The fully revised, expanded trade paperback edition of John D. Haefele’s A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos went live on Amazon yesterday — with the look inside the first thirty or so pages to come in the next few weeks, and the cover flipping from front to back, and all the other cool tricks you expect from Amazon.
Plus the price — at least for the moment — is only $17.99 for a solid tank of a book that comes in at over 500 pages.
If you were thinking about nabbing one before, when I first blurbed the original hardback printing (but understandably hesistated at the $60 price tag), now’s your chance. Get it for some apt seasonal reading for Halloween, or toss it on a Christmasy wish list.
Great book — as I’ve said before, the most interesting litcrit on Lovecraft I have read in many years. Plus a history of Arkham House, and the Lovecraft Circle writing for Weird Tales magazine — Haefele even does a bit on Frank Belknap Long that makes me re-evaluate my previous very low estimate of Young Belknapius.
For this edition I get the Dedication Page all to myself, not just for proofreading the text something like five million times, but for nudging Haefele into dropping much of the academic apparatus he had in the hardback version — page numbers for quotes in the text and all that needless crap — and getting on with it. You’ve got the best book on the subject ever done, you want the public to read it, not just a few profs and a couple of hardcore Lovecraftians.
I liked the original edition, but this new one just sinks it. Whoa.
And by the way, this edition is the first book from Leo Grin’s The Cimmerian Press. If you remember Leo’s outstanding work with his magazine The Cimmerian, you know you’re in for quality. Leo took a few years off in there. But he’s back.
