New Eldritch Tomes

Every time I think I am done adding Arkham House volumes I see something, in this case two somethings, that I cannot resist. I have not read any of Vincent Starrett's weird fiction. His name popped up on my radar recently as I was reading about Sherlock Holmes and the pastiche industry generated by Doyle's character. But since Im love Homes and weird tales I added this to my library.

From the Wikipedia article on Starrett, "Starrett's most famous work, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1933. Following that, Starrett wrote a book column, "Books Alive," for The Chicago Tribune. He retired after 25 years of the column in 1967. Starrett was one of the founders of The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic), a Chicago chapter of The Baker Street Irregulars."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Starrett

The same bookseller had a couple of other items I was interested in so the order got bigger. I love Donald Wandrei and poetry so how could I resist Poems for Midnight. Both Arkham House books have covers by Frank Utpatel one of my favourite Arkham House cover artists.

These Ballantine editions with covers by John Homes were the Lovecraft books I started reading as a teenager. I did not keep them when I graduated to the hardcovers Arkham House put out in the late 1980's. So now that I have decided I would like copies I can enjoy tracking down and buying vastly more expensive used copies. Other titles appear here.

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2018/11/new-eldritch-tomes-saskatoon-2018.html

The last book in this order A Man Called Poe: Stories in the Vein of Edgar Allan Poe (cover by Josh Kirby) contained among other items the short story "In Which an Author and His Character Are Well Met"  by Vincent Starrett. Isn't this were we came in maybe but we are not quite done.

Not quite Helen and I finally went out Friday to the Inglewood neighbourhood where we like to shop. The stores were finally open again. A building that was a mere frame the last time we were there was almost finished, it has been a long time. At The Next Page bookstore which, sells both new and used books I was able to find a number of horror anthologies, something I rarely encounter. The covers were a bit scrapped up but at $4 each I was delighted to give them a home. 

I could not find the cover artist for these two books but I would love to know. 

Fast fashion, H.P.L. and me

 

I was visiting, as I often do The Online Journal of Caitlín R. Kiernan.

https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1562876.html

I noticed my heroine was wearing a really cool t-shirt, and well I had to have my own. Need you ask why? 

Once over at teepublic I had to at least see what else else they had. And my two search terms, as always were Lovecraft and Godzilla. I know but its gotten me to my mid 60's so why change now. I already have a plethoria of Godzilla, okay one HPL and four Godzilla so tempting as some of the Godzilla themed items were I went with Howard this time. One Vblogger we watch to relax does warn of the perils of fast fashion. I my own defence, my dad passed away in 2001 and I still have a couple of his shirts so I cling to clothing like a limpet. Most of my cabin clothing is from Value Village and the real gems end up in my closet here. Some stuff also heads to the charity drop boxes so I do try. But well how could I resist. This is not an endorsement, find your own road to financial ruin.

And remember when updating your investment portfolio, casting a vote or 

simply Marie Kondoing your outfits.

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” 

Why settle for the lesser of two evils?

 

New Eldritch Tomes Lovecraft and Ian Miller Part Two

I have always wanted at least one paperback with an Ian Miller's cover for the Panther Horror editions of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Eventually I tracked down a copy on ABE which seemed affordable, in theory. I ordered it March 30th from Australia but stuff was happening and I received it today. I was delighted.

A lovely reminiscence of reading these editions and much better cover photos of all three titles can be found here.

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/teeces-bit-a-shadow-over-rotherham/

Some time ago I discussed my purchase of The Art of Ian Miller here. 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2020/06/new-arrivals-philip-k-dick-and-ian.html

In this book he offered an alternative cover illustration for The Haunter of the Dark. 

Photo above from The Art of Ian Miller

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/search?q=ian+miller

Miller's explanation.

This French edition of  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward arrived some time ago. 

I am a Canadian but I do not speak or read French. My adult self might tell my rather unambitious younger self that learning other languages would be way more valuable than 90% of the curriculum especially the woefully inaccurate and outdated information on other countries the geography teacher dispensed. Okay I got that out of my system. So why buy this? I have read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward a number of times, and each time I rank it higher among Howard's works. But I have never seem a cover that did justice to the mood of the story until now. This representation of Joseph Curwen, in my mind, looking like he is becoming more and more bestial as he advances farther and farther into his dark arts is brilliant. What do you think?

New Eldritch Tomes, HPL, Caitlin R. Kieran and Ian Miller

I got a couple of new used books from Abe as well as a new purchase I wanted to share. The first is this SFBC collection with a cover by Ian Miller. I cannot understand why who ever did the layout of the back cover butchered the Miller illustration to include the ISBN box rather than rearranging the elements. May they have an unfortunate encounter with Shub-Niggurath (The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young). I had literally been eyeing this copy for years. One thing I ask myself is do I need another HPL collection, the answer is often yes. I am a sucker for art work so Miller was a huge plus but I am happy to say the editor Andrew Wheeler rewarded my purchase with a short one page dream piece "What the Moon Brings" which I do not remember reading before. 

"So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-conquering stench of the world's dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon." (395) 

Yes Howard really hated sea food. The tone of this story really brought to mind another moon related passage I had just read in his essay "In Defence of Dagon" 

"Romanticists are persons, who on the one hand scorn the realist who says that moonlight is only reflected wave-motion in the aether: but who on the other hand sit stolid and unmoved when a fantaisiste tells them that the moon is a hideous nightmare eye-watching ... ever watching..." (147)

I was looking for a copy of  Caitlin R. Kieran's short story, "The Daughter of the Four Pentacles". The same vender had Thrillers 2 a signed limited edition with that story and Kieran's "Houses Under the Sea. " so the die was cast.

 

When the pandemic began my wife and I purchased a couple of gift cards from a locally owned bookstore we frequent. Yesterday we ventured out masked and sanitized to see what they had. I had checked their online catalogue so I knew what I wanted. Helen got Monsters and Myths: Surrealism & War in the 1930s and 1940s, which I discussed briefly here. 

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2020/07/new-arrivals.html

I got of course, was there any doubt, The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham edited by Leslie S. Klinger. I have volume one but Klinger restricted that volume to works that mentioned Arkham, the Miskatonic river valley or Miskatonic University. This excluded some of my favourite works. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, "The Strange High House in the Mist:, "The Outsider, The Rats in the Walls", "The Lurking Fear" etc. And here they are. What no "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" I know it was cowritten with E. Hoffmann Price, but Price admits he was just nudging Lovecraft to get him to write it and that the story was Lovecraft's. 

We also have an introduction by Victor LaValle the author of the mythos related work, "The Ballard of Black Tom". I have LaValle's book on my kindle but I have not read it yet, I certainly will. So I will refer interested readers to the review of this book  at The Great Lovecraft ReRead. 

https://www.tor.com/2016/02/17/book-reviews-later-the-ballad-of-black-tom-by-victor-lavalle/

LaValle's introduction was interesting reading. He discussing finding and enjoying Lovecraft's as a ten year old only to realize at 15 that as a young black man he could not accept the racism in Lovecraft's writing. It is a perfectly understandable reaction. I did want to quote one passage from the introduction because I think it frames my experience with genre literature and why I think I still read science fiction, weird tales, Sherlock Holmes related works and the like. "Ten year old me was here for all of it: the high anxiety, waves of madness, and the terror of human insignificance. Certain writers must be encountered at a young age or else their spell will never be cast properly. Some people would say this is because an older reader has matured out of the appeal such pulp provides, but I call bullshit on that. Instead, I would say that as a child the aperture of your imagination is wide open. In adulthood we call its closure "maturity" but it hardly seems like a triumph to me. Instead, I try to embrace the bravery of such openness...," (xii) I am also trying to retain this openness since it is still the source of much of my joy, whether it is in the literature I read, my experience of the natural world or the observations we share with each other during a quiet walk or meal out with my wife. 

I have shared my own thoughts on Lovecraft's racism here.

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-real-shadow-over-innsmouth-odd.html

Now to the book itself. One; the cover illustration, Jacket design Steve Attardo, Jacket Art by Christina Mrozik, is one of the most striking covers based on one of Lovecraft;'s stories I have ever seen. Rats and cats, does it get better. Last night I read "The Outsider" and the accompanying annotations. I found Klinger's annotations helpful, the ones I liked were those that referred to other work that could be seen as related to this story, a poem by Hawthorne for example. But some of the most interesting referred me to critical interpretations of Lovecraft's story. I could see both types as rekindling my interest in new works in the canon and also items within my own collection that I want to revisit. 

Valentia by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Followers of this blog will know how much I enjoy the work of Caitlin R. Kiernan. The other day I decided to read her collection To Charles Fort with Love. I have a number of her collections on hand. But I decided on this one because both my wife and I enjoy the reality styling of Charles Fort, the author of (among other titles) The Book of the Damned. Fort collected and published accounts of "anomalous phenomena," things like rains of frogs, mysterious disappearances, lights in the sky etc. Helen has subscribed to The Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to Fortean occurrences for years. Many science fiction writers have been fans of Fort and Eric Frank Russell based several novels on ideas gleaned for Fort's books. So I was not surprised that Kiernan would assemble a collection in his memory. 

Valentia is a relatively short work. The protagonist Dr. Anne Campbell is a paleontologist working in New York. She receives a call from her supervisor(?) that a colleague Morris Whitney has been found dead in Ireland his body recovered by fisherman. She also learns that the site he was working on, the trackway of a tetrapod(s) early four-limbed vertebrates, has been damaged. Once in Ireland, Campbell means Marie, one of the two graduate students working with Whitney. Marie asks if Campbell was Whitney's lover, but Campbell says that part of their relationship ended a long time ago. Marie can offer no insights into by Whitney would have visited the site at night, or how his death may have come about, or who  would damage the fossils. The motive was not theft since nothing appears to have been removed. Instead, the fossils were smashed to pieces until nothing remains. The photographs, measurements and the data gathered on the scientific tests that were performed are still available, and Campbell begins to study them. That night Campbell has a dream in which she is standing on the step of the American Museum of Natural History. Suddenly Campbell finds herself transported back into a Devonian landscape similar to the one that would have existed when the fossil trackway was created. This dream of past landscapes is one she has experienced before, but this time it seems more disturbing, and at one point, she seemed to hear Whitney's voice. 

I enjoyed this story. Helen and I worked as archaeologists, and I have had a lifelong interest in prehistoric life. Kiernan herself has worked as a paleontologist specializing in marine life; mosasours and turtles seem to be two areas of interest. This experience allows her to bring a level of expertise to the story, including the description of Campbell's dream landscape. At the end of the story, Kiernan's notes mention that parts of this story were reworked for her novel Threshold. She also mentions that the trackway is real and that it was discovered in 1994 by Ivan Stossel. 

If you are interested in this evolutionary period, I recommend Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. It was also a program on PBS. I took a look for the book downstairs, but I probably got it from the public library. I was able to find a theropod trackway photo, which might be the one Kiernan mentioned. Given our shared interests, Kiernan's story was one I found particularly interesting. 

New Eldritch Tomes, Ron Weighell, Manly Wade Wellman, Ramsey Campbell

I noticed The White Road on my favourite bookseller's homepage. That copy was sold but he was good enough to track down a copy for me, he had been reading it. He did say it was quite good and that Weighell should be better known. My wife and I were both working in archaeology when we meet and while we left the field we still follow it avidly. So an Egyptian themed cover will always catch my eye. I am also a fan of Victorian and Edwardian horror and modern works that mine that vein are grist for my mill. (sorry) The comments on Goodreads helped convince me I wanted a copy. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9751496-the-white-road

Two anthologies edited by Ramsey Campbell, from the collection of Hugh Lamb another horror anthologist. New Terrors Volume 2 is inscribed "for Hugh, who knows how difficult these things are! Very best from Ramsey 24/10/80''

Cover by Andrew Douglas.

But want really interested me was the number of authors I associate with science fiction that are represented in the work. Christopher Priest (''The Miraculous Cairn''), John Brunner (''The Man Whose Eyes Beheld The Glory''), Greg Bear (''Richie By The Sea'') and M. John Harrison (''The Ice Monkey''). 

The Far Reaches of Fear, includes Manly Wade Wellman's The Petey Car which I wanted to read, as well as stories by Fritz Leiber, R. A. Lafferty, Brian Lumley, Robert Aickman and Campbell himself.

Cover by Terry Oakes.

Lastly Shadowridge Press put out a new edition of the Carcosa volume of Wellman's Worse Things Waiting with the Lee Brown Coye illustrations. I am iffy on Lee Brown Coye (heresy) but I really enjoy Wellman and the price was right for an old retired duffer. 

Sherlock Holmes and The Occult Detectives Edited by John Linwood Grant 2 vols.

"Where there is no imagination, there is no horror."

Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet"

As readers of my blog may remember, I love Sherlock Holmes pastiches. I discussed this in more detail in a post of the work of Ralph E. Vaughan, which you can find at the links below.

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2019/02/ralph-e-vaughan-sherlock-holmes-vs.html

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2019/03/ralph-e-vaughan-sherlock-holmes-in.html

These can be works patterned on Conan Doyle's original stories or stories that have a supernatural element. I was reading some when I received an email update that the anthology, Sherlock Holmes, and the Occult Detectives (2 volumes) edited by John Linwood Grant was available. I have long been a fan of Grant's website 

http://greydogtales.com/blog/ 

and have mentioned his anthologies here before. Hells Empire; tales of the incursion is excellent, and his short story collection A Persistence of Geraniums about Mr. Dry the Deptford Assassin is a must-read for those who like the fog-shrouded London of Edwardian England. So I figured these books would be good and they are. I had expected that most tales would involve some of the more well known occult detectives. While we have stories linking Holmes to Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, Stoker's Van Helsing and Blackwood's John Silence, there was no story featuringWilliam Hope Hodgson's Carnacki , who I missed. Instead, a number involve sleuths that appear to have been created especially for the story. This was not a problem; these are some of my favourites. While Grant provides some notes in his Editor's Note I would have preferred a note for each story, which would have saved me some fruitless googling. As with any anthology of this type, I enjoyed some, found others less interesting and encountered some real gems. Typically with anthologies, pick and choose here I started volume one read to the end and then started volume two. While I have not finished volume two, I want to discuss one favourite from each volume. 

Volume one. "The Adventure of Marylebone Manor" by Naching T. Kassa. Holmes and Watson have been summoned to Marylebone Manor in Sussex. Lord Charles Lightfoot has been found dead in a locked room. The room shows signs of a struggle, and Lightfoot has bruising on his throat. The doctor claims, however, that he died of a heart attack. Predictably the police have arrested the groom. Lady Catherine Rose Lightfoot, his wife, believes a ghost is responsible. She is a devoted spiritualist and holds regular seances in the house. Before Holmes and Watson can leave, two members of the Baker Street Irregulars appear. One, Jimmy Hampstead, tells Holmes the groom is innocent and that he can help find the actual murderer. Holmes knows that Hampstead has solved several recent mysteries. Then Hampstead offers a demonstration of his powers. He drinks from a flask, and his eyes change colour. He relates an incident from Holmes's youth that even Watson did not know.

Holmes gives Hampstead money for more respectable clothing and agrees he can accompany them. While Hampstead is absent, Holmes consults his files. Holmes tells Watson Hampstead is actually James King, who briefly disappeared at age three on Hampstead Heath. When found, he could only say he was with a bloofer lady. At age eight, Hampstead disappears again this time with a group of gipsies (sp) who have apparently raised him. The three set off to Sussex meeting Conan Doyle who is also headed for Maryleborne Manor on the train. Conan Doyle is a friend of the family and has attended several seances at the house.

This story had everything: mediums, hauntings, seances, gipsies (sp), and a locked room mystery complete with the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Kassa knows her Holmes and remains faithful enough to the original stories to satisfy me. There is no distortion of the relationship between Holmes and Watson, and Hampstead is a fabulous character. There was one point where I just said, wow, I will let you guess where.

Volume two. "The Ironwood Wardrobe" by Josh Reynolds. This story pairs Holmes with the Royal Occultist Charles St. Cyprian and his assistant Ebe Gallowglass. Holmes has requested St. Cyprian's assistance through Mycroft's government connections. A young girl, Sarah Goodwin, has disappeared while visiting her uncle Alfred Ransom. It appears she climbed into a curiously carved ironwood wardrobe. Holmes has already checked that the room, and the wardrobe are solid, with no passages or hidden panels. When St. Cyprian touches it, he has a vision of a snowy forest and hears the howling of wolves. Reynolds has written a number of stories featuring St. Cyprian, he was an apprentice of Carnacki and investigates other worldly occurrences for the crown. His assistant, the rather pragmatic Ebe Gallowglass, was born in Cairo and sports a handy Webley-Fosberg revolver. I loved this and nominated it as my favourite story before I finished the volume.  I enjoyed "The Ironwood Wardrobe" so much I reread the last half immediately after finishing it. I won't tell you all the influences I detected, the story travels beyond just Sherlock's realm, but Holdstock's Mythago Woods came to mind. I also purchased Reynolds collection Casefiles of the Royal Occultist; Monmouth's Giants.

I enjoyed these books. They also exposed me to other authors and collections I can enjoy in the future. Grant has an excellent knowledge of both the literature of this period and the pastiches that followed. These volumes capture the feel of the period nicely. If you want to return to Baker street but with a ghost or ghoully included, these are for you. These pastiches have also lead me back to the originals, and yesterday I reread "The Problem of Thor Bridge" and "The Adventure of the Creeping Man" can the hound be far behind? I read an interview with horror writer Thomas Ligotti last night in which he mentioned the importance of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories in his early reading. I have to agree with his importance in my own reading life. Yesterday I experienced again what a good writer Conan Doyle was. 

If you want to learn more about Arthur Conan Doyle, I recommend Michael Dirda's book, pictured below.