ESCHEREHEYE

More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft

S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon

Reviewed by Aaron DeWeese

I'm neither pleased nor entirely displeased with "More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft". I feel a melancholic listlessness. There was some very insightful annotations, and some which only give the dictionary definition of such words as "cyclopean". That which was insightful, was quite so, and I only wish there were even more. Noteworthy were the notes on Pigafetta's "Regnum Congo", the Symbolists, the pre-Raphaelites, Bauldelaire, Huysmans, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, such artists as Goya, Dore, Angarola, Sime and Fuseli, Lovecraft's family, historical places and pictures, historical names, and excerpts from Lovecraft's letters.

I did notice several spelling errors--they were not archaic spellings, but actual printing errors. This, together with the several seemingly asinine and sometimes redundant annotations, gave the work a sense of being hastily constructed. I believe this would be an very nice introduction for the Lovecraftian neophyte. There is quite a lot of good information here, which has given me a long list of referenced tomes which I would love to add to my shelves, such as Lord Dunsany's "The Book of Wonder" and W. Scott-Elliot's "The Story of Atlantis" and "The Lost Lemuria", Fiske's "Myths and Myth Makers", Miss Murray's "Witch-Cult in Western Europe" and Del Rio's "Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex".

I am fascinated by the fact that Lovecraft, a confessed "mechanist materialist", was totally obsessed with the supernatural. Jack Vance's character, Gartover, in "Ports of Call" said that "'skepticism' is sometimes known as 'dogmatic ignorance'.

I would have to say that my favorite Lovecraft piece within this collection is "Pickman's Model"--"But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life"--wheels within wheels, the profound paradoxical. I too cannot get William Blake's "The Ghost of a Flea" out of my mind's eye.