HPLinks #21 – Spectral Realms, Spanish Lovecraftians, Madness on the London stage, Azoth 1918-1921, and more…

15 Wednesday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #21.

* New on the Hippocampus Press website, the annual weird poetry journal Spectral Realms No. 22. There are a few ‘classic reprint’ poems as well, including… “a rare poem from Weird Tales by pulpmeister E. Hoffmann Price”.

* In Spanish, a new open-access journal article in the latest Signa: Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Semiotica. This focuses on discussion of two… “spearheads of genre fiction in our country: Emilio Bueso and Guillem Lopez, [who adapt] the Lovecraftian model to their own distinctive styles and obsessions”. Freely available online.

* In English in the latest edition of the Hungarian journal Patchwork, Escape from Innsmouth and The Shadow over Innsmouth: The Role of The Reader and Player in Postmodern Multimedial Narratives. Freely available online.

* The latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast hosts, as a guest, the author of the new book Ripples From Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes and True Detective (2024).

* French blog L’Antique Sentier translates part of the letter from H.P. Lovecraft to Helen V. Sully, 5th March 1935.

* Another 2025 London Lovecraft Festival theatre listing, for At The Mountains Of Madness at the Drayton Arms Theatre, 16th February 2025. Booking now. As yet, no sign of a 2025 programme at the official Festival website.

* Spraguedecampfan has a detailed review of Planets and Dimensions by Clark Ashton Smith. As I blogged last week, a scan of this 1970s book collection of CAS’s essays is now free on Archive.org.

* New from Scriblus, an 8,000-word article on “The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (1969-74): An Introduction”.

* Frontier Partisans trails the forthcoming “comprehensive and meticulously curated” 646-page new edition of the Western Tales Of Robert E. Howard. Due from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press in February 2025.

* Modern Age magazine suggests “It’s Time for a Walter Scott Revival”… “He’s known for his swashbuckling tales but offers much more.”

* Free on Archive.org, Azoth: The Occult Magazine of America (1918-1921). Of possible interest to Mythos writers seeking deep background on the immediate post-war period, which were also the years in which Lovecraft started to write stories again.

* Inverse reconsiders Underwater, a submarine horror box-office flop of a movie. Has major spoilers.

“Five years ago, Underwater did what many Lovecraft adaptations couldn’t. […] The film isn’t adapting any particular [Lovecraft] story, but a dedicated watch reveals details that are intentionally [Lovecraft] lore-consistent”.

* And finally, Beth Murray was a photographer who made a fine set of 1940s views of Providence, which I collected in a blog post a while ago now. Later I found one more from the set, which was later issued as postcards. I’ve now found another card not seen before, showing the Seekonk River near Red Bridge. Small size, but clear enough to suggest that it was still very much a working river when Lovecraft was alive. The river was strongly tidal and salty.

Red Bridge on the Seekonk, Providence, in the 1940s.

— End-quote —

Lovecraft at the Red Bridge: “I was standing on the East Providence shore of the Seekonk River, about three quarters of a mile south of the foot of Angell Street, at some unearthly nocturnal hour. The tide was flowing out horribly — exposing parts of the river-bed never before exposed to human sight. Many persons lined the banks, looking at the receding waters & occasionally glancing at the sky. Suddenly a blinding flare — reddish in hue — appeared high in the southwestern sky; & something descended to earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence shore near the Red Bridge — about an eighth of a mile south on Angell Street. The watchers on the banks screamed in horror — “It has come — It has come at last!” — & fled away into the deserted streets. But I ran toward the bridge instead of away; for I was more curious than afraid. When I reached it I saw hordes of terror-stricken people in hastily donned clothing fleeing across from the Providence side as from a city accursed by the gods. There were pedestrians, many of them falling by the way, & vehicles of all sorts. Electric cars [tram-cars] — the old small cars unused in Providence for six years — were running in close procession — eastward away from the city on both of the double tracks. Their motormen were frantic, & small collisions were numerous. By this time the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus. Suddenly a glare appeared in the West, & I saw the dominant landmark of the Providence horizon — the dome of the Central Congregational Church, silhouetted weirdly against a background of red. And then, silently, that dome abruptly caved in & fell out of sight in a thousand fragments. And from the fleeing populace arose such a cry as only the damn’d utter — & I waked up …” — Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, May 1920.

Fix your Amazon WishLists

10 Friday Jan 2025

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Many readers will have a number of Amazon WishLists, probably with substantial user comments appended. But now some useless tea-boy at Amazon has tinkered with your WishList comments, making them very tiny and also hiding more than the first line of text. So here’s a useful free UserScript for your Web browser, Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix. This should fix the problem. Requires TamperMonkey or similar, to run UserScripts on Web pages.

HPLinks #20 – Lovecraft’s copy of Landmarks of New York, rustic Derleth, Ancient Egypt, future-oracles, and more

09 Thursday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #20.

Not much to glean this week, which I guess is due to the usual ‘slump’ over Christmas / New Year. And most of the items below are only tangentially related to ‘Lovecraft himself’.

* Up for sale, what appears to be Lovecraft’s copy of the book Landmarks of New York (1923), with bookplate and signature date for May 1928. Which suggests this was a memory-jogger of the New York of 1922, rather than a pocket-guide used at that time or in the later New York Years. The seller notes… “This title does not appear in Lovecraft’s Library nor any of Lovecraft’s published letters”. Not on Archive.org, so we can’t be sure it’s actually New York City. It might be ‘upstate’ New York.

Also at Honest Abe’s site, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in Czech. A uniform set titled Volani Cthulhu, with variant dustjacket colours for each volume. Here we seen the green one, which shows off the artwork to best effect.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a joint mini-review of “three interesting H.P. Lovecraft-related items”. The Starry Wisdom Library, The Dagon Collection, and the map-set H.P. Lovecraft and His Environs.

* Beyond Lovecraft: A Companion is the mooted title for an academic book collection now being assembled. Will apparently have chapters discussing various recent adaptations and (details are scant, so I’m guessing) possibly even those ersatz ‘barely-adaptations that use the Lovecraft name’? (Perhaps we need a name for such cruft, these days? ‘Lovecruft’?)

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Planets And Dimensions, a 1973 book which collected… “the most important non-fiction prose of Clark Ashton Smith”. Includes tributes to Lovecraft.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and among other matters he brings news of the publication of various new August Derleth books, among which the complete Gus Elker farm/rural humourous stories in two volumes. Buck in the Bottoms: Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls and Wild Plums: More Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls. Of these, Joshi writes…

David E. Schultz […] did yeoman’s work in unearthing both uncollected and unpublished stories that had gone unnoticed by Peter Ruber, whose compilation Country Matters (1996) purported to include all the Gus Elker stories.

I wonder if Derleth ever sometimes thought of himself as following Lovecraft in this? After all, the master had once penned the comic tale “Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl”, about the daughter of a Vermont backwoods bootlegger.

* Nominations now open for the 2025 Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.

* In Portugal until February 2025, a substantial retrospective exhibition of the comics work of Liam Sharp. Science-fiction, fantasy, and some Conan.

* Newly officially free on the Poe Society website, the book Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986).

* The latest edition of the open-access journal Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt is a special on Ancient Egypt in science-fiction and related modern pop culture. Also note the new book Alternative Egyptology: Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt (2024), which is available free-to-read online at the publisher website.

* Talking of ancient Egypt, I spotted an interview with the author of the new novel Tomb of the Black Pharaoh. This is part of his Danforth: Eldrich Tales of WWII series, which fuses… “Lovecraftian horror, Egyptian myth & WWII-era espionage”. Sounds fun.

* And finally, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a new exhibition on “Oracles, Omens and Answers”, showcasing the material and mental cultures involved in supposed ‘divination of the future’ prior to the advent of science-fiction. Has an accompanying book. A timely show, given that our fast-evolving ‘AI oracles’ may soon offer us various forms of precognition. Or, appear to do so. Related: Wormwoodiana has a new post this week on The Tarot in England.

— End-quotes —

“It must be understood that the real developments of the future are utterly beyond prediction, since wholly unseen or wrongly appraised factors may swing matters in totally unexpected directions.” — Lovecraft, in his essay “Some Repetitions on the Times”.

“So far as future history is concerned, I’m damned if I know what lies ahead. […] Nobody knows what factors will pop up to prove the decisive ones. What will the next war bring — and leave? […] How fatal will be the decadence or collapse toward which both western and eastern cultures seem to be moving? Will the modified behaviour-patterns, created by the lapse of certain traditional beliefs, produce unforeseen results? [Thankfully] The northern and western countries seem to have a knack of readjusting their government, economics, and society to meet changing needs without explosive disaster, and if they can be left free to evolve without encroachment, they probably have quite a future.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“The past is real — it is all there is. The present is only a trivial and momentary boundary-line — whilst the future, though wholly determinate, is too essentially unknown and landmarkless to possess any hold upon our sense of concrete aesthetic imagery. It is, too, liable to involve shifts and contrasts repugnant to our emotions and fancy; since we cannot study it as a unified whole and become accustomed to its internal variations as we can study and grow accustomed to the vary’d past. […] it seems to me all one can do at present is to fight the future as best he can.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

“… anyone’s emotional attitude toward the future is essentially a matter of chance and of taste. [Those involved in] the impersonal and objective matter of calculating what the future is likely to be [will of course draw on the] different emotions [that] give different individuals different habits of perception, appraisal, and reasoning-habits which importantly affect all conclusions save those depending on the very simplest, clearest, and most concrete data. One really ought to think of the future apart from all likes, dislikes, and personal perspectives. He would then see a transformation [that is even now] in process; likely to invalidate most of our present standards, thought-habits, and pleasure-sources, and to substitute another set of these things which — though no doubt satisfying to those born under its aegis — will call forth less of the varied pleasure and thought-potentialities of mankind than the systems of the past and present have called forth. He needn’t call this a tragedy if he doesn’t wish to — for of course he will not live to reap its worst effects, while his great-grandchildren will be too steeped in the newer order to miss any other.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

A quickie ‘greatest hits’ for Star Trek (TOS)

04 Saturday Jan 2025

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A few readers may be interested in my recent revisiting of Star Trek (Original Series, Kirk and Spock etc). My viewing was only a sampling of the best, as I didn’t want to slog through it all. I also avoided those ‘make the characters act out-of-character’ and ‘time travel to the Earth in the past’ episodes that you tend to get in long TV sci-fi series. Anyway, here’s my final list for a quickie Enterprise-focused ‘greatest hits’ tour of the Original Series (fans call it ‘TOS’), plus the follow-on cinema movies. You should be able to get through it in three or four evenings.

__Series 1__

1×10 The Corbomite Maneuver

1×14 Balance of Terror

1×22 Space Seed (Origin of Khan, useful as backstory for the later movie)

1×25 The Devil in the Dark

1×26 Errand of Mercy (Klingon Empire)

__Series 2__

2×01 Amok Time

2×10 Journey to Babel

2×15 The Trouble With Tribbles (not as good as I recall it, but fun)

__Series 3__

3×02 The Enterprise Incident

3×07 Day of the Dove (Kang)

3×09 The Tholian Web

3×16 The Mark of Gideon

THEN –> 1st Movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Director’s Edition, aka Director’s Cut) which has a creaky start but is much better after the first 30 minutes. Then Wrath of Khan and finally The Search for Spock.

HPLinks #19 – hard and Long, Joshi’s Recognition reviewed, a Fanhistory Project webinar series, dreaming cats, and more…

02 Thursday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #19.

* Newly listed for discounted pre-order, a 500-copy hardcover edition of A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. Due to ship in early spring 2025 (“March”), and it can’t ship outside the USA.

* In English in the latest edition of the Hungarian open-access journal Patchwork, “Subjectivity and Cosmic Ambiguity in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City””.

* The latest edition of the new open-access journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale has a review of Joshi’s The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown (2021).

* In the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Il richiamo degli abissi: una ripresa del Glauco ovidiano in H.P. Lovecraft” (‘The Call of the Deep: a revival of Ovidian Glaucus in H.P. Lovecraft’). Presents, in Italian, the idea that Ovid’s… “Metamorphoses, [specifically the] episode of Glaucus, was an important source of inspiration for the short story The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

* A special new Lovecraft issue of the French journal EaN… “Cthulhu waits no longer. Lovecraft is more relevant than ever: this is perhaps what explains the contemporary interest in his surprisingly modern work.” EaN appears to be open-access.

* In the latest issue of the French journal Otrante ($ paywall) “Relecture juridique de la nouvelle Le molosse d’H.P. Lovecraft” (‘A legal rereading of the short story The Hound by H.P. Lovecraft’).

* The current Weird Tales IP owners recently had a 100-page ‘Cosmic Horror’ special issue (#367), which I think I missed hearing about. But usefully, last week the Tellers of Weird Tales blog perused this issue, finding that… “the contributors to this issue are mostly movie, television, and comic book people” rather than writers. He also suspects that most of the unsigned pictures, of which there are apparently many, were generated by AI models. Which I’ve no objection to myself… provided AI images are done well, generated by someone who knows what they’re doing, and tickled a bit with Photoshop before release. Tellers of Weird Tales also has another post taking a deeper look at the Cosmic Horror issue.

* FanHistory Project Zoom Sessions. This is an online webinar series with the holders and curators of science-fiction fandom university collections. Set to run from January through April 2025.

* A few years back the Chinese communist authorities took a sudden and unexpected interest in science-fiction fans and communities. What seemed somewhat benign at the time now looks different, as a new paper reveals the “unexpected intensification” of censorship which followed, and how “government censorship caused once-thriving fanfiction communities to break apart”.

* Propnomicon posts the scenario setup for The Miskatonic University Sahara Expedition 2025. A real-world LARP in the deserts of North Africa.

* An early indication of the return of the London Lovecraft Festival in February 2025. A listing for “A Night Beneath The Elder Sign” at The Drayton Arms Theatre, London, on 16th February 2025. Lovecraft’s “Celephais, a tale from the Dreamlands, told in shadow puppet style” with “electronic soundtrack performed live”. Plus a “dramatic retelling of From Beyond”.

* Metal Temple interviews the band The Great Old Ones… “Lovecraft may be the sixth member of the band. It’s always music first, but Lovecraft is part of the band, you know?”

* And finally, the English edition of El Pais asks “How do cats dream?”.

— End-quote —

“My dream of the black cat city was very fragmentary. The place was built of stone & clung to the side of a cliff like some of the towns drawn by Sime for Dunsany’s stories. There are towns more or less like it in Spain. The place seemed to have been built by & for human beings aeons ago, but its present feline inhabitants had evidently lived there for ages. [I beheld] the cats moving about in a rational & orderly manner, evidently in the performance of definite duties.” — Lovecraft to Lumley, June 1936.

HPLinks #18 – Lovecraft and relativity, Lovecraft’s political evolution in Spanish, a Canton discovery, and more…

19 Thursday Dec 2024

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HPLinks #18.

* A new Wormwoodania post, “Remembering Scott Connors”, the Clark Ashton Smith and weird fiction scholar who has recently passed away. Related is last week’s news that S.T. Joshi intends to spend 2025 writing the long-awaited Clark Ashton Smith biography, a book Connors had apparently started but was unable to bring to publication.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog surveys 2024’s accomplishments in producing valuable new data and scholarship about Lovecraft’s wife.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine for Winter 1992, with the lead article being the memoir “H.P. Lovecraft Meets Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser” by Fritz Leiber.

* The Fossils website has a new “scan of the article “The Phenomenon of H.P.L., a ten-page biography of H.P. Lovecraft by Helen V. Wesson originally published in The Fossil for July 1957.”

* Now free on YouTube, S.T. Joshi’s presentation “Lovecraft and the Physicists: Coming to Terms with Relativity and Indeterminacy”, given at the recent ‘Lovecraft et les sciences’ conference in France. Two hours, but the length is partly due to the lack of an AI insta-translator. Thus there are many pauses needed for manual translation.

* A third Lovecraft book of translated letters for Spanish readers, El Terror de la Razon. Cartas III (2024), new from publisher Aristas Martinez. The blurb reveals that the first section flows around the idea of… “‘The Terror of Reason’, his ideas about humanity and the cosmos that he disseminated in his most famous stories [and fashioned into] visionary thought that would later inspire a new generation of posthumanist philosophers”. Then the second part of the book focuses on the evolution of the man’s political ideas and ideals, in his own words. I’d hope there are copious footnotes enabling younger readers with no personal experience of the 20th century to (for instance) distinguish national socialism from soviet socialism, and to know what a ‘blackshirt’ was, etc. e.g. when he signs off “Yrs for the blackshirt march on Washington” — Lovecraft to Galpin, July 1934.

* New from Brazil in open-access, a Spanish-language journal article with the translated title ‘Gods, Monsters, Aliens: Lovecraft and the Post-Human’.

* The free bundle of Lovecraft tales, specially set up for deep textual analysis with a computer, is now available as lovecraftr version 1.2 (December 2024).

* Further to my July 2024 post on “that Canton madhouse”, Tentaclii reader Luke has written to say that he’s spotted a possible state institution at Canton (this being the Canton to be seen from a tall railway viaduct, when on the rail route from Providence to Boston). This was the ‘Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children’, later the ‘Massachusetts Hospital School’. Opened in 1907 and continuing to the present day, located on an 160-acre slope going down to meet the large local lake then called ‘Reservoir Pond’. Lovecraft had written “I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse”. Yet this real place was not a “madhouse”, but rather an institutional residential hospital with vocational training (farm work, craft workshops etc) for ages 2 to 20. This possibility is certainly worth considering. But, so far as I can see, the location and relatively low-rise appearance (compared to the vast castle-like state madhouses of the time) suggests it may not have made much of an impression on passing rail travellers, even if it could have been seen from a train window…

Note that Luke plausibly observes that the use of “poor little cousin” indicates that the Innsmouth-tainted cousin may have been sent away when a child. He was “little” but then “I had not seen him in four years”, and then a few more years pass before the rescue plan. All of which suggests a boy of perhaps 12 or 13 at the time of the rescue. A boy who would not yet have been transferred to an adult institution. Thus, to find the key state institution for “deformed” children at the real Canton is certainly intriguing.

* A new Skull Session podcast interview with Will Murray… “Will Murray and I discuss his long and varied career writing for Marvel Comics and magazines” and the influence of Lovecraft.

* It’s official, there will be a “4k restoration” version of the Re-Animator movie, complete with bubbling vats of newly-brewed extras. Likely to appear in early April 2025, and to ship with a 150-page book. The much-loved 1985 comedy movie adapted Lovecraft’s Home Brew magazine shocker-serial “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

* In Denmark in August 2025, a three-day conference on ‘Otherworldly Entertainment’…

Today, videogames continue to be one of the biggest platforms for horror, magic, gothic, and occult entertainment, even outperforming cinema and television. Despite [this deep reach into] broad audiences, [the topic] remains severely understudied.

* A paying Lovecraft-related job for a “Dark and mysterious painterly illustrator” wanted for the early stages of a commercial project. Predictably it’s a ‘rush job’ and over Christmas and New Year too. But the offer looks quite serious and there should be just enough time. Sadly the application is by a “super detailed and borderline complicated form” (‘exit stage-left: half the creatives in the room, screaming…’, etc).

* Tartarus Press on the T. Lobsang Rampa books. I recall these being prominent on home bookshelves, as a young child. Not my own shelves, as I never read the Rampa books. But it’s fascinating to learn now that the supposed mystical Tibetan lama who peeped out at me from the book-cases as a child, was… “in fact the son of a plumber from Plympton in Devon [southern England] called Cyril Hoskin”. He became a sometime fitter of corsets, sometime photographer, in the dreary greyness of post-war London. After his first 1956/57 best-seller…

with each subsequent book, Rampa casually shared his knowledge of astral travel, civilisations on Venus, UFOs, etc. One of his books was even meant to have been dictated to him by his cat.

The newspaper expose didn’t matter. He just went into full character for the rest of his life, claimed ‘reincarnation’ and much else… and credulous readers still lapped it up. Tartarus is now seeking anyone who can help with the research for a new full biography of this strange and strangely popular Englishman.

* Islands magazine recommends a visit to an “Underrated Literary Gem Filled With Rare Finds In Rhode Island”. This being the John Hay Library in Providence. Along with the huge Lovecraft collection, evidently the visitor can find there what sounds like one of the world’s finest collections of miniature toy soldiers, and for the especially ghoulish… four books bound in human skin.

* And finally, at the Grolier in New York City, “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works”. Their exhibition runs until 15th February 2024. The Necronomicon is, regrettably, represented by a rather naff plastic ‘joke’ case (supposedly holding ye dreadfull tome).

— End-quotes —

“Hope ya kin get your Black Cat file [i.e. a complete ‘reference file’ run of a past magazine]. I used to buy that reg’lar-like, and recall the swell weird stuff it had.” — Lovecraft to Morton, 23rd February 1936.

“I have been re-reading [your new story] “Marsh-Mad” — & the more I analyse it the better I like it! I shall make every effort to get this in the official organ [but, if not then it] is far too good to waste on any but a first-rate paper! Try it on the Black Cat.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 29th August 1918.

“Once again I’ve followed a Mortonian [Morton] tip, as I did when sending “Dagon” to the Black Cat and “The Tomb” to the Black Mask and have slipped Weird Tales five of my hell-beaters” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923.

We know Lovecraft began to “notice” the magazine Black Cat in 1904, but I know of no scholars able to pinpoint the exact date at which he ceased to buy or read the title.

HPLinks #17 – Masonic Lovecraft, Lovecraft as trainspotter, Lovecraft and Science conference, search the Providence Journal archives, and more…

11 Wednesday Dec 2024

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HPLinks #17.

* The journal Fraternal Review, from the Southern California Research Lodge, has a new ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Freemasonry’ special edition. Contents include…

* Harry Houdini and Masonry.
* Lovecraft’s Masonic grandfather.
* Masonic influences on Lovecraft, as well as Lovecraft’s subsequent influences on the occult world.
* Real-life location of the Masonic Lodge that inspired the one taken over in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

A $5 digital edition is available. It’s interesting to think what might have happened had Lovecraft taken a different path… able to break into local journalism, then a local magazine editor (he would have been a cert for something like the Hospital Trust magazine The Netopian, with all its local history) and… thus been enticed to join a local Masonic Lodge. Possibly there’s a “what if” Mythos story in that?

* Deep Cuts looks into Her Letters To August Derleth: Muriel E. Eddy, and there are also a few firmer biographical memories found in the article “Mrs. Hinckley’s Providence”. The latter having an item of data on Lovecraft’s youth that I don’t think I’d seen before…

Dorothy Walter, a member of our Short Story Club, said Mr. Lovecraft used to call on her when she was young. About 20 years ago [circa 1946-47] a stranger came from Baltimore and asked Miss Walter and me [Mrs Hinckley] many questions. I only remember that my father knew Mr. Lovecraft and always spoke to him. When we came from Wickford to go to school, Mr. Lovecraft was usually sitting in the Providence railway station, probably because it was nice and warm there.

Presumably the father was taking the girls to the train for school each day, or meeting them off the train, and thus he said ‘hello’ to the boy Lovecraft. This seems quite plausible, though due to Lovecraft’s avid early interest in trains and railroad-men rather than for the warmth (his adult aversion to cold was later known, which probably coloured memories). Deep Cuts puts this at a time when Lovecraft was perhaps 10-12 year old. So maybe 1901-02? I also note that the article also recalls that at that time, at the back of the railway station there was a “beautiful backwater cove”. Tidal and sweet-smelling as she recalled it, but which was later filled in. This huge water feature can be seen on panorama views of the early city. It’s interesting to hear that it may have been known to Lovecraft as a boy. I seem to recall he was to be found, late in life, doing a bit of ‘urban exploring’ in the same location.

* Deep Cuts also has Three Letters to the Editor, 1909, found via the digital archive of the Providence Journal. The topic of Lovecraft’s letters was Robert E. Lee and the South in the Civil War. Also letters from the young Lovecraft on the stage play The Clansman, something which was also debated among amateur journalists some years later — and as such his opinions on it are already well known.

* I see the (new?) Providence Journal Archives search is free, but then any items found are paywalled via individual pricing or a monthly subscription. I’m uncertain if they can take payments from outside the U.S., since payment is via credit card only. $29.95 gets you a one-month ‘unlimited downloads’ pass. Sadly passes cannot be gifted to researchers, since only the cardholder is allowed to use them.

The search-box supports phrases in quote marks e.g. “Ladd Observatory”. As with many old newspapers, however, the OCR of tiny print leaves much to be desired and there are many false-positives and oversights. For instance a search for “Winslow Upton” of the Ladd, will not find some articles that have his name and can be found with “Ladd Observatory”. Still, there are fascinating free snippets available, and even these may give mythos writers a historical hook on which to hang a story…

Found in a few minutes: Winslow Upton of the Ladd Observatory discussed “life on other worlds” in public in 1907. Whipple graves were opened ‘en masse’, 1910. Lovecraft’s beloved River Seekonk was being totally poisoned by sewage outflows, 1923.

* Newly announced, the dates for the Robert E. Howard Days in June 2025.

* The German Lovecraftians have released dates for their annual get-together, 17th to 20th July 2025. In scholarly activity, note that a Literature Team Leader is now required to take forward their ongoing work… “on a volume of essays from German-speaking countries and a translation project for Lovecraft’s letters and essays”.

* In France, a two-day conference at the University of Poitiers on ‘Lovecraft and the Sciences’. 5th-6th December 2024, so sadly it’s been and gone. But here’s the programme in PDF, and I guess there may be recordings on YouTube and/or a book in due course.

* Skulls in the Stars reviews The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch. Being a “quality edition” of 22 early Bloch stories, published by Valincourt. Has plot spoilers.

* New and free at FantasyBabble (spin-off from HorrorBabble), “A Stroll through the Dreamlands: 13 stories by H.P. Lovecraft”. The reading runs 2 hours 47 minutes, and it has all the Dreamlands stories in audio (except the Randolph Carter tales).

* In early 2025 France’s prestigious comics mega-fest Angouleme will feature a Masterclass with Gou Tanabe, the acclaimed manga adapter of Lovecraft. The event is one of several that will run alongside his large one-man exhibition ‘Gou Tanabe x H.P. Lovecraft’…

The great architect of a mythology which has infused all the world’s popular culture, H.P. Lovecraft has now built a bridge between 20th century New England and 21st century Japan, transcending borders and time, enabling pulp and manga to meet and join hands. This show is an opportunity to verify, once again, how great stories are universal.

* News of another Lovecraft all-night lakeside camp-out near Mexico City. Noctambulante 2025 is a Lovecraft-themed ‘camping and cinema’ event, and this time the organisers also promise that… “Cthulhu will emerge from the depths of Lake Xochimiclo”. Campers are expected to dress in a Lovecraftian manner. Starting on the evening of 29th March 2025, and booking now.

* The well-loved vintage videogame The Thing: Remastered, apparently forthcoming in a new release with… “updated character models, textures, and animations, with the implementation of advanced 3D rendering for updated lighting and atmospheric effects.”

* Also being mooted for a polish, a 40th anniversary Re-Animator edition of the celebrated 1985 comedy-adaptation movie of Lovecraft’s Home Brew shocker “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

* Visualizing Camelot was a 350-item university gallery exhibition surveying the uses of King Arthur in popular culture. The show was developed by subject-expert curators who were able to draw on specialist American and British collections of such material. It’s been and gone but a substantial website remains online.

* And finally, the new online H.P. Lovecraft Translator…

— End-quote —

“I was arrested mainly by the great temple of the Scottish Rite Masons, whose striking architecture lifts it out of the commonplace and mundane into the realm of the cosmick and mystical. Gazing upon it, I could well believe all the vague legends connected with the Masonick order; for here surely dwelt arcana whose sources are not of this earth. I saw it first at night, when only the twin cryptick braziers beside the great bronze door lit up the grim guardian sphinxes and the huge windowless facade. Mystery dwelt there — and I departed full of vague thoughts hinging upon the obscurest of dream-memories.” — Lovecraft on his visit to Washington in 1928.

“The hall retains its pristine impressiveness; its lofty rooms forming the present home of Ionick Lodge, the Masonick branch founded by my grandfather, and of which he was the first Grand Master. It did me good to see his picture there, enshrin’d in proper state.” — Lovecraft visits his grandfather’s Masonic Lodge in 1926.

Time-travel with LORAs

08 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in AI

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A few more free add-ons, for use with the free Stable Diffusion AI image generator.

1900s Drama Movie. Note also the Lovecraft-friendly Colonial style porches and doors.

10s Retro Future Movie trained on visions of the future, as found in 1910s movies.

Silent Movie v1.0 LORA makes small frame-sequences which can then be compiled into wobbly movie clips.

40s Western Movie. More R.E. Howard than Lovecraft (“Sweet Ermengarde” and “Juan Romero” aside), but possibly of interest to those who need to emulate pulp western images, in combination with an art-style LORA.

Stygia v1.1 LORA for Conan backdrops. An update from version 1.0.

HPLinks #16 – Lovecraft Imagined, imagining Northumberland, manifest destiny, AI shoggoths, and more.

05 Thursday Dec 2024

Posted by in Astronomy, HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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Welcome to HPLinks #16.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post brings news of a new Ken Faig Jr. book, The Skull of Roger Williams: Lovecraft Imagined. In Joshi’s words, this offers…

powerful and poignant stories (and even a play or two) featuring Lovecraft as a character, along with some of his close family members; Clark Ashton Smith and R. H. Barlow appear in one of the pieces. If you’re looking for over-the-top horror tales with liberal doses of gruesomeness, you should go elsewhere; but if you’re interested in deeply moving portrayals of Lovecraft and his family as they actually lived their lives from the 1890s to the 1930s, written by one of the most learned and sensitive of Lovecraft’s biographers, this is a volume you will not want to miss.

Sounds good. Available now, as a 440-page paperback or as a budget ebook.

* In Italian in this week’s edition of the newspaper Domani, a long feature-article on “L’inferno artificiale di Lovecraft: come costrui il suo Northumberland senza esserci stato” (‘Lovecraft’s artificial hell: how he built his Northumberland without having been there’). Related, and linked to by the article, is an essay on “Lovecraft Archaeology”.

* Deep Cuts blog remembers Philomena Hart and her tangential connection with Lovecraft. She was the wife of Bertrand Hart, long a favourite newspaper columnist in Providence and one who tangled with Lovecraft in print.

* The work of Alfred North Whitehead, a British philosopher whose 1920s works influenced Lovecraft, is now in the public domain. Thus, new this week, we now have Whitehead’s acclaimed and seminal Science and the Modern World (1925) as a LibriVox audiobook.

* The latest Typebar Magazine has “An Unintended Critique of Manifest Destiny in H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness”. The author states he worked on it long, and it is now… “available on Patreon for magazine subscribers now, it’ll be available in a month or so for non-subscribers to read online.”

* In a South American open-access journal “La metafora del shoggoth en la inteligencia artificial” (‘The shoggoth metaphor in artificial intelligence’). The PDF has an English abstract.

* Up for auction, in France, original Druillet Lovecraft artwork from the 1970s.

* This week, John Coulthart outlines the edition history of his Yuggoth collage.

* I see that the £122 Routledge academic book Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books (2022) had a chapter on “Tanabe Gou’s Manga Adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft”.

* Wormwoodiana blog has a new post on Arthur Machen and the Sherlock Holmes stories.

* Who knew that Bram Stoker wrote a book of fairy tales, as well as the famous Dracula? Yup.

* A special ‘Haunted Midlands’ issue of the regional history journal Midland History. This being the English Midlands of the UK. Appears to be free to access, at present. Serious articles, not contemporary ‘ghost-hunter’ piffle and confabulation.

* The World Fantasy Convention 2025, set for the south coast of the UK, now has its two themes: ‘Lyrical Fantasy’ and ’50 Years of British Fantasy and Horror’.

* A call-for-papers for Youth and Horror: An International Conference.

* The new £130 Routledge academic book Entering the Multiverse (2024) has a chapter on “The Arkham Horror Multiverse”. With a focus on fan-interaction in the form of fan-guides for the game, which aim to boost the pleasures to be had from the… “endless world-building that comes from ludifying [i.e. ‘making game-like’] Lovecraft”.

* New on Archive.org, a run of Unbound fanzine, which offered a range of fan-written Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium) adventures in the 2010s. Including a set for solo players.

* A new Creative Commons open ebook on Hybrid Monsters in the Aegean Bronze Age. A bit niche, but it may appeal to writers or RPG makers seeking monster ideas from the deep past.

* Mythos writers may also be interested to know that the CQuill offline fiction-writing software is now available for Mac, albeit in an experimental but working version. A few days ago I was able to get a discounted copy of the Pro version for Windows, in the Black Friday sales. Having Pro means I’ll be able to make a Lovecraft ‘Style Assistant’ for it, when I find time sometime in 2025. I guess I may then share the Assistant via my Patreon. The standard version of CQuill is free, and only lightly crippled — it will load (but not create) an Assistant from an author’s works.

* And finally, a reminder that The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft application deadline is 17th January 2025. The awardee gets to swish around the Brown campus with up to $5k in their back pocket, while researching Lovecraft.

— End-quote —

“… you have no doubt read reports of the discovery of the new trans-Neptunian planet […] a thing which excites me more than any other happening of recent times. […] Asteroidal discovery does not mean much — but a major planet — a vast unknown world — is quite another matter. I have always wished I could live to see such a thing come to light — & here it is! The first real planet to be discovered since 1846, & only the third in the history of the human race! One wonders what it is like, & what dim-litten fungi may sprout coldly on its frozen surface! I think I shall suggest its being named Yuggoth!” — Lovecraft on his reaction to the discovery of the planet Pluto, in a letter to Miss Toldridge of April 1930.

A new mega-observatory in Chile is now coming online, with the largest camera ever built, and it should be able to easily find the ‘Planet X’. Recent research shows this very likely rolls in an unknown orbit far beyond Pluto, and some 80% of the likely locations have now been discounted. The current best estimate is that, when found in 2025 or 2026, the planet will be around 6.66 times the mass of the Earth. An ominous number.

HPLinks #15 – Zann, R Lovecraft, a new Lovecraft philosophy book, Lovecraft and nostalgia, a new REH letter and more…

28 Thursday Nov 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #15.

* In the latest Journal of The Fantastic in the Arts (35.1, 2024), “Beyond Worlds: Music, Literature, and the Fantastical in H.P. Lovecraft and E.T.A Hoffmann” ($ paywall). “Zann” is here compared…

with Hoffmann’s [story] “Ritter Gluck: Eine Erinnerung aus dem Jahre 1809” [ with discussion…] especially concerning the influence of German Romantic notions of music […] In Lovecraft’s tale, the unheimlich (‘uncanny’) is invoked through and by the romantic notions of music that the author utilizes to wrestle with language’s limitations in expressing the abstract, thus showcasing the importance of a musical approach to the fantastical.

* “Vascones, Pompelo and Calagurris in the three Versions of ‘The Very Old Folk’, by H.P. Lovecraft” a new book chapter, archived on Academia.org. In Portuguese. Relates to the previous 2019 article on the same topic, freely online in English, by the same author.

* A new issue of the open-access Journal of Gods and Monsters (Winter 2024).

* LovecraftR 1.2 on GitHub. Being Lovecraft’s stories pre-packaged for computational text-analysis using the R coding language. Regrettably the sources of the texts are not given. Thus, it’s uncertain if these are the gold-standard Joshi-corrected texts or not.

* Now free in open-access (was previously $ paywalled), the broad survey article “‘Awed listening’: H.P. Lovecraft in classic and contemporary audio horror” (2022).

* A new £135 academic philosophy book from Routledge, Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age, due in early spring 2025. If one looks past the book’s alarmist, tendentious and pseudo-scientific title (perhaps foisted on the German author by the publisher) then the book sounds interesting. The core of the blurb states…

the book traces Lovecraft’s gothic and decadent influences, examines materiality and its transcendence in weird fiction, and considers the posthuman and postsecular dimensions of his narratives. Through this, the study highlights Lovecraft’s role in navigating the challenges of a secular, disenchanted world, offering a ‘dark enchantment’ that echoes current philosophical concerns.

* Psychogeographic Review reviews the forthcoming book Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia (2025) which begins with Charles Dickens and then apparently… “closely consider[s] the works of other writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Alan Moore” in relation to nostalgia.

* Futuramen blog brings news that there’s now a hardback for Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations). According to the post, the first three volumes were hardback but this fourth book had only been in paperback until now.

* Miskatonic Books still has copies of Arcana Viridia: An Occult Herbarium (2013) which sounds like a very unusual book of interest to some readers of Tentaclii. Apparently the handsomely-presented and illustrated book is the result of some 25 years of active field and desk research. A possible Christmas present?

* Deep Cuts blog looks at “Her Letters to Clark Ashton Smith: Annie E.P. Gamwell”. This being Lovecraft’s aunt.

* The Pulp Superfan surveys the Lovecraft-Eddy tales and memoir books currently in print from Fenham.

* Wormwoodania blog looks at the new Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937-1973: A Pictorial History & Guide for Collectors.

* It seems the HPLHS will visit Australia in 2025, having been picked as International Guests of Honour for Chaosium Con Australia 2025. I assume they will receive travel tickets, a hotel room, and their own personal shoggoth… rather than it being just a virtual visit over the InterWebz.

* The latest issue #49 (November 2024) of The Paperback Fanatic has an article on the “UK Panther editions of Lovecraft” and also a “Guide to Conan Pastiches”. Available now, in paper only.

* A new Robert E. Howard Letter Dated to August 1932 has been discovered. The letter was sent to E. Hoffmann Price. Among other matters, REH discussed a sketch-portrait of Lovecraft.

* A new public-domain one-hour audio reading of “Red Shadows” by Robert E. Howard, at Librivox.

* Another text interview with the creators of the new HPL graphic-novel partial-biography of Lovecraft. In Italian.

* New to me, I find that acclaimed comics artist P. Craig Russell adapted Lovecraft, first published in badly-printed form circa 2003 and then pristine in Murder Mysteries and Other Stories: Gallery Edition (Titan, 2015). Apparently the story was “From Beyond”, though I can’t find any sample pages from the adaptation. The sumptuous 2015 oversized edition is now well out-of-print and is (from the sound of it) highly collectable.

* The new volume Dripping with Fear – Ditko Archives Volume 5 collects Ditko’s mystery-horror comic-book shorts, from 1958 onwards.

* A review of a new videogame at GameSpew. “Blood on the Thames is amateur theatre meets H.P. Lovecraft”, and the game is found by the reviewer to be a “wobbly but oddly appealing adventure”.

* And finally, Spectre Miniatures, the British maker of 1.1″ RPG miniatures, has released a new ‘machine-gun Mythos’ set along with some game rules…

The Mythos range is Spectre’s first release for ‘Supernatural Horror In Miniature’. Inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Mythos takes Spectre Operations players back to the weird world of Lovecraft’s 1930s America.

— End-quote —

“My favourite toys were very small ones, which would permit of their arrangement in widely extensive scenes. My mode of play was to devote an entire table-top to a scene, which I would proceed to develop as a broad landscape […] Toy trees — of which I had an infinite number — were used with varying effect to form parts of the landscape […] even forests (or the suggested edges of forests). Certain kinds of blocks made walls & hedges, & I also used blocks in constructing large public buildings. […] My people were mainly of the lead-soldier type [sometimes adapted and re-painted …] My mode of play was to construct some scene as fancy — incited by some story or picture — dictated, & then to act out its life for long periods — sometimes a fortnight — making up events of a highly melodramatic cast as I went. These events would sometimes cover only a brief span — a war or plague or merely a spirited pageant of travel & commerce & incident leading nowhere — but would sometimes involve long aeons, with visible changes in the landscape & buildings. Cities would fall & be forgotten, & new cities would spring up. Forests would fall or be cut down, & rivers (I had some fine bridges) would change their beds. […] Horror-plots were frequent […] There was a kind of intoxication in being lord of a visible world (albeit a miniature one) & determining the flow of its events.” — Lovecraft recalling his time circa 1900 as a boy pioneer of the ‘tabletop RPG’, in a letter of November 1933.