A blog for young readers (and YA lovers) from the Providence Athenaeum.
The Providence Athenaeum is a unique library and cultural center in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. Growing out of the Providence Library Company (fourth library in the United States), the Athenaeum as we know it was formed in 1836. Our handsome building on the corner of Benefit and College was completed in 1838.
We are one of the few surviving membership libraries in the nation. Student memberships are available - visit or call for more information.
This blog is updated by one of our circulation assistants (and YA enthusiast), RJ. Follow us to find out what's new in our Young Adult corner, or just for a daily dose of literary shenanigans.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
What’s New: The Lovecraft Anthology, Volume 1 edited by Dan Lockwood
New to the Athenaeum’s YA corner is The Lovecraft Anthology, Volume 1, a graphic novel tribute to the works of Providence’s legendary horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft. From Wired’s GeekDad Review:
The monsters in Lovecraft’s stories are meant to be so far removed from our reality that to merely look upon them is to risk insanity. It’s what is left out of the story that can be far more horrific than what is left in. Just as music is equally in the pauses between the notes, great horror fiction comes in what the reader sees that is only hinted at between the words…
When a graphic novel comes along representing some of Lovecraft’s greatest tales, it has a lot to live up to. I’m happy to say that the graphic novel compilation The Lovecraft Anthology, Vol. 1 provides the goods, weaving horrific and abstract imagery into solid, although expurgated, retellings of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Haunter of the Dark,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “Dagon,” and — my personal favorite — “The Colour Out of Space”… David Hine and Mark Stafford capture the initial hope and gradual degradation of the Gardner family in “The Colour Out of Space” with a cartoonish art style that only highlights the creepiness of what Lovecraft wrote.
The secret of capturing Lovecraft graphically is not about realism, but capturing the surreal nature of what he was writing, using abstraction. The most successful stories in this anthology recognize this, boiling the text down to its core and then allowing the visuals to hint at the horror rather than presenting it in detail, and allowing our imaginations to fill in the rest.
