American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time)

In this podcast, I talk about the letters H. P. Lovecraft wrote to his friends and colleagues in the autumn of 1930. Topics include: "The Whisperer in Darkness, Quebec, Lovecraft's fictional world-building, witches, and the importance of dynamite in horror tales.

What do dinosaur bones, "clock-slavery", Charleston, and Hart Crane have in common? They all are discussed in H. P. Lovecraft's letters in 1930 (specifically February through August). I talk about this and more in this episode of this podcast.

H. P. Lovecraft's letters from the winter of 1929-1930 were written around the time he wrote "The Mound". So we should not be surprised to see him reflecting on civilizations, art, and geography. These letters also speak to his thoughts about erotic art. Highlight is a massive letter to Woodburn Harris.

So we are back to the "Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft" in this episode. Features correspondents include Maurice Moe, Elizabeth Toldridge, and James Ferdinand Morton. Topics include poetry, lost cultures, and machine culture

In this second revision of a Adolphe de Castro story, "The Electric Executioner", we explore the supernatural power of electricity in a Mexican setting. A fun story, worth checking out. 

"The Last Test" is by Adolphe de Castro, as revised by H. P. Lovecraft. I rather liked this story, with its exploration of deep history and hidden traditions. It is framed as a story about experiment and outbreak in the prison, although the truth is much more chilling.

So this story is based on a dream, detailed in a letter by Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei in 1927. Wandrei later revised this account into a the published story "The Thing in the Moonlight".

The second and final part of my review of CONFIDENCE by Henry James. This puts an end to this series on James' early novels.

This short story, "Two Black Bottles", was written by Wilfred Blanch Talman, with an assist by H. P. Lovecraft. While not one of the revisions that is mostly done by Lovecraft, let's read it anyways. It is a pretty good story. Published in WEIRD TALES in 1927

Like THE EUROPEANS, CONFIDENCE is a light and somewhat comedic novel about Europeans in America or Americans in Europe, or something. Another early novel by James that I found underwhelming but still probably worth checking out.