Books published by Hippocampus Press

The Kalem Club was one of the great literary partnerships in American literature. Taking shape even before H. P. Lovecraft arrived in Brooklyn in 1924, the group featured some of the most distinctive figures of their day: George Kirk, genial bookseller and collector; Rheinhart Kleiner, a worldly versifier and man about town; Samuel Loveman, exquisitely refined poet and friend of Hart Crane; James F. Morton, devotee of freethought, the single tax, and Esperanto; Everett McNeill, prolific writer of historical novels for boys; Frank Belknap Long, poet, aesthete, and writer of weird fiction; and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft, on the threshold of becoming the 20th-century Poe. As chronicled in largely unpublished letters by George Kirk to his fiancée, the Kalem Club comes alive as never before-gathering for weekly sessions, taking long, leisurely strolls throughout the New York area, and sharing their works-in-progress. In the second half of this book, an abundance of writings by the Kalems-poems, essays, excerpts from treatises and novels-allows readers to grasp at first hand why the Kalem Club has left an indelible mark upon the literature of its time. Lovecraft's New York Circle has been compiled by Mara Kirk Hart, daughter of George Kirk and a longtime student of Lovecraft and the Kalem Club, and by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft.

This collection of five novellas ranks among Blackwood's finest works. Not only does it present weird scenarios of extraordinary richness and bizarrerie-the "regeneration" of a blasé English nobleman by means of pagan rituals on a mountaintop; a dismal house haunted by the souls of those whom its fanatical owner condemned to hell; the sapping of a man's spirit as he performs an ancient ceremony in the sands of Egypt-but also probes the characters' reactions to the bizarre with unfailing subtlety and acuteness. The result is a landmark in the history of weird fiction. With an introduction by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on supernatural literature.

S. T. Joshi is one of the premier critics of supernatural fiction. His pioneering research on H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, and other writers has set a standard of scholarship that few have equaled. In The Evolution of the Weird Tale--an informal follow-up to his earlier studies, The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001)--Joshi assesses a wide array of American and British supernatural writers of the past century or more, meticulously scrutinizing their weird work and gauging their place in the canon of horror fiction.Such American writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as W. C. Morrow, F. Marion Crawford, Robert W. Chambers, and Edward Lucas White come under scrutiny, as well as their British counterparts E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, and L. P. Hartley. Joshi includes substantial essays on Lovecraft and his disciples Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Frank Belknap Long.In a provocative section on contemporary writers, Joshi dissects the vampire novels of Les Daniels, the short stories of "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, David J. Schow and the school of splatterpunk, and the novels and tales of Poppy Z. Brite. All in all, Joshi has provided some of the most in-depth analyses of both classic and modern weird writers ever written.