Book Announcement: The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft

Tim Lanzendörfer

The first extensive discussion of the great range of adaptations of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work, The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft brings together nineteen essays on theory, copyright, translation, as well as on the distinct medial forms of comics, film & TV, podcasts, video games, and board games. Through essays written by scholars from Germany, the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, and Thailand, Medial Afterlives of Lovecraft seeks to survey the full range of what it means to adapt the writings of Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s writing, often grandiose, verbose, and resistant to easy visualization, has long been understood to be problematic for adaptation. Lovecraft adaptation serves the volume as an instructive problem, one perched between questions of what it means to adapt the ostensibly unadaptable, how the boundaries of what the “Lovecraftian” is are policed, and how the often problematic gender and racial politics of Lovecraft’s fiction get transformed in the process of adaptation. From popular and high-profile works such as HBO’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to the manga of Japanese artist Gou Tanabe to the BBC’s podcast production The Lovecraft Investigations and Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror board games, Medial Afterlives seeks to be both encompassing and deep, granting insight into a variety of texts even as it discusses them with attention to their own specific arguments.