Sexuality and Lovecraft
Lovecraft’s work has a distinct absence of overt sexuality. While Lovecraft’s stories contain some deviant sexual behaviors, nothing is ever depicted in detail. However, modern authors and filmmakers seem unable to make a film without inserting (sometimes graphic) sex into the script. Why is that? Is it just the tentacles? or Is it something deeper? Downum, Joshi, Peterson, Cook, Smiley
Amanda Downum is the author the Necromancer Chronicles, published by Orbit Books, and Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Weird Tales, and is forthcoming in Dreams From The Witch House and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu. She lives in Austin, TX, but one day she will return to the sea.
S. T. Joshi is the author of such critical studies as The Weird Tale (Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Starmont House, 1990), The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (PS Publishing, 2012). He has edited a corrected edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction (Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition [Hippocampus Press, 2015–16]) as well as The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works (Night Shade Books, 2001; rev. ed. Hippocampus Press, 2013) and Collected Essays (Hippocampus Press, 2004–06; 5 vols.). He has prepared three annotated editions of Lovecraft’s tales for Penguin (1999–2004). His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1996), won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award; a revised and expanded edition has appeared as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2010).
Joshi has done scholarly work on other authors of supernatural fiction. He is the author of a bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 1993) and critical study of Lord Dunsany (Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination [Greenwood Press, 1995]), and a critical study of Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction [Liverpool Univ. Press, 2001]). He has prepared editions of the work of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, and other writers. He is the coeditor (with Stefan Dziemianowicz) of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2005).
Joshi has edited such anthologies as American Supernatural Tales (Penguin, 2007), the Black Wings series (PS Publishing, 2010f.), Searchers After Horror (Fedogan & Bremer, 2014), A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Centipede Press, 2014), and The Madness of Cthulhu (Titan Books, 2014–15).
Evan J. Peterson is the author of Skin Job and The Midnight Channel and editor of the Lambda Literary Award finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing can be found in Weird Tales, The Stranger, The Rumpus, Glitterwolf, The Queer South anthology and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Minor Arcana Press and a 2015 Clarion West writer. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
Garrett Cook is an author and editor of Horror, Bizarro and Mythos Fiction. He is the author of five books, the most recent being the collection You Might Just Make It Out of This Alive. His work has appeared in such magazines as Exquisite Corpse and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction and such anthologies as Decade's Best Bizarro Fiction, Deepest, Darkest Eden, In Heaven: Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by the Films of David Lynch and Giallo Fantastique He is the editor-in-chief of The Imperial Youth Review. He is available to edit your books regardless of what cyclopean appendages they possess.
Jim Smiley has had many jobs. Infantryman, private investigator....and his new career has caused relations to disown him, and made dogs to weep in the zocalo. He is an author of strange things. He is the author of both Girls' Night In and Both Alike in Dignity, is a contributor to Dark Discoveries magazine, and is a submissions editor for Dark Regions Press.