Poole calls his occasionally flaky biography “unorthodox,” but it’s also thoroughly enjoyable and highly readable.
A deep plunge into the Lovecraft-ian dark side.
Poole (History/Coll. of Charleston; Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror, 2014, etc.) enthusiastically explores how H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) influenced modern pop culture. The author’s ardent fandom occasionally gets in the way, but he doesn’t shy away from being critical when it matters, as when he discusses the “raw sewage of the author’s racial theories.” Poole reveals how a “strange, sickly, geeky, gawky, weird, impossible Howard” became H.P. Lovecraft, creating “horror tales without precedent and monsters without antecedent.” The reclusive writer was lucky to be around when scary ghost stories were the thing; even “high-falutin figures” like Henry James were writing them. Lovecraft’s moody “fictional grimoire” found favor with the editors of Weird Tales beginning in 1926 with “The Tomb” (they originally rejected his most famous work, “The Call of Cthulhu”). It gained him an audience but little income. Downplaying the role Poe had on his work and paying particular attention to the role women played in Lovecraft’s life, Poole seamlessly weaves biography and criticism as he shows how the fodder of Lovecraft’s mental state was transformed into the eerie, occult-infused stories Nail Gaiman calls “where the darkness begins.” The rise of interest in Lovecraft after his death at 46 to the “apex of American popular culture’s current fascinations form[s] a story as peculiar as his own life.” Poole chronicles how writers like Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Robert Bloch championed him while Arkham House tirelessly kept his books in print. The “contemporary geek culture” created a “multibillion dollar entertainment juggernaut” consisting of video and board games, films, TV shows, comics, and steampunk that bear the Lovecraft-ian stamp. Poole even chronicles his visits to fantasy conferences interviewing fans who want to talk about the author who “wrote a new American history and a new geography to match it.”
Poole calls his occasionally flaky biography “unorthodox,” but it’s also thoroughly enjoyable and highly readable.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-647-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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