Joshi is, zonder de minste twijfel, de meest belangrijke mens in de wereld van H.P. Lovecraft. En zijn review van een nieuwe verzameling Lovecraft door professor Roger Luckhurst is niet de meest vriendelijke review.
Hij besluit met:
In At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft states, in regard to the protagonists’ first view of the shoggoth: “It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that should not be.’” This volume is, prototypically, the Book That Should Not Be. It has no reason for existence, aside from putting a few pennies in the pockets of its editor and publisher. The decision to use pulp magazine texts—especially those from Astounding—borders on the moronic; the selection is flawed, the introduction is windy and contentless, the notes disappointingly skimpy when they are not ripped off from my own work. The paper and typography are nice, and the dust jacket presents a curious and rather spooky illustration of a sea creature (Ascidia) from an old book by Ernst Haeckel (whose Riddle of the Universe [English translation 1900] is, incidentally, misdated to 1903). But that’s about all the good that can be said about this rudis indigestaque moles.
I guess the lesson one has to draw from this book is: Don’t entrust an amateur to do a professional’s job.
Was ik Luckhurst, ik denk dat ik in foetushouding op de vloer van mijn badkamer lag.
lol @
“The only reason Astounding chopped up the long paragraphs in both stories is that, in the two-column format of the magazine, the paragraphs would seem even longer than on an ordinary printed page, and therefore would presumably be intimidating to the brainless sods who would be reading the stories.”