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 of the Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and The Poison Court. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Weird Tales, and in the anthologies Lovecraft Unbound and Dreams From the Witch House. Unsatisfied with only writing about necromancy, she recently began a new career as a mortician. She lives in Austin, Texas for the time being.
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 Drag Star! (Choice of Games), the world’s first drag RPG, as well as The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir (Lethe Press). He is a Clarion West alum and author of the horror poetry chapbooks Skin Job and The Midnight Channel as well as editor of the Lambda Literary finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing has also appeared in Weird Tales, Unspeakable Horror 2, Queers Destroy Horror, Boing Boing, and Best Gay Stories 2015. He is the founder of the now-concluded Seattle programs Minor Arcana Press and SHRIEK: Women of Horror Film. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
Garrett Cook is an author with Deadite Press and an editor with Eraserhead Press. His work has appeared in A Breath from the Sky, DOA III, Giallo Fantastique, Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade and more. His next book Crisis Boy comes out October 15th.
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.