A Monster of Voices: Speaking for H. P. Lovecraft [ペーパーバック]

Robert H. Waugh is my all-time favorite H. P. Lovecraft scholar, and I find everything that he writes of intense interest. I first discovered his essays in that finest of journals, LOVECRAFT STUDIES, and then I went into a state of ecstasy while reading his first collection from Hippocampus Press, THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR (2006). This is an extremely intellectual and Literary study of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction, and I like that it challenges one of merely moderate intelligence such as I. Many of the essays are original to this collection, appearing in print for the first time. The Contents of the Book is:

INTRODUCTION
FURTHER SORTIES
The Blasted Heath in "The Colour out of Space"
Lovecraft and Lawrence on the Hidden Gods
"The Rats in the Walls," The Rats in the Trenches
The Hounds of Hell, the Hounds of Heaven, and the Hounds of Earth
The Ecstasies of "The Thing on the Doorstep," "Medusa's Coil," and Other Erotic Studies
FREE RANGE
Bloch and Leiber: the Siblings at War with Lovecraft, the Compound Ghost
The Weird Historical Novel: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Other Historical Ventures
"Hey Yew, Why Don't Yew Say Somethin'?" Lovecraft's Dramatic Monologues
The Surreal and the Organic Imaginations: Lewis, Tolkien, and Lovecraft
"An Exquisitely Low and Infinitely Distant Musical Note": German Romantic Opera and Lovecraft's Aesthetic and Practice
FILIATIONS AND AFFINITIES
Lovecraft, A Citizen of Rome
Lovecraft Speaks French, in a Manner of Speaking
Lovecraft and O'Neill: The New England Haunts
IN SWAN POINT CEMETERY
WORKS CITED

"In Swan Point Cemetery" is a wondrous sonnet that Waugh has composed in Lovecraft's memory, and it makes one ache to read more of this gentleman's poetry. Of especial interest to me in the essay on "The Thing on the Doorstep," "Medusa's Coil," and Other Erotic Essays; for I have long demanded that, counter to the opinion of many who see Lovecraft as sexually sheepish, the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft contains elements of intensely perverse sexuality that, for me, becomes more and more perverse the deeper we investigate it.

In his Introduction Waugh writes: "And with beasts in mind, the next essay takes up the problem of one of Lovecraft's least respected stories, 'The Hound,' which returns us to one of the major themes of THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR, the hero as ghoul; this essay also concerns the relation of this story to Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous novel, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, as well as to Francis Thompson's poem 'The Hound of Heaven'." "The Hound" has been roundly abused as one of Lovecraft's "bad" stories, and S. T. Joshi comes to the story's defense by insisting that Lovecraft wrote it as a joke, Lovecraft's parody of his own style. What bogus nonsense. Waugh's stunning essay shews how one of the Gentleman from Providence's "minor" tales has a place in Literature and is in its own right a magnificent weird tale with many points of interest.

I have read THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR many times, and indeed I have two copies of the book, one to which I constantly return and one I keep on the shelf in good condition. I know that I will read A MONSTER OF VOICES: SPEAKING FOR H. P. LOVECRAFT many many times, soaking in its rich rewards, and will eventually have to purchase a second copy to keep, unread, upon my Hippocampus shelf in good condition, to be read in that future time when my first copy falls apart in tatters.