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 Joshi, S. T.
 A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft 
. BerkeleyHeights, NJ: Wildside P, 1999. 312 pgs. Chronology. Bibliography. Index.To review the work of one identified on the cover of 
 A Subtler Magick 
as “the world’sforemost Lovecraft scholar” is, of course, no small task. In
 Magick 
, S. T. Joshi once morevindicates his claim to the title, producing a work of impressive scope and detail which bringstogether much information which reader’s of Joshi’s
 Annotated H. P. Lovecraft 
and other workswill recognize, along with further information about Lovecraft’s personal philosophy and itsinfluence on his work. Providing major readings for each story in sequence, as well asbiographical information,
 Magick 
gives a unified view of the career of an artist whose influencefar outreaches his fame.For those unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s life and career,
 Magick 
begins with a brief introduction to his life and thought before proceeding to deal with Lovecraft’s fiction incomposition sequence. Given the diffuseness of Lovecraft’s work, which was neveranthologized in his lifetime, and the fact that many previously unpublished fragments have beenpublished somewhat erratically in various collections, the sequential approach is invaluable tothe scholar; it is also the most natural order for the interested reader, as it creates an almostnarrative flow which is kept relatively free of unnecessary technical intrusions. Notes and cross-references are wisely deferred until the end of the book, allowing the reader to proceed fromstory to story with a minimum of clutter.
 
The readings in
 Magick 
are, as is typical of Joshi’s Lovecraft studies in general,sympathetic to a fault with Lovecraft’s personal philosophy.
 Magick 
delivers able explicationsof each story, noting the various influences and the reuse of plot elements in various stories, andoccasionally adding perceptive stylistic notes, as when Joshi concludes that “Lovecraft, raised onboth Graeco-Roman literature and its imitators in the English Augustan age, could neverachieve” the “transparent simplicity” of “Dunsany’s powerful use of paratactic construction”(76-77).
 Magick 
also usefully points out the manner in which Lovecraft, a frequent borrower of scenes and moods and superficial details from other writers, almost invariably transforms theborrowed elements into a distinctive creation reflecting Lovecraft’s personal literary andphilosophical priorities.Joshi’s sympathy with Lovecraft’s philosophy, however, occasionally betrays him into adangerously flattenned reading of Lovecraft’s fiction. In several cases in
 Magick 
, stories with noless aesthetic power than is the average among Lovecraft’s works are dismissed as inferiorbecause of their failure to consistently express Lovecraft’s philosophy. Are we, then, toconclude that nothing is to be learned from Lovecraft’s fiction except that which Lovecraftelsewhere articulated? It seems odd, and certainly runs counter to received critical wisdom, tohold that an author may not find in his art expression for that which he cannot articulate, perhapsis not willing to believe, in more prosaic terms. Joshi is the uncontested master of Lovecraft’sbiography and can confidently refer to letters and unpublished writings to support his readings,but this nearly myopic attention to detail seems, at least at points, to miss the larger issues whichLovecraft’s fiction so often touches.In addition, Joshi’s attention to the details of Lovecraft’s life and writings leaves him atsomething of a loss for the broader literary context into which Lovecraft wrote himself. While
 
 Magick 
contains many references to works which Lovecraft himself claimed as influences, andwhile connections among these influences are noted with significant skill and detail, we oftenfind glaring gaps in contextualization. For instance, the treatment of “The Outsider,” one of Lovecraft’s most important early stories, remarks upon a number of significant parallels to“Berenice,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” byPoe, as well as to works by Wilde, Hawthorne, and Mary Shelley; he completely misses,however, the two fairly obvious references to Poe’s work: the shocking entrance of a returneefrom the grave evokes “The Fall of the House of Usher,” while the climactic scene in which thecharacter comes face-to-face with his own image seems to reflect Poe’s “William Wilson,” itself one source of similar works by Wilde and others. To be sure, these are not simplistic parallels:the first-person revenant in “The Outsider,” unlike the buried sister in “Usher,” actually seems tobe dead; and in “Outsider,” unlike “William Wilson,” the shock is delivered by an actual mirror,rather than the apparent mirror formed by a doppelganger; but in a treatment of a story explicitlyidentified as “Poe-inspired,” which Lovecraft himself attributed to “my literal thoughunconscious imitation of Poe at its height,” such influences should be noted before proceeding tosignificantly more remote allusions, especially the very tangential allusion to Shelley’s
Frankenstein
.These shortcomings, however, are tolerable and predictable, and mean only that thescholarly critic reading the work will desire to make his own additions and contributions to thefield, rather than resigining the entire world of Lovecraftiana to Joshi. As an introduction to themajor fiction,
 Magick 
provides a consistent thread with which to tie the development of Lovecraft’s work together and provides a wealth of detailed information which the reader wouldotherwise have to hunt through annotations and anthologies–not to mention the published and
of 00

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