The Lovecraft Chronicles was wonderful, but its portrayal of F. B. Long really depressed me. Peter was one of those New York Lovecraftians who befriended Long in his last years, and some aspects of the portrait painted of him saddens me. Today's post brought the edition of the Arkham House book, Hounds of Tindalos, that I recently ordered. I am happy to see that Centipede will soon publish (if they haven't already) their deluxe edition of Long's weird fiction.
I can easily see that being the case, as it is a portrayal I wouldn't have expected. It seems to have left something of a sour taste in several people's mouths (so to speak)... yet its accuracy is something I am not in a position to question. Long is an interesting figure, though, and while some of his fiction is... shaky, to say the least, there are always brilliant passages. And, when he was at his best, he soared very high indeed. I am very glad that the Hippocampus Press Tindalos Cycle will be reprinting "The Horror from the Hills", for instance... a very uneven tale, but a very intriguing one, and some parts of which I don't think even HPL could have surpassed... even if he did provide the central portion with his Roman dream....
The Hounds of Tindalos (the Arkham House edition) is a wondrous thing, really. I used to have a copy of this, though it is one of those things I had to let go during a particular nasty period in my life. I hope to pick up another copy at some point, preferably with the Hannes Bok cover, which is really quite perfect for that tale. Congratulations on receiving a copy of it -- I look forward to your thoughts on that one.
I haven't read Pulptime since its initial publication. I loved Screams for Jeeves because it succeeds so well as humor. People trying to write humorous Lovecraftian tales usually come off as merely "cute" or boring. (I've been disturbed to see William Browning Spencer's tendency to write more and more Lovecraftian "humor" pieces.) When I finally met Peter in Manhattan, I tried to encourage him to return to writing, as I did with a wee segment in "The Saprophytic Fungi" addressed to him. He is a remarkable and excellent writer.
Yes, I'd wondered about whether he was doing any writing these days, as I hadn't seen anything from him in quite a while. Let's hope you (and others) can coax him back to it, as he really is quite talented. As you say, he is one of the
very few who can manage to write humorous Lovecraftian material and have it work....
"The Call of Cthulhu" is superbly structured! I can't recall HPL calling it cumbrous. He often seems to downgrade his finest work. When we visited Providence in October of 2007, some friends who worked at the Providence Art Club let us inside the Fleur-de-Lys Building, and as I stood in one of the main studios I read portions of "The Call of Cthulhu" aloud, from the Penguin Classics edition.
I envy you that experience. As I mentioned earlier, I hope to make it to Providence some day, and to spend a fair amount of time there just soaking up the impressions of the town and of the places HPL himself knew. As for his opinion on "The Call of Cthulhu"... I'll have to see if I can't find the particular quote on that. Yes, he seemed to almost never see the worth of his work, with the possible exceptions of "The Colour Out of Space", "The Music of Erich Zann" and, just possibly, At the Mountains of Madness. Campbell's comments in the film are right on the nose, I think: that any writer who is hard on his own work should hear what HPL had to say about
his work. It is painful to see him so denigrate tales which are so very well-crafted, and so powerful decades after they were written.
The Monster in the Mirror is my all-time favorite book of Lovecraftian criticism. I was transfixed when I read some of those essays in Lovecraft Studies, and I nearly fainted with delirious joy when I knew they would be published in book form. They are a real challenge to one as non-intellectual and uneducated as myself -- yet they hypnotize me with their ideas, and the way in which those ideas are expressed.
I can't quite say whether or not it will be my very favorite, but I can already tell it is going to be high on the list. I, too, read several of these pieces in their original form, and the revisions here often make them almost new pieces, really. Waugh is one of the most intelligent and fascinating among a bunch which is amazingly talented to begin with. The work of so many of the Lovecraftian scholars is, to my thinking, itself literature of a high order. It is as if they imbibed something of Grandpa Theobald's ability with the language, so that their own writings when dealing with his work reflects that care and love of good, even beautiful prose.
I will admit to an especial fondness for the work of Barton L. St. Armand and Donald Burleson in this regard (yes, even the deconstructionist essays of the latter, which took some getting used to, but which I now reread with the greatest of pleasure). I still experience a genuine frisson with the closing line of Burleson's "On Lovecraft's Themes: Touching the Glass" (in An Epicure in the Terrible, for those who aren't familiar with these things): "Lovecraft's career-long text itself is a sprawling hall of mirrors, mirrors mirroring mirrors, a labyrinth of iterated thematic reflections through which wanders the Outsider who forever reaches forth, in hope against hope, to touch the glass"; while St. Armand's The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft remains as challenging and enriching today as when I first read it nearly twenty years ago, as does his "Facts in the Case of H. P. Lovecraft" in Joshi's
Four Decades of Criticism.
In fact, I owe Joshi an enormous debt for introducing me to Lovecraftian criticism back in the early 1980s; a field which has give me a great deal of pleasure and expanded my horizons intellectually to a tremendous degree.
I wonder if Gaiman is still labouring under a certain anxiety of influence w.r.t. Lovecraft?
Could be... though, to be honest, most of Neil's comments about Lovecraft both in this film and in The Eldritch Influence are generally positive. He certainly sees Lovecraft as the major influence on modern horror, and has more than once noted that one of the reasons Lovecraft receives so much parody is because he is so important; we don't parody (at least not to any great degree) that which is negligible, but only that which is truly unique and groundbreaking. We may make fun of it, but we don't go to the effort to write genuine parodies unless there is something substantial there....
