For those heel-dragging Luddites who still see no use in social/business networking sites, I submit this member’s entry at LinkedIn. Whilst I would aver that some of the info presented on the LinkedIn page of His Sleepiness might smack of both bravado and bragadaccio (and it also displays a poor command of the English language; which is understandable, considering his foreign national status), the bottom line is that The Big C is a mover n’ shaker with an absolutely fanatical grass-roots movement behind him. His message, in a nutshell, is “Change.” Now that he’s begun to use the Interwebs in a strategic fashion, I really don’t see anything that can stop him. Log in (while there’s still time) and become wild and free.  The stars are right.

*My thanks to Metallica for the headline…

Three different volumes of possible interest to readers of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Horror tales and thought-provoking writings are being released in March and April. Cthulhu’s Reign and Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, respectively edited by Darrell Schweitzer and S.T. Joshi, are collecting stories by various writers. Dark Awakenings is entirely authored by Matt Cardin.

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“Francis Stevens” was the pen-name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, the first important female writer of fantasy and  science-fiction in the United States, who paved the way for Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore. She wrote for pulp magazines such as All-Story Weekly, Argosy and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Mrs Bennett was definitively a pioneer. It should be noted that her novella “The Nightmare,” which appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1917, a story close to Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ The Land That Time Forgot, was published a year before the latter story.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft praised many times Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s writings; for instance her novel Claimed: “One of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will every read.” On The Citadel of Fear: “Wonderful and tragic allegory … amazing and thrilling scenes … masterful … huge mystery, gigantic tragedy, and original and extraordinary situations…”

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The 14th of March is the nativity of Algernon Blackwood, who was a marked influence on H.P. Lovecraft. In a bit of cosmic coincidence, the 15th of March was an anniversary for the Rhode Island Raconteur, but it would mark that other defining day of a man’s existence on Earth. As with Gaius Julius Caesar, the Ides of March would see Lovecraft pass from this plane of existence through the Veil of Negative Existence.

Even since that day, the shade of Lovecraft has cast a dark shadow over the field of weird fiction–and in my personal reading.

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Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds well forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.

–H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

I highly appreciate your offer to lend me the Blackwood books and intend to take advantage of your kindness at some future date when my plans are not quite so uncertain as they are now. Thank you very much for the magazine with your story; I am certain that “The Picture in the House” will prove a real treat.

–Robert E. Howard letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. December 1930.

I do not know if Howard ever made good on his promise to Lovecraft. Lovecraft recommended a number of stories and authors to Howard, and there’s every possibility he did. I truly hope this was the case, for like the Man from Providence, I consider Algernon Blackwood to be one of the finest practitioners of the Weird Tale I’ve had the pleasure–or more appropriately, the abject horror–to read.

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“…the older Christopher Lee gets, the cooler Christopher Lee gets.”

– Steve Tompkins, “The Voice of Saruman, Speaking the First Age Into Being”

While I’d heard whispers of a new Christopher Lee project on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum,* it was this fine blog entry by Jeff Sypeck on the Quid Plura? site which motivated me to get up off the parliamentary side o’ me arse and compose a blog entry of my own.

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I recently mentioned here at The Cimmerian that four Robert E. Howard Kindle ebooks were to be published by Halcyon Press. A few more volumes are now available. As you can see above, Solomon Kane, Howard’s swashbuckling Puritan from Devonshire, is among these digital publications for Amazon’s reading device. No way is this a complete collection, since the table of contents only lists five stories: “Solomon Kane,” “Skulls in the Stars,” “The Moon of Skulls,” “Wings in the Night” and “Rattle of Bones.” The other two books are meatier.

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A while back I read Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill. Joe is an important new voice in horror, having won a Bram Stoker award for his short story collection 20th Century Ghosts. This is his first novel, and it is a doozy. The villain is a former CIA interrogator who learned hypnosis and mind control tricks while in Vietnam, and now that he’s dead, he can really get into your head. The action is fast-paced and never lets up, and Slasher fans will appreciate the role the protagonist’s dogs play in this story. If it reads a bit like Stephen King, that is natural, as Joe is Stephen King’s son, and grew up listening to his father’s stories.
See review here.

There are some authors who can tell a new story, and yet make it feel as if it’s been told for eons. Something about the inherent truth within the work, combined with the sincere approach, has the tale feel like it was first told, albeit in an altered style, in Mesopotamian city-states, or Germanic campfires, or wattle huts in Africa. Neither allegorical, nor inextricably reflective of a period, the plot is essentially timeless. The details might change, but the story would remain. An example of this sort of story, for me, is Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers.”

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My wee article on the best of 2009 appears to be quite a hit among readers, and I was astonished to learn that the Library of America (or at least the writer of their newsletter) was among them. In their “Recent Items of Interest to LOA Readers” column, there are a number of links to LOA publications on various “Best of 2009″ lists:

American Fantastic Tales makes both FearNet‘s Top 9 list and The Cimmerian‘s Best of 2009 list

Farber on Film leads Newcity‘s Top 5 film books list

Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings selected by Caustic Cover

The Complex picks Raymond Carver: Collected Stories

Vindication! Hopefully this will lead readers of the LOA newsletter to pick up a copy, and perhaps even explore some of the authors in other books. One can always hope that this will aid the prospect of a full Howard volume in the future, and given the way things have been going, I’d say it’s a distinct possibility. Lovecraft has one: it’s only a matter of time before his epistolary friend from Cross Plains joins him.

A speculative illustration of a Library of America Howard volume. I don't think it looks out of place at all.