|
Post by helrunar on Jul 7, 2022 19:40:14 GMT
More Derlethiana; interesting blog entry on "The Shuttered Room": the original short story, which this writer declares to have been "August Derleth's greatest work of [Lovecraft] fanfiction," as well as the film adaptation and the novelization of the latter: deepcuts.blog/2021/10/13/the-shuttered-room-1966-by-julia-withers/Lots of interesting other stuff in this blog, including an entry about the Arkham House volume The Curse of Yig which quotes extensively from Derleth's correspondence with Zelia Bishop Reed. H.
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jul 7, 2022 20:40:05 GMT
Nice find. And yes, The Shuttered Room is fanfiction.
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jul 8, 2022 20:28:36 GMT
I read this article about the very tangled negotiations that led up to Arkham House's publication of Zealia Bishop's Curse of Yig anthology. Amused to note the minor bombshell dropped by the author at the end that Derleth himself may have written the profile on his career signed with Bishop's name. The financial details of the publication are quite interesting to read. deepcuts.blog/2020/12/23/the-curse-of-yig-1953-by-zealia-bishop/It's hard to know if Bishop was delusional, or possibly schizophrenic, since she kept insisting that she had written the Lovecraft revision stories herself with "encouragement" and criticism from HPL. Evidently Long also was hired to "teach" her--one wonders just in what that particular curriculum consisted. H.
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jul 9, 2022 11:19:38 GMT
I read this article about the very tangled negotiations that led up to Arkham House's publication of Zealia Bishop's Curse of Yig anthology. Amused to note the minor bombshell dropped by the author at the end that Derleth himself may have written the profile on his career signed with Bishop's name. The financial details of the publication are quite interesting to read. It's hard to know if Bishop was delusional, or possibly schizophrenic, since she kept insisting that she had written the Lovecraft revision stories herself with "encouragement" and criticism from HPL. Evidently Long also was hired to "teach" her--one wonders just in what that particular curriculum consisted. H. Nice find, Steve. I only dimly remember the Bishop stories. Without checking I tend to confuse The Mound with a very similar minor Robert E. Howard story.
Frankly I don't know if Bishop was not right from her perspective that she did write those stories. One will never know how the original text was, if she ever painstakingly compared the puplished version with her text or not. Or if she incorporated the revisions herself and thought them more as recommendations. If you take into account how many years she laboured on this Lovecraft article writing couldn't have been her first priority. Most of those explanations why the work couldn't be done are not very convincing. Which makes this whole vanity publishing thing more understandable. It was often done by amateur writers.
That Derleth did another re-write of the stories - he was really good at taking things over unasked, huh? - further muddies the water. This was news to me. I think I must have the Bishop material in a couple of anthologies. But who can say who did what?
|
|
|
Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 9, 2022 13:39:06 GMT
Without checking I tend to confuse The Mound with a very similar minor Robert E. Howard story. "The Mound" is a very entertaining "lost race" story, and rather unlike anything else associated with Lovecraft. Very likely the circumstances of its origin are exactly what Ms Bishop claims them to be. I think this idea that only Lovecraft could write good stories is just fanboy nonsense.
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jul 9, 2022 20:40:37 GMT
"The Mound" is a very entertaining "lost race" story, and rather unlike anything else associated with Lovecraft. Very likely the circumstances of its origin are exactly what Ms Bishop claims them to be. I think this idea that only Lovecraft could write good stories is just fanboy nonsense. Of course you are right. There are enough bad Lovecraft stories. According to Joshi's biography of HPL "The Mound" was nothing more than a small outline by Bishop and written by Lovecraft from start to finish. Wright rejected it for WT because it was "too long". He had a point there. As for Long's involvement, according to Yoshi he acted as Bishop's agent.
|
|
|
Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 19, 2022 19:21:10 GMT
“Derleth began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in 1926 when he was 17, although the two men never met.” Above quote taken from J. S. Mackley, The Shadow over Derleth: Disseminating the Mythos in The Trail of Cthulhu (chapter seven) Included in David Simmons’ New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. Nevertheless, I still feel I have seen such a photograph somewhere in the Arkham House SELECTED LETTERS. And here they are, together! Or so Craiyon assures me.
|
|