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"Fully-realized characters and evocative prose distinguish [Clint] Smith's outstanding second collection."-Publishers Weekly Starred ReviewIn 2014, Hippocampus Press published Clint Smith's first short story collection, Ghouljaw and Other Stories. That scintillating volume, which simultaneously drew upon the rich heritage of classic weird fiction and infused a new vibrancy into old motifs by a vibrant prose style, deft character portrayal, and innovative scenarios, was an instant hit. Now, Smith has assembled his second story collection, and it features all the virtues of his first book while adding new touches that will broaden his readership. The Skeleton Melodies features such stories as "Lisa's Pieces," a grisly tale of cruelty and murder; "Fiending Apophenia," in which a schoolteacher reflects poignantly on his past derelictions; "The Fall of Tomlinson Hall," wherein Smith draws upon his own expertise in the culinary arts to fashion a story of cannibalistic terror; and "The Rive," a highly timely post-apocalyptic account of the horrors that inequities in health care can foster. Other stories treat of domestic strife leading to supernatural or psychological horror, such as "Animalhouse" or "The Undertow, and They That Dwell Therein." The volume culminates in the richly textured novella "Haunt Me Still," one of the most subtle and powerful ghost stories in recent years. Clint Smith is establishing an enviable reputation as a leading voice in contemporary weird fiction. This volume will only augment his high standing in the field.

In 1978, Donald Sidney-Fryer published the first full-scale bibliography of Clark Ashton Smith, Emperor of Dreams. In the more than forty years since that book's appearance, the publication and study of Smith's work have increased exponentially, and a new, more exhaustive bibliography is long overdue. The three compilers of this volume, all leading authorities on Smith, have now achieved this monumental feat. Smith created a sensation when he published The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) at the age of 19. He issued several other poetry collections before moving on to writing tales of horror, fantasy, and science fiction for a wide variety of pulp magazines. He later resumed the writing of poetry, publishing numerous poems in English, French, and Spanish in little magazines, while his stories appeared in several volumes issued by Arkham House. This volume details the totality of Smith's writings, from rare pamphlets to all his appearances in magazines to translations of his work into a dozen or more languages. It also chronicles the burgeoning field of Smith criticism, from books and pamphlets about Smith to newspaper articles from local papers to analyses in academic journals. A section on adaptations of Smith's work into various media-films, television shows, comic books, musical settings, and spoken-word recordings-is also included. This volume is an essential work for any devotee or scholar of Clark Ashton Smith, charting the widespread dissemination of his tales, poems, and other writings throughout the world.

In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, Donald Sidney-Fryer has distinguished himself by being the biographer, critic, and bibliographer of Clark Ashton Smith; the chronicler of the "California Romantics," a school of 20th-century poets including Smith, George Sterling, and himself; and an unfailingly acute analyst of poetry and prose fiction in several languages. In this scintillating volume of his more recent writings, Sidney-Fryer dwells at length on his visits to Thailand, Cambodia, Egypt, Central America, Hawaii, and Micronesia, revealing his sensitivity to exotic landscapes and the weight of history and culture in these ancient lands. We also find essays and reviews on surrealism, the poetry of George Sterling, Wade German, Henry J. Vester III, and Alan Gullette, and two vivid accounts of Lovecraft conventions in Providence, R.I. The latter sections of the volume contain Sidney-Fryer's ongoing experiments in poetry and prose poetry, exhibiting his mastery of a multiplicity of verse forms and also taking note of his momentous transition from California to Massachusetts.

The tenth issue of Spectral Realms demonstrates that this journal of weird poetry is going strong as it completes its fifth year of publication. Once again, this issue features the work of many of the leading voices in contemporary weird verse: Wade German, Adam Bolivar, Christina Sng, Frank Coffman, Ann K. Schwader, Chad Hensley, Thomas Tyrrell, and Ian Futter. Manuel Arenas, Liam Garriock, David Barker, and others provide vivid prose-poems. Jeff Hall's "In the Garden of Thasaidon" is a tribute to Clark Ashton Smith, while Manuel Pérez-Campos's "The Mirror of Arkham Woe" draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft's "The Colour out of Space." The classic reprints feature a pair of scintillating haunted-house poems by the acclaimed American poets Lizette Woodworth Reese and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Marcos Legaria supplies the second part of his study of Clark Ashton Smith's influence on Robert Nelson, quoting the entirety of Nelson's vivid poem "Dream-Stair" (Weird Tales, April 1935). Among the reviews, Leigh Blackmore studies the October 2018 issue of Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and Donald Sidney-Fryer contributes a review-article on the brilliant work of G. Sutton Breiding. As a special bonus, a complete index of authors and titles to all ten issues of Spectral Realms is provided.

Wilfred B. Talman was a late member of the Kalem Club, the group of literati who gathered around H. P. Lovecraft during his years in New York (1924-26). In the 1920s Talman attempted to write weird fiction, and Lovecraft's letters to him feature extensive advice on the story he revised for Talman, "Two Black Bottles"; Lovecraft also wrote a 6000-word synopsis for a story, "The Pool," that Talman never wrote; the synopsis is here presented in an appendix. But Talman soon moved to other interests, and in his correspondence Lovecraft discusses such diverse subjects as Dutch settlement of the American colonies, the Greek calendar, and his wide-ranging travels. Helen V. Sully is one of Lovecraft's few women correspondents. A friend of Clark Ashton Smith, she made the long trip from California to Rhode Island to see Lovecraft, and he treated her with his customary old-world courtesy. In their subsequent correspondence, Lovecraft attempted to act as consoler to Sully (who had apparently lapsed into depression), and his sage words on ethics, values, and contemporary civilization are still of value. Lovecraft also exchanged a few letters with Helen's mother, Genevieve Sully. As with other volumes in the Letters of H. P. Lovecraft series, this volume prints all surviving letters unabridged and with extensive annotations by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, along with numerous writings-prose, essays, and poetry-by Lovecraft's correspondents.

The passing of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire in the spring of 2019 was a grievous blow to his many friends, colleagues, and devotees, but his literary legacy is likely to endure for decades to come. In this volume, which spans the spectrum of his work from the 1980s to the present day, Pugmire demonstrates why he became perhaps the leading proponent of Lovecraftian short fiction in his time. Several tales are set in Pugmire's Sesqua Valley-a parallel to Lovecraft's Arkham Country, and based on the Pacific Northwest topography he knew from a lifetime's residence. But beyond the mere evocation of landscape, Pugmire's tales are enlivened by the presence of vivid, piquant characters-male and female, gay and straight, sinister and naïve, all of whom contribute to the atmosphere of refined strangeness that was Pugmire's signature achievement. But Pugmire's work extended well beyond mere Lovecraftian pastiche, and in such tales as "The Barrier Between" and "The Boy with the Bloodstained Mouth" he demonstrates both originality and skill in weird creation. In sum, this volume is a testament to the pioneering imagination of one of the most distinctive writers of his generation. W. H. Pugmire (1951-2019) was the author of Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley (2009), The Tangled Muse (2011), An Ecstasy of Fear (2019), and many other volumes. He lived for most of his life in Seattle, Washington.

H. P. Lovecraft's letters are among the most remarkable literary documents of their time, and they are a major reason why he has become such an icon in contemporary culture. He wrote tens of thousands of letters, some of them of great length; but more than that, these letters are incredibly revelatory in the depth of detail they provide for all aspects of his life, work, and thought. This volume, first published in 2000, assembles generous extracts of Lovecraft's letters covering the entirety of his life, from childhood until his death. He tells of his youthful interests (poetry, Greco-Roman mythology, science), his childhood friends, and the "blank" period of 1908-13, after he dropped out of high school. He emerged from his hermitry in 1914 by joining the amateur journalism movement, where he became a leading figure and was involved in numerous literary and personal controversies. In 1921 Lovecraft became acquainted with Sonia Greene, whom he would marry in 1924. By that time, he had begun publishing in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. But his marriage was a failure: living in New York, he was unable find a job and found the teeming city so different from the tranquility of his native Providence, R.I. Returning home in 1926, he embarked on a tremendous literary outburst, and over the next ten years wrote many of the stories that have ensured his literary immortality. Lord of a Visible World is a riveting compilation that not only paints a full portrait of Lovecraft's life, writings, and philosophical beliefs, but features the piquant and engaging prose characteristic of his letters. In this new edition, the editors have updated all references to current editions of his work and also exhaustively revised their notes and commentary. TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction[Biographical Notice]I. Childhood and Adolescence (1890-1914)II. Amateur Journalism (1914-1921)III. Expanding Horizons (1921-1924)IV. Marriage and Exile (1924-1926)V. Homecoming (1926-1930)VI. The Old Gentleman (1931-1937)Appendix: Some Notes on a NonentityGlossary of NamesFurther ReadingIndex

This third volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with a tale, "The Thousand and One Nights," that has never before been reprinted. It continues with a succession of tales that Machen wrote during and just after World War I, a cataclysm that shook Europe to its foundations. The most famous of these is "The Bowmen" (1914), a narrative of medieval soldiers coming to the rescue of besieged British infantrymen in France was widely believed to be a true account, in spite of Machen's repeated protestations to the contrary. Machen's final war tale, the short novel The Terror (1916), is an imperishable depiction of the revolt of animals against humanity's rulership of the earth. In the 1920s Machen resorted to humor and satire to convey his dissatisfaction with the increasing secularization of his era, which he felt was robbing the imagination of wonder and mystery. He also began contributing to anthologies of original weird fiction edited by Cynthia Asquith and others, producing several memorable tales as a result, including "The Happy Children" and "The Islington Mystery." Machen's final novel, The Green Round (1933), is a subtle tale of supernatural menace, narrated in the blandly repertorial prose that Machen had developed in his later work. He then published two final volumes of weird tales, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool (both 1936), which contain many memorable tales, including "The Bright Boy" and "N." Machen's collected fiction is a monument to the author's fifty years of rumination about human life and the obscure mysteries that may lurk hidden in far-away corners of the earth-and in our imaginations. They are filled with an intensity and sincerity of expression testifying to their author's earnest philosophical and religious beliefs, and they are written in some of the most mellifluous prose of their time. The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.