Cannon, Peter 1951–

(P.H. Cannon, Peter H. Cannon, Peter Hughes Cannon)

PERSONAL:

Born October 19, 1951, in Palo Alto, CA; son of James Hughes (in business; also private investor) and Jo-Ann Harper (a homemaker) Cannon; married June 14, 1986; married Julia Glass (divorced, 1993); married Nancy A. Hawley, October 9, 1993; children: (second marriage) Nicholas, Alice and James (twins). Ethnicity: "White." Education: Stanford University, B.A., 1973; Brown University, M.A., 1974. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Episcopal. Hobbies and other interests: Court tennis.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Publishers Weekly, 360 Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10010; fax: 646-746-6631. E-mail—pcannon@reedbusiness.com.

CAREER:

Helen Brann Literary Agency, New York, NY, assistant, 1975-76; Federated Manufacturing Co., New York, NY, compositor, 1976-78; Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, began as assistant to editorial production editor, became assistant editor, 1978-86; Chelsea House Publishers, New York, NY, associate editor, 1986-87; Modern Language Association of America, New York, NY, copy editor, 1988-89; American Textbook Council, New York, NY, editor, 1989-93; high school substitute teacher and teacher of English as a second language, New York, NY, 1990-92; Theodore Roosevelt High School, Bronx, NY, English teacher, 1992; freelance editor, 1993-2000; Publishers Weekly, New York, NY, reviews editor, 2000—.

MEMBER:

Wodehouse Society, Horror Writers Association, Friends of Arthur Machen (England), Ghost Story Society.

WRITINGS:

(Under name P.H. Cannon) Pulptime: Being a Singular Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club, as if Narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (novel), illustrated by Steve Fabian, Weirdbook (Buffalo, NY), 1984.

The Chronology Out of Time: Dates in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon (West Warwick, RI), 1986.

H.P. Lovecraft, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1989.

The Sky Garden (short fiction), Dementia (Richmond, VA), 1989.

Sunset Terrace Imagery in Lovecraft and Other Essays, Necronomicon (West Warwick, RI), 1990.

(Under name P.H. Cannon) Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (short stories), illustrated by Jason C. Eckhardt, Wodecraft (New York, NY), 1994.

The Lovecraft Papers (contains Pulptime and Scream for Jeeves: A Parody), illustrated by Jason C. Eckhardt, Guild America, 1996.

The Early Cannon (fiction), Volume 1: The Thing in the Bathtub and Other Lovecraftian Tales, Volume 2: Tales of Lovecraftian Horror and Humor, Tsathoggua (West Hills, CA), 1997.

Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long, British Fantasy Society (Stockport, England), 1997.

(Editor) Lovecraft Remembered, Arkham House (Sauk City, WI), 1998.

Forever Azathoth and Other Horrors (short stories), Tartarus (Horam, England), 1999.

(Editor, with S.T. Joshi) More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, Dell (New York, NY), 1999.

Episode of Pulptime and One Other (short stories), W. Paul Ganley (Buffalo, NY), 2003.

The Lovecraft Chronicles (novel), illustrated by Jason C. Eckhardt, paperback edition, Mythos Books (Poplar Bluff, MO), 2004, limited cloth edition, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2008.

Work represented in anthologies, including 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1994; The Resurrected Holmes, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996; Return to Lovecraft Country, Triad, 1997; The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1998; and Tales Out of Innsmouth, Chaosium, 1999. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction, Plum Lines, Wooster Sauce, Baker Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Social Studies Review. Some writings appear under the name P.H. Cannon or Peter H. Cannon.

SIDELIGHTS:

Peter Cannon once told CA: "Pulptime: Being a Singular Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club, as if Narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr., my first book, sets out three major influences on my work: H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Frank Belknap Long. Of these Lovecraft's influence is by far the most significant. My Lovecraftian fiction divides into three categories: works that use the Providence author as a character (notably Pulptime and The Lovecraft Chronicles); pastiches that range from the relatively straight (‘The Madness Out of Space,’ my first ‘professional’ short story) to the satiric (the six stories that comprise the ‘Forever Azathoth’ series); and dual parodies that combine Lovecraft's style and themes with those of other writers I admire (P.G. Wodehouse in the three ‘Wodecraft’ tales, F. Scott Fitzgerald in ‘Tender Is the Night-Gaunt,’ James Herriot in ‘All Moon-Beasts Amorphous and Mephitic,’ William Faulkner in ‘The Sound and the Fungi’). My shorter Sherlock Holmes pastiches are also cross-literary: in ‘Holmes and the Loss of the British Barque Sophy Anderson’ the great detective encounters a descendant of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower; in ‘The Adventure of the Noble Husband’ Holmes investigates Conan Doyle (aided by P.G. Wodehouse); in ‘The Problem of the Three Edwardian Pennies’ he proposes a solution to a mystery that baffles Welsh author Arthur Machen. The stories that feature Fred Carstairs, my fictional equivalent of Frank Belknap Long, have a serious side, since they derive from my sobering personal experience of Long and his wife Lyda. A comparison of the five tales that make up ‘The Partridgeville Papers’ in Forever Azathoth and Other Horrors with Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long, my autobiographical memoir, shows the overlap between fiction and reality.

"I like to think of my most typical work as self-referential meta-horror fiction. That is, I often write stories about horror writers and their fans, their distance from the mainstream world of books and publishing, the realm in which I've spent most of my working career. A boyhood love of horror stories, and later of Lovecraft in particular—a passion for certain non-horror authors, from Martin Gardner to Barbara Pym—an impulse to make fun of my literary heroes, fueled by a comic sensibility first formed by reading Mad magazine—all combine to produce genre writings for a specialized fan audience."

Cannon later added: "My writing career has come to a virtual halt since my wife and I added children to our family and I became a full-time employee of Publishers Weekly in 2003. I identify with Arthur Machen, one of my literary heroes, who likewise became a father in middle age and had to support his family as a journalist, with his best creative work behind him."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Publishers Weekly, October 24, 1994, review of Scream for Jeeves: A Parody, p. 57; August 16, 2004, review of The Lovecraft Chronicles, p. 48.