August 2013 Paperback ISBN 978-1-61498-063-6 234 pages Cover art by Daniele Serra
Review by Don D'Ammassa
The stories in this collection of Lovecraft related fiction have been previously published by I hadn't encountered any of them before. Almost half the book was apparently previously published as Tales of the Lovecraft Collectors and they deal with odd "discoveries" about HPL's life. They are of varying interest but a couple of them are quite clever. The remaining stories are mostly mythos related stories of which "The Haunting of Huber's" is the best. They generally have the tone of Lovecraft's own fiction but without the now archaic language. The horrors tend to be more intellectual than physical. A couple of the stories seemed quite minor, more mood studies than narratives, but for the most part they were entertaining. Faig is a noted Lovecraft scholar.
Most of us know Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., as one of the leading scholars on H. P. Lovecraft—a meticulous and indefatigable researcher on obscurer corners of the Providence dreamer’s life. But over the past several decades, Faig has exhibited enviable skill at fiction—especially fiction that draws upon his deep knowledge of Lovecraft and weird fiction. In this volume we find an augmented edition of Faig’s delightful Tales of the Lovecraft Collectors (1995), in which industrious scholars have unearthed surprising facts about Lovecraft’s life and work—such as the romance he had with an Italian girl from Federal Hill. Other stories in the volume continue to draw upon Lovecraft’s legacy: “Life and Death,” an ingenious hoax purporting to be a lost story by Lovecraft—a hoax that took in many of the leading authorities of the day; “Innsmouth 1984,” a revisiting of the setting of Lovecraft’s baleful tale of regional horror, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; and “Gothic Studies,” in which fact and fiction are inextricably linked in a tale of a lost Gothic novel. All in all, Lovecraft’s Pillow demonstrates both the cleverness and the effectiveness of Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., in the realm of Lovecraftian and weird fiction.
This product was added to our catalog on Thursday 04 July, 2013.
