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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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