Tale, (McFarland, 2001, 278 pp., trade paperback, $35.00) is Joshi at his acerbic best, startling but always well-reasoned. Who else would proclaim that The Running Man Stephen King’s best novel, or Peter Straub’s The Throat to be the best mystery novel ever published? Otherwise Joshi has little use for King and has many reservations about Straub. He comes out in favor of the subtle and quiet school of horror, with an emphasis on literary excellence: Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Jackson, T.E.D. Klein, Ramsey Campbell, and a few others. Too bad the high cover price will prevent this book for being as widely read as it deserves; but it is sure to be influential.
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We Get Letters, although not enough of them. Patrick Bagley writes to praise Stephen Dedman’s “Valley of the Shadows,” remarking, I love it when writers are able to so seamlessly mix fantasy with historical fact. If any other readers are interested in the background of the story, I highly recommend The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Spectacular Death of the Medieval Cathars by Stephen O’Shea.
Elaine Weaver writes: Is it my imagination, or are the intervals between issues of Weird Tales getting shorter and shorter. Not that I am complaining, mind you. I devoured #324 in the space of a day and am already hungry for more.
Thomas Ligotti’s “My Case for Retributive Action” was not only the best story in the issue; it was one of the best stories I’ve read in a long time. Wonderfully surreal and fascinating, it made me wonder if Mr. Ligotti has ever actually held such a bizarre job (I sometimes suspect the people I work with are all on one type of medication or another). The story made me smile as well as shudder.
Well, we can’t comment on Mr. Ligotti’s employment history, but we can tell you that it’s not quite an illusion about the intervals between issues. Our publisher, Mr. Lapine, is rightfully proud that since he took over, a dozen or so issues ago, Weird Tales has become that relatively scarce creature: a quarterly that actually comes out four times a year, on time.
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Conrad L. Rostan, after warmly commending Carrie Vaughn’s “Doctor Kitty Solves Your Love Problems,” complains: The biggest flaw in issue #324 was the last sentence of S.T. Joshi’s The Den. I have always wondered why certain people use “pulp” as a style of writing rather than a type of cheap paper. As you know, being the forerunner of paperback books, pulp magazines covered all genres and mainstream fiction. The quality of writing differed as it still does. What we enjoyed as 12- to 13-year-olds is not the same as when we got older. I can still recall this third-grader sending 35 cents to the Scholastic Book Club for Daybreak 2250 by Andre Norton. It scares me to reread that novel because it may not live up to my memory of it as excellent.
We think Mr. Rostan raises some good points here, but we can’t entirely agree. For one thing, paperbacks predate pulp magazines by a long way. Specimens can be found from the very early 19th century. It is the mass-market revolution of the post-World-War-II era which displaced the pulps, but back about 1910, pulps displaced an earlier sort of paperback, the dime novel. In any case, the term “pulp” has long since spread beyond its specific, technical meaning (a kind of cheap, wood-pulp paper) to meaning the sort of stories often printed thereon. In fairness, if you go back and read the pulp magazines of the first half of the 20th century, yes, there are excellent writers in pulp magazines — Lovecraft, Chandler, Bradbury, Leiber, Howard, Mundy