Wormwood 15

Wormwood 15 will be available mid-November. It will contain Stefan Zechowski: A Pilgrim of the Infinite by Brian Banks & Marta Mazur; Wilfred Rowland Mary Childe by Jonathan Wood; Gerard de Nerval: Exotic Voyager, Hashish Dreamer, Accursed Suicidalist by Adam Daly; Arthur Johnson: Another Sense of the Past by Robert Eldridge; Threshold in the First Half of the Tenth Chapter of Lucius Shepard's Viator by Adam Golaski; Under Review by Reggie Oliver; Late Reviews by Douglas A. Anderson and Camera Obscura. Please note that Under Review by Reggie Oliver is a new, regular column for reviews of contemporary publications.

A New Journal: Fastitocalon

I understand the first issue of the new academic journal Fastitocalon is just out (though I haven't got my contributor copy yet).  Articles are in English, though it's published in Germany, and edited by Thomas Honegger (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) and Fanfan Chen (National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan).  I have a column in it, "Notes on Neglected Fantasists."  Those authors covered in my first installment include: Elinore Blaisdel (1902-1994), George Blink (1796-1874), Oscar Cook (1888-1952),Alan Miller (fl. 1920s-1940s), Francis C. Prevot (1887-1967), and Ernst Raupach (1784-1852). Herein it is revealed for the first time in English that the famous vampire story "Wake Not the Dead!", which is often attributed to Ludwig Tieck and considered an important pre-Polidori vampire story, is in fact by someone else, and its first publication occurred in its original German three years after Polidori's 1819 watershed tale "The Vampyre".  Tolkienists will be pleased to note the contribution to this issue by Amy Amendt-Raduege, "Better Off Dead:  The Lesson of the Ringwraiths".  A table of contents, and various information about the journal, can be found at the publisher's website.

RIP: Dr. Anthony Harrison-Barbet 1939-2009

I note with sadness the recent passing, on May 29th, of noted philosopher and teacher Dr. Anthony Harrison-Barbet, due to prostate cancer. Anthony was a friend of writer E. H. Visiak (1878-1972) for the last thirteen years of Visiak's life, and had promised to write a study of his friend's life and works. The resultant volume, E.H. Visiak: Writer and Mystic, was published by Paupers' Press in 2007, and it stands as the most significant study to date of Visiak's world-view and literary achievement. Anthony also contributed an essay on his friendship with Visiak to the final issue of Abraxas Unbound, published in January 2009.