13 Saturday Dec 2025
Posted in Scholarly works
Sadly Google are junking the trusty old Google Books interface, and your “bookshelves” lists with it…
They haven’t junked it yet, thankfully. So one can switch back for now. But be warned.
10 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books
HPLinks #66.
* Due this month, the new book Twenty-five Years of Hippocampus Press: 2000-2025 (2025)…
This volume chronicles in meticulous detail all the publications of Hippocampus Press since its founding in 2000. Complete tables of contents are provided, and notes on the compilation of the books are provided by the publisher and in-house editor. All in all, this compilation is a complete guide to a pioneering small press in the weird fiction field.
* The forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long is holding its release date in December 2025, according to the current Hippocampus Press website. This date is for the Limited Edition Hardcover, an edition of 500, which appears to still be available for pre-order. It’s not yet known if the Brown University repository will release the scans of the letters simultaneously, or perhaps they may wait until the paperback appears.
* The Italian journal La Civilta Cattolica reviews the long letter Lovecraft wrote to Woodburn Harris, which is now translated into Italian and published as Potrebbe Anche non Esserci piu un Mondo…
the author is unparalleled in the century […] Lovecraft is a merciless pedagogue and an impassioned ideologue, intent on demolishing the three great illusions with which man tries to mitigate his dismay: romantic love, religion, and democracy. He is a racist, a nativist, a champion of the “humanistic man,” an extreme individualist.
* In Leicester University’s undergraduate Journal of Physics Special Topics, the short science paper “The Lack of Colour from Outer Space”…
We find that for photographs taken with a 1930s-style camera, the Outer Ones [in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness”] must have a refractive index that increases with wavelength, controlled by a dispersion coefficient of B = −0.59 µm2.
* A paywalled chapter in a new £90 academic Gothic Studies book, “Fluid Memories of Horror: The presence of water in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart”.
* Now freely available in open-access, the academic book chapter “Domestic Jungles and Murderous Megaflora: Plants in Italian Science Fiction”.
* In Danish, Hvad Maanen Bringer (2025), being a thick book of one-man comics which adapt Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales.
* Nick O’Gorman adapts H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple” as a 40-page comic-book. The Kickstarter has raised the funds, and is still live.
* John Coulthart this week revisits his artwork “H.P.L.”.
* Grognardia’s blog this week considers Lovecraft’s “The Other Gods”.
* This week SpraguedeCampFan has a long article on “Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith”.
* Leading Italian Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi has a new YouTube video talk on “Ungoliant and Cosmic Horror”. Ungoliant being Tolkien’s giant primordial light-eating ur-spider. YouTube can now auto-dub to English.
* New on YouTube, a tribute to Glenn Lord: Robert E. Howard’s Greatest Champion.
* New on CivitAI, a Heavy Metal Magazine Cover LoRA for use with the new Z-Image Turbo. Z-Image has excellent text rendering capabilities. Also of note, a 70’s Painted Art LoRA for Z-Image, which means fantasy and sci-fi paintings rather than David Hockney et al.
* The Internet Archive is running its annual contest for creative short films that use public domain material, especially the 1930 releases due on 1st January 2026. Make a 2-3 minute short film with an equally open soundtrack. The 1930 date suggests obvious linkages with Lovecraft. They offer no rules on AI makeovers of visual materials, but I expect they’ll want to easily discern your use of original footage and images. The deadline is 7th January 2026. To help entrants, here’s my quick survey of what’s (perhaps) entering the public domain in 2026, with a focus on fantasy, science-fiction and horror.
* At the DAZ Store, AB’s Master of Horror is a character pack for use with DAZ’s base Genesis 9 3D figure, which ships with the free DAZ Studio software. The character is not quite Lovecraft, but pretty close. And you could get closer since the latest advanced G9 series of base figures are intended for adaptation, having many sliders for easily tweaking facial features and other anatomy. He would however need suitable HPL-style hair and a 1920 style suit. For which you would have to look to the G8 content, since there’s nothing like that for G9 (I looked). All of which would make the purchase quite expensive — although in such cases the long-time DAZ users know that the trick is to wishlist expensive items and then pick them off during the frequent deep sales.
* And finally, there was once another Lovecraft at Coney Island. New on Archive.org is the Victoria Daily Times (British Columbia, 26th October 1893). The front page for that day relayed an agency report from Coney Island, New York City…
— End-quotes —
“So aviation ain’t come down in price even yet! Why the Pete do they wanna advertise it so much if they’s gonna keep it out of the poor woikingman’s reach! I’ll have to hook a ride on one of these transatlantick planes. If it doesn’t get across, I’ll have just as good a time exploring Atlantis’s weedy pinnacles & barnacled temples.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1928.
“… the rudimentary $3.50 taste [of aeroplane flight] I got at Onset in August [1929, Cape Cod] has given me quite a taste for super-nubian soaring; a taste which I ain’t yet had the opportunity to reindulge. I’d hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddarn useless speeding up of an already over-speeded life! But as devices for the amusement of a gentleman, they’re oke!” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1929.
“I know this has been done to death ever since Arthur Gordon Pym, yet none the less I think I’ll take a whack at it some day. I can imagine an aeroplane party landing on a peak far inland, & finding some glacier-crevasse leading down, down, down to the roofs of a silent & cryptical city of stone whose dimensions are not quite right — or I can imagine a natural (or artificial) phenomenon causing a large-scale melting of the ice …. with revelations better hinted at than told!” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, November 1930.
“It is puerile & silly to fancy that a man living from childhood in an aeroplane age could possibly have even approximately the same basic notions of distance & national isolation as a man living from childhood in an age of horses & galleys, ox-teams & canoes, impassable mountain ranges & unplumbed black forests.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.
“… there have been newspaper accounts of an incredible place in New Mexico — the Navajo country — called ‘The Desert of the Black Blood’. This is a ghoulish and desolate area of broken lava which is rifted by great chasms and which has probably never been penetrated beyond a few miles by any white man — or any living Indian for that matter. Aeroplanes, flying over it, have spied what look like ruins at its very heart; and local legends tell of an ancient and mysterious city whose crumbling walls now harbour carnivorous dragons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, December 1936.
10 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in Historical context
A small update on my “Uncle Eddy” article in the Lovecraft Annual 2022…
Lovecraft visits the Eddys, January 1928…
As for my hibernation — I ain’t ben outa the shanty sence Jany. 2, on which date I was damn near knocked out by de cold after payin’ honest C. M. Eddy a call. I hadda come home in a cab, & couldn’t relish my vittles for a week afterward.” — Lovecraft to Morton, 28th February 1928
Thus my newly discovered April 1929 address for the Eddys, at 317 Plain Street in Lower South Providence, could well be the address visited by Lovecraft in January 1928.
317 Plain Street, still there.
06 Saturday Dec 2025
Posted in Unnamable
It’s that time of year again, in which a few past gems will soon slip into the public domain. Authors who died in 1955, books published in 1930, plus some music and song. Here are some items I dug up, which may perhaps interest Tentaclii readers. Possibly there may be some I’ve missed, and if so please comment.
Writers who died in 1955:
Mindret Loeb Lord, a lesser Weird Tales writer in the late 1930s and 40s.
Nat Schachner, early U.S. advocate for manned space travel and a founder of the American Interplanetary Society. Prolific SF story writer of the 1930s (for Astounding and others) and also published a smattering of pulp horror tales.
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, first a romance writer and then (as the Depression deepened) a suspense/mystery writer for the early pulp paperbacks. Apparently also published one children’s fantasy novel titled Miss Kelly.
Wallace Stevens, poet. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered him, but his poetry is said to be… “abstract, fantastical, speculative, artificial, strange”.
Thomas Mann, author of the classic Death in Venice and others.
Teilhard de Chardin, the speculative/mystical thinker.
Ortega y Gasset, the famous Spanish author.
False alarms:
SF author Bryan Berry (aka Rolf Garner) did not die in 1955, as was once claimed. Research now shows 1966.
Tod Browning’s Dracula movie is said by some to be 1930, but appears to have been released in 1931.
Some pages on Wikipedia have Jean Cocteau’s surrealist first film The Blood of a Poet as 1930, but the release was 1932.
In nations with copyright expiry as ‘life +50 years’:
James Blish, SF author.
Murray Leinster, SF author.
P.G. Wodehouse.
Fiction published in 1930:
H. Rider Haggard, his late book Belshazzar.
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, the groundbreaking classic of modern SF.
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Skylark Three, featuring the first truly epic space-opera space battles.
Jack Williamson, The Cometeers, a space-faring SF novel.
Franz Kafka’s The Castle, in the first English translation.
Philip Wylie, Gladiator, a proto-superhero novel showing how a ‘real’ serum-induced superhero would struggle to live in 1920s America.
Hugh Lofting, The Twilight of Magic. By the Doctor Doolittle author, said to be a long fairy-tale novel for children. Update: U.S. copyright page says 1930, but apparently it did no appear in U.S. bookshops until 1931.
Andre Maurois, Patapoufs et Filifers. In English in 1941 as Fattypuffs and Thinifers. Short 92-page children’s comedy-fantasy of an underground world divided into the fat and the thin. Potential for a new translation/adaptation from the 1930 French original?
Movies of 1930:
Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers movie.
The Climax, said to be about mental telepathy, from a notable play on the topic. Later filmed again.
Hell’s Angels, the big-budget Howard Hughes aviation movie.
Just Imagine, an early science-fiction musical movie with impressive Metropolis-style sets and props, but little else. Its spaceship was later re-used for the Flash Gordon series. The versions that survive are said to have terrible visual quality and there are many gaps.
In Germany… “released in 1930 with the title Die Zwolfte Stunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens [‘The Twelfth Hour – A Night of Horror’], an ‘artistic adaptation’ of Noseferatu made by a Dr. Waldemar Roger.” I just found the mention of it, and I’m not sure if it survives.
Also in Germany, Alraune, which sounds like a sort of updated Frankenstein?
Also: Robert Riskin died 1955, the screenwriter for the big-budget movie of Lost Horizon (1937).
Non-fiction from 1930:
[Wikipedia:] “Romanticism’s celebration of euphoria and sublimity has always been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere; with the options of ghosts and ghouls, the grotesque, and the irrational. The name “Dark Romanticism” was given to this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in his lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, The Romantic Agony. … First English translation 1933″.
Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe. Popular science book by a leading British astrophysicist, possibly useful for understanding the state of knowledge of the cosmos in Lovecraft’s time. Appears to have been published in America in the same year. Also appears to have been read by Lovecraft.
Winthrop Packard, Wild Pastures. A “vivid and descriptive account of Packard’s experiences traveling through the vast and rugged terrain of the Western United States” as the culture of the Old West faded or changed.
The Mound Builders. A book-length reconstruction of the prehistoric American ‘mound builders’ culture, by an archeologist adhering to the knowledge of his time.
James Frazer, Myths of the Origin of Fire. Golden Bough author, possibly only a British publication?
Contemporary Illustrators of Children’s Books, a USA publication. Seemingly a survey rather than a directory?
Chemical Magic. USA, book on stage and trick-magic tricks done with chemicals and inks. Such a book would never be published today, but back then nearly every middle-class boy had a chemistry set at home.
Walter de la Mare, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe. USA book, with his essay on the topic followed by his very wide range of quotations on the theme as found in pre-1930 poetry and tales.
Magazines and illustrators:
Florence Susan Harrison, died 1955. Illustrated children’s books in a Pre-Raphaelite ‘knights and maidens’ style, adapted for story-book illustration.
01 Monday Dec 2025
HPLinks #65.
Slightly late this week, to take account of the fact that many Americans will have been away from their computers for Thanksgiving.
* Newly published, the academic Routledge book Graeco-Roman Horror and its Modern Reception: Unleashing Classical Dread (2025). The Introduction notes that Part II of the book…
… concludes with a case study of classical reception in the realm of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and the Hermetic deity Yog-Sothoth, [examining] how the concept of [Greek lettering, word uncapturable by OCR] from the Hermetica and the later motif of the Veil of Isis, once associated with solace after death, are reinterpreted in subsequent traditions. According to these traditions, discovering the true nature of reality is a terrifying experience. [The chapter] argues that Lovecraft inherits this tradition but makes a more ambiguous change to Hermetism, providing positive connotations to the initiatory experience.” This chapter itself claims… “Lovecraft’s use of Hermetism lies at the core of some of his conceptualization of cosmic horror.
* New in French in the major new academic chapter book Theologica Galactica (2025), “Grands Anciens versus Grande Race. A la croisee des horizons teleologiques entre theologie et science-fiction dans l’univers d’H.P. Lovecraft” (‘At the crossroads of teleological horizons between theology and science fiction in the universe of H.P. Lovecraft’)…
… the exploration of the Lovecraftian cosmos offers a teleological literary experience: that of the negation of the values of humanism, values which fundamentally imbued Kant during his lifetime. We propose here a hermeneutic outline: for us it is a question of trying to understand in what way this conflicting dialogue symbolically plays on the one hand the collapse of all theology, through the representation of a systematics of the superhuman, and on the other hand the failure of the dreams of science fiction, this time through the staging of the impotence of the paragon of science and technology in the face of the announcement of an apocalyptic annihilation.
* The forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026) will have the chapter “Children of the Mad Scientist: Lovecraft’s Dr. Munoz and Herbert West’s Zombies”.
* In Italian and newly on YouTube, Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi discusses “The Cats of Ulthar” with Nicola Nannerini. Note that YouTube can now do AI auto-dubbing into English.
* The latest monthly round-up from the German Lovecraftians gives dates for their annual national meet-up, set for “10th to 12th April 2026”. They note that the online version of their Lovecrafter magazine is still looking for a new editor, as is the more Lovecraft-the-man focussed Lovecraft Lore newsletter.
* The German newsletter also notes that… “The Bietzen Theatre Company is bringing “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to the stage as a live radio play in Saarbrucken.” And there’s news that another German theatrical Lovecraft production is now a film, which appears to be set to premiere in early 2026…
On 6th February 2026, the film The Model, a one-man adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” will be shown at the Bottger bookstore in the city of Bonn. This adaptation, originally performed as a theatrical production, was conceived by the artist and writer Thomas Franke. Franke will be present at the screening and will discuss, among other things, the genesis of his work.
* In France, Spectacle Detective Lovecraft a Lyon, which offers details of a stage-play, set for a run in the city of Lyon throughout January 2026.
A black and white detective comedy that mixes suspense, absurd comedy and fantasy. A retro atmosphere inspired by American thrillers from the 40s. By the Cocotte Company [Cocotte Compagnie], and entirely staged in black and white.
The play appears to imagine that Lovecraft had lived, and that during wartime he turned his knowledge and loathing of New York City to profit. Thus in 1943 he works in the city as a private detective, able to be “hired by Veronica to find her husband… and the Necronomicon”. Sounds great. Booking now, and hopefully there will be a filmed version available in due course.
* New on Archive.org, good auction images of a movie-prop Necronomicon.
* The latest SFFAudio Podcast #867 pairs “The Thing On The Roof” by Robert E. Howard and “The Nameless City” by H.P. Lovecraft. Librivox readings, then a 50 minute discussion — which is also summarised in text at the link above.
* The Grognardia blog has an article that considers Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City”, as a lesser transitional tale but one that “anticipates several of Lovecraft’s major later works”.
* Adventures Fantastic blog has an article considering Poul Anderson and the Vagaries of Publishing, musing on how some fine writers are subject to an undeserved posthumous decline into obscurity.
* One way of keeping neglected authors alive is excellent audiobooks of their work. Such as those being made now by Gates of Imagination, which last week released a reading of Robert E. Howard’s “The Footfalls Within”, a Solomon Kane tale. Given the pace of AI, we’re soon going to be able to auto-produce good soundscapes and music to accompany such audiobooks, generated by having the AI auto-analyse the text. Which may further enhance the appeal of older works. Ideally the audiobooks would have a new ‘triple track’ file-format, rather than a hard mixdown, thus enabling the listener to easily ‘turn off’ the accompanying music or soundscape if not required.
* And finally, taking of AI… The excellent new free Z-Image Turbo, released only last week, already has the free DaNecro Necronomicon Sketch Style LoRA ‘plug-in’. This takes advantage of Z-Image’s precision text-rendering to help you generate images of ‘Necronomicon pages’. The CivitAI page omits the information (found in a comment) that the prompt triggers are old hand drawn book or written book.
Sadly CivitAI is not available in the UK except via a good VPN, due to what is effectively government censorship. I read today that Substack is about to go the same way.
— End-quotes —
“Possibly I shall emerge from obscurity some day as the only genuine light poet in amateurdom. Since other amateur bards seem to be unable to achieve success in this medium, I shall perhaps aim for distinction in a field so little occupied, & hitherto neglected by me save for occasional effusions.” — the young Lovecraft has some hopes for his ability with producing “light verse”, if only to glean some fame in the little ‘zines of amateurdom, 1917.
“Poverty and obscurity have their advantages — for they practically guarantee us dead-broke old nonentities against the tragic humiliations and ignominies to which our more materially fortunate contemporaries are constantly exposed.” — Lovecraft to Barlow, 1936.
“Time enough to know the great when our work speaks for itself and spontaneously attracts their notice …. and if it never does that, we are just as well off in our merciful obscurity.” — Lovecraft to Miss Bonner, May 1936.
“Were this prodigious prospect anywhere within the easie reach and knowledge of the town, ‘twou’d be flockt with and noisy revellers on every Sunday and bank-holiday; but obscurity hath effected that unsully’d preservation which design is impotent to achieve, this region being far south of any great road, and north of a district very flat and notable for its want of pleasing scenes. I doubt if ten men in Providence are sensible it is on the globe.” — Lovecraft on the view from just to the left of the farmhouse of Mr. Law, owner of the Dark Swamp. Encountered on Lovecraft’s cross-country quest to find the Dark Swamp.
21 Friday Nov 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts
HPLinks #64.
* The German Lovecraftians have shipped their German-language Lovecrafter annual #14 in print. One of the themes of the twin-themed issue is Fritz Leiber Jr. and his “very special relationship with Lovecraft, particularly notable for his unique intellectual and empathetic quality.” The other theme, judging by the issue’s cover (which recalls 1970s comic-zines), is presumably related to traces of Lovecraft as found in 1965-1985 Marvel and DC comics?
* Currently under embargo, but with an abstract, “Conflicting Visions: H.P. Lovecraft and the Genesis of the Modern Weird Tale” (2025). The central claim appear to be that… “far more so than most Lovecraft scholars have acknowledged. Lovecraft reworked, and improved, material that he read in the pulps, which provided him with a warehouse of ideas and themes.”
* The latest edition of Literal: Latin American Voices considers Lovecraft translations from Bolivia…
… translating Lovecraft came to Colanzi in the middle of a creative crossroads. Jumping into the Providence author’s mind and grappling with his baroque style opened up new possibilities. One thinks of Holderlin, struggling with his German translation of Antigone…
* It’s always good to see a quality magazine being revived. The Pulp Super-Fan brings news that Illustration magazine is back.
* Syfy.com peeps into the French book Atlas Lovecraft and has some interior previews. The October 2025 hardcover is currently listing as “unavailable” on Amazon UK, though I guess there’s bound to be an English edition soon.
* Sprague de Camp Fan takes a long look at Clark Ashton Smith via his biography and the book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers.
* This week the Online Review of Rhode Island History provides some historical context for Lovecraft’s love of old houses. With a long look at the very popular celebration of Old Home Days in Rhode Island, annual events which show that Lovecraft was far from being an isolated enthusiast in such matters.
* New on YouTube, an on-site tour of some sites related to “H.P. Lovecraft’s Visit to Staten Island” (warning: swaying camera will quickly induce sea-sickness).
* Longbox of Darkness opens the box-lid on “Four Tales of the Weird: A Foray into Henry Kuttner’s Greatest Horror Stories”…
The Salem Horror” feels like Kuttner’s most direct homage to Lovecraft, combining New England Gothic atmosphere with Mythos entities. But where Lovecraft would have dwelt on cosmic insignificance and alien geometries, Kuttner keeps the horror grounded in very human terrors: invasion of the creative mind, loss of agency, and the corruption of one’s own work.
* John Coulthart on “The Return of the Crawling Chaos”.
* In France, press coverage of Campus Miskatonic (warning: VPN users are blocked). The weekend event starts this evening in Verdun, and details are at the Campus Miskatonic event website.
* In the USA, dates for NecronomiCon Providence 2026. No programming details yet, but there’s a 1970s-evoking ‘retro-groovy’ poster and the Vendors Hall bookings… “will open in late 2025 / early 2026”.
* A short review of the new indie puzzler-videogame The Dyer Expedition.
* Stuart Gordon’s 1980s movie of Lovecraft’s Re-Animator is having a new… “Dual 4K UHD/Blu-ray Limited Edition release, alongside Standard editions, on 15th December 2025”. Apparently it’s a box-set complete with special features, and a 120-page essay-booklet. I’m no expert on Lovecraftian movies, and I’m not sure if these are new or have been released before.
* I re-visited the seller of the bargain UK books of the Letters, as recently posted about and linked to here on Tentaclii. I’m glad I did, since I found he had added Click & Collect to those listings. Which means I’m pleased to say I’ve bagged the C.L. Moore, the Vernon Shea, and also the Morton volumes of Lovecraft’s letters, at bargain prices. Not dirt-cheap, but bargains compared to the high post-lockdown prices that books now command. The purchases are now on their way to a local pickup-point. I’ve long had the Morton letters in ebook, but it’ll be nice to now have these in print. Many thanks to my Patreon patrons for enabling such purchases.
* And finally, new on Archive.org is a good scan of the 69-page French catalogue for the exhibition Les 6 Voyage De Philippe Druillet.
Picture: Lovecraft in the clutches of night-gaunts, Druillet.
— End-quotes —
“Last summer and this spring I have spent much time exploring the colonial reaches of Staten Island” — Lovecraft to Moe from New York City, June 1925. He was also there in 1924, since a letter of September 1924 mentions an “all-day jaunt to elder regions” of Staten Island. Incidentally, most of the earliest wild western movies were made in New York, on Staten Island, before the industry moved out to Hollywood. Lovecraft’s good friend and fellow Kalem member Everett McNeil had been a professional screenwriter for these westerns. One of the key makers of New York westerns was a firm called KALEM.
Days before writing out the entire plot of “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft fearlessly went on a magnificently extensive solo all-night walk through the city, in defiance of Sonia, ending up on the Staten Island ferry. Quite a walk to take, alone at the dead of night in the less salubrious parts of a large city: “I could go where I darned please and when I darned please […] I set forth on a nocturnal pilgrimage after mine own heart; beginning at Chelsea […] & working south toward Greenwich […] south along Hudson St. to Old New York […] under Brooklyn Bridge [then back] toward The Battery [and as dawn broke, onto] a Staten Island ferry.” — Letters from New York, page 170.
“… truly untainted countryside near New-York — the rolling agrestick reaches of Staten-Island. I saw much more of it than I ever had before, visiting in particular the tangled colonial alleys of Stapleton, the archaick lanes of New-Dorp, and the steep streets of Richmond, which rests in a picturesque valley. In New-Dorp is the antient Britton-Cubberly house, a hoary moss-grown pile now employ’d as a Musaeum; whilst at Richmond are the finest hilltop court-house and valley churchyard that the length and breadth of the island can afford. I shall never forget my sight of Richmond in a glorious sunset, when I stood on a neighbouring hill behind the churchyard and saw the spires and roofs of the drowsy village below tipp’d with a magick and trans-figuring flame.” — Lovecraft’s “Observations on Several Parts of America”, 1928.
14 Friday Nov 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts
HPLinks #63.
* In the Books pages of The Korea Times newspaper, “Lovecraft’s madness finds new form in three Korean books”. Freely available online..
“Honford Star, one of the leading publishing houses for translated speculative Korean fiction, has released three books filled with daring tales under the Lovecraft Reanimated Project. They pay tribute to the American writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) […] two novellas and a graphic novel”
* Mexico had a large Gothic Fan Fest a few weeks ago, with ‘Poe & Lovecraft’ as the 2025 theme.
* PulpFest 2026, now calling for attendees to “Register for PulpFest 2026”.
* The venerable audiobook maker Horrorbabble has released Lovecraft’s Complete Cthulhu Mythos: Expanded Audiovisual Edition 2025. Free on YouTube.
* The new fundraiser to conserve the Robert E. Howard house for future generations is already now a quarter of the way to its goal, having raised $25k of the required $100k.
* DMR considers the maps for R.E. Howard’s Kull. This is a “part one” post, so more parts are coming.
* Dyerbolical has a new appreciation of the double-bill b-movie Die, Monster, Die!” (1965)… “When H.P. Lovecraft Invaded British Soil and Boris Karloff Became Cosmic Horror’s Last Gentleman”.
* Talking of horror movies I see that the next movie from film director Luc Besson (Fifth Element, Valerian) will be Dracula. It’s missed a Halloween release, but is apparently set for Christmas 2025. Sadly it’s been ‘re-imagined’ as more of a romantic love story than horror, and Besson says he’s not much interested in horror as a genre.
But I guess Besson is lucky to be able to make a film at all, after the huge flop of his $250m spectacular space opera Valerian. Which some may recall for being bloated with cringy ‘love interest’ and unaccountably lumbered with a mumbling and wooden lead-actor. Note however, that there is a fan-edit titled Valerian: No Love Lost Edition, which is said to more or less rescue the film.
* And talking of rising from the dead… popping up on Archive.org is Totem. This was yet another of those 1970s European comics magazine, akin to Heavy Metal. How many of these eurocomic monthly magazines were there? Anyway, the run of Totem is on Archive.org, offering another source of vintage fantasy, horror and sci-fi illustration.
* Rob Hansen’s weighty history THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 has a new 2024 edition, “corrected and updated”.
* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal Penumbra has published the 2025 edition.
* 70 years on, The Blog Without a Face appreciates Ray Bradbury’s The October Country in “70 Years Buried”.
* A $25 charity fundraiser for the videogames Sinking City Remastered and a bunch of the Sherlock Classics including the Lovecraftian The Awakened. A quality bundle, and the offer has two weeks to run. The charity being helped is the Malala Fund, which supports schooling for girls in cultures which frown on such things.
* Stable Diffusion image-makers may want to know about the new Nicholas Roerich Style for SDXL, available as a free LoRA (i.e. a style-guidance plugin). Readers will recall that Roerich was near the top of the list of Lovecraft’s favorite artists.
* Talking of AI, I find that Stable Audio Open can after all do human vocalisations. I recall that when I first installed it I had tried in some awkward way to get it to output text-to-speech, and had concluded that it had only ingested the non-human field recordings from Freesound. I was wrong. Thus makers of films, games, enhanced audiobooks and suchlike can indeed use this for generating royalty-free human utterance sounds (e.g. “shambling zombie moans horribly”). The 6Gb portable version takes about five minutes to load up on Windows 11, but thereafter does work… so long as you have a decent graphics-card (a NVIDIA 3060 12Gb or better).
* And finally, The Notes & Commonplace Book employed by the late H.P. Lovecraft (1938), in good clean plain-text on Wikisource.
— End-quotes —
“… good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone [New York City]. There is something in his handling of perspective & atmosphere which to me suggests other dimensions & alien orders of being — or at least, the gateways leading to such. Those fantastic carven stones in lonely upland deserts — those ominous, almost sentient, lines of jagged pinnacles — & above all, those curious cubical edifices clinging to precipitous slopes & edging upward to forbidden needle-like peaks!” — Lovecraft to James F. Morton, March 1937.
“Possibly I have mentioned to you at various times my admiration for the work of Nicholas Roerich — the mystical Russian artist who has devoted his life to the study & portrayal of the unknown uplands of Central Asia, with their vague suggestions of cosmic wonder & terror … surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time, & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen.” — Lovecraft to his aunt Lillian D. Clark, 21st/22nd May 1930.
“I live in such worlds of endurable memory & dream & cosmic expansion & escape as my feeble creative powers are able to devise for me — always staving off the suicide-line by illusions of some future ability to get down on paper that quintessence of adventurous expectancy which the sight of a sunset beyond strange towers, or a little farmhouse against a rocky hill, or a rocky monolith in Leng as drawn by Nicholas Roerich, invariably excites within me. I don’t believe, intellectually, that I can ever do it — but it is consoling to imagine that I might, through some accident.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.
12 Wednesday Nov 2025
Posted in Odd scratchings
A small Lovecraft Library for sale in the UK, on eBay. Including some bargain books of letters, and also an expensive copy of the firmly out-of-print graphic novel Some Notes on a Non-Entity: The Life of H P. Lovecraft. I’d have had two of the books of letters at £13 each, but sadly the seller doesn’t offer “Click & Collect” on purchases. Potential buyers should know that the Kleiner and Galpin letters were later published as expanded editions — the ones for sale here are likely the earlier editions.
06 Thursday Nov 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #62.
* New from Argentina, “El interiorismo del afuera en H.P. Lovecraft”. Freely available online, in Spanish.
In certain stories [by Lovecraft], it is possible to identify his careful attention to the specialized language associated with fine arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Its precision and abundance, as I propose in this article, is an attempt to bridge the gap between the artifacts and their perception that becomes a description by narrators and characters. The cultivation of this artistic knowledge, which is also expressed in his essayistic and epistolary corpus, allows us to consider Lovecraft as a well-versed interior decorator …
Offering some historical context here is the new exhibition review, “The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home”…
This engaging exhibition told the stories of four men — “bachelors” — who devoted themselves to designing their homes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New England. The exhibition beautifully displayed well-selected objects from the men’s homes and contextualized them with archival materials. An eloquent, witty accompanying book devotes chapters to each of their stories. […] they are situated in late nineteenth-century ‘bachelor culture’, which celebrated unmarried men and homosocial life within carefully crafted, comfortable, highly designed domiciles.”
* In the new edition of the journal Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, “Strange associates: Weird affect, weird fiction and the weird short story”. Freely available online.
… this paper investigates weird fiction’s relationship with the short story, and argues that the short story is perhaps the most ‘natural’ form for the weird.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog reports that he has finished his forthcoming Clark Ashton Smith biography. It weighs in at 164,000 words, so is presumably likely to appear in two volumes. “Will be published in the summer of 2026 by Hippocampus Press”.
* At Law and Liberty magazine, a Halloween article “Poe, Forevermore”. Freely available online.
* “Local librarian nominated for fantasy fiction award”… “The Dagon Collection is an anthology published as a fake 1929 auction catalog of items from a federal raid on the Esoteric Order of Dagon cult.”
* For Halloween, LibriVox offered its latest free audiobook collection Short Ghost and Horror Collection 080. The collection led with Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, closely followed by his “Cool Air”. Also includes tales by August Derleth and the Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.
* In videogames… Games Industry Ecosystem reports the “The producer of the first Diablo [game] has raised $500,000″ from an investment firm… “to develop Innsmouth Mysteries — a cooperative RPG [videogame] with elements of horror and extraction games, whose storyline is inspired by “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.
* In comic-books, Pullbox reviews the one-off The Cats of Ulthar, a Tale Reimagined (for children). With interior page images.
* H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025 poster, now available. Plus the streaming dates in December 2025.
* From Australia, a new Lovecraft miniature to buy…
* Archive.org has a new set of screen-captures of Lot #54 – Necronomicon. Being auction images for a sophisticated movie-prop Necronomicon used in the movie Army of Darkness.
* And finally, Fungi music, in which British art-boffins wire up live fungi and have them play musical synths.
— End-quotes —
“I seldom notice what the cover-design of any cheap magazine is. Only once in an age does anything worth a second glance appear. If Wright [editor of Weird Tales] were to use a really effective weird design the bulk of his half-illiterate readers wouldn’t know what it was all about, and would write scornful and ungrammatical letters to the Eyrie.” — Lovecraft to Conover, September 1936.
“Not many of us, even in this age, have any marked leaning toward public pornography; so that we would generally welcome any agency calculated to banish offences against good taste. But when we come to reflect on the problem of enforcement, and perceive how absurdly any censorship places us in the hands of dogmatic and arbitrary officials with Puritan illusions and no true knowledge of life or literary values, we have to acknowledge that absolute liberty is the lesser evil. [Their recent actions show that] censors actually do seek to remove legitimate and essential matter [… And yet] ironically enough, this same censorship blandly tolerates, through legal technicalities, infinite sewers full of frankly and frivolously nasty drivel without the least pretence of aesthetic or intellectual significance.” — Lovecraft in The National Amateur, March 1924.
“I don’t know as it does much good to interfere with the vices & vulgarities of plebeians [through censorship]. The sooner they go to the devil, the sooner they’ll die off, gordam ’em.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1927. Lovecraft deftly anticipates the current state of pornography + birth-rate demography.
“I’ll endorse a censorship [of art and literature only after] the Watch and Ward Society have disposed of the blunders of Eddie Guest and of the designers of houses and public buildings of the 1860-1890 period. There is some ugliness that ought to be abolished by law in the interest of the good life! Down with French roofs and imitation Norman Gothic ….. keep the children from the degrading contamination of scroll-saw porch trimmings and octagonal cupolas and Richardsonian quasi-Romanesque ….. fie on the immortality of cast-iron lawn deer!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1931. The Watch and Ward Society were a notorious pro-censorship group based in Boston, New England. Eddie Guest was probably Edgar Albert Guest, the sentimental popular poet then known as “the People’s Poet”.
29 Wednesday Oct 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts
HPLinks #61.
* New on eBay, two postcards from Lovecraft and one from his friend Everett McNeil (then very elderly, on his way to Tacoma and thus weeks from death), all sent to Talman.
i) The card on the left is unpublished, judging by the internal dating: Talman appears to be honeymooning in New York City, “Poor old Mac is going west Oct 20”, and Lovecraft gives Talman his Barnes St. phone number (“DExter 9617”) in anticipation of a visit from the newlyweds.
ii) Also unpublished. Everett McNeil offers the useful information “I have left behind me most of my books”, and we also get the exact Tacoma address he had moved to. No mention of where all his Lovecraft letters (still missing, today) were, though. It sounds to me like he was keeping the rent paid on his New York flat for a few months, just in case of a return, and that the Lovecraft letters were likely there along with the books. But then the flat would have been cleared after his sudden death. Presumably any New York bookdealer and/or family members would have had no idea of the $$$s they were throwing away, as they discarded what would now be perhaps a million dollars worth of letters. Note that this flat was not the Hell’s Kitchen flat where the Kalems met, but a new one he had for a short time due to some unexpected book royalties… “in Astoria at the foot of Ditmars Blvd.”
iii) The 1929 Lovecraft card is partly unpublished. Letters to Wilfred B. Talman only has it (p. 119) as a brief excerpt, as previously printed in The Normal Lovecraft.
* Newly listed on the HPLHS Store, Ken Faig Jr’s new scholarly essay collection More Lovecraftian People and Places (2025).
* We’re still waiting for the long-awaited Lovecraft in Florida (the book), but for now there’s a completed Lovecraft in Florida (the screen documentary)… “Mike T. Lyddon’s new short documentary film Lovecraft in Florida is now in the mix for the 2025 – 2026 film festival season.” This appears to be unrelated to its namesake book, except via the topic.
* A Reddit review of the CD of The Curious Sea Shanties of Innsmouth.
* Freely available online, the “Blood and Insight: Monstrosity in Bloodborne” (2021). Originally in a small journal from the Gothic Studies crowd that appears to now be defunct, with its website dead — Aetemum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. The article has this week popped up again on HCommons.org. The author makes special reference to Lovecraft in videogames.
* Everything Theatre has a theatre review of a recent staging of H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” at the Old Red Lion Theatre, London. The staging had a 1920s setting, and it sounds like the show was a fine success.
* For Halloween DMR Books blog outlines “The Long Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe”.
* Decadent Serpent has a long footnoted essay on “Horror To Some Purpose: H.P. Lovecraft and Colin Wilson”. Freely available online.
* Blavatsky News has a Halloween post on “Blavatsky & H.P. Lovecraft”. Who knew that… “Blavatsky herself penned some intriguing occult tales, published in Theosophical magazines, gathered in [the collection] Nightmare Tales”. Actually, now… there’s an interesting starting hook for an alt-history fiction: the head of the Theosophist Soc. hires Lovecraft as Blavatsky’s ghost-writer circa 1931 (literally her ghost-writer, as she died in 1891), at a price he can’t resist. Then, as he takes a long wished-for trip to Britain on the handsome proceeds, her spirit actually starts to contact him from the great beyond.
* A new “Lovecraft-inspired” one-off 33-page comic-book of the First World War in Europe, “Whispers Beyond the Trench”. Is that an alt-history Lovecraft on the cover, joined up and shipped to France? Only Kickstarter backers get to find out, it seems. Since that’s the only way to get the comic.
* The Weird Tales brand is set to offer a new comics anthology via Kickstarter. Sadly it’s not a set of linked true-life tales and poignant biographical vignettes drawn from the magazine’s rich publishing history. But rather a collection of new horror strips containing, among others, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Skulls in the Stars” novella, plus two Mythos tales by modern writers.
* The Online Review of Rhode Island History this week has a new page of Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916. Photos from the City Hall, not of the City Hall. One of these reveals something I’d never noticed… “In the upper window of the Market House is the Masonic symbol.” Removed, after it became the Board of Trade house. Also interesting to know is that the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Providence served as a substantial membership library, having… “a 4,000-book library with 70 daily and weekly newspapers”. One wonders if similar libraries were part of the attraction of YMCAs, for Lovecraft on his travels?
* Por Por boggles at some of the (other) figures in Penthouse magazine for October 1978… “This October issue of Penthouse had a lengthy article, ‘Science Fiction Fever,’ by journalist Tom Nolan. The article covers the science fiction boom then sweeping the popular culture.” The post reminds today’s readers of the power of print SF publishing in those days, with Penthouse revealing that Starlog magazine was circulating 500,000 copies per issue, and Bantam Books had sold 17 million Ray Bradbury paperbacks.
* The Shadowed Circle has published a “50th Anniversary Edition” of Gangland’s Doom (1974), one of the first non-fiction books on the long-running pulp magazine character The Shadow.
* In Chicago, the large art exhibition Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination, on now at The Art Institute of Chicago.
* And finally… thinking of fleeing the UK, before the tragic Autumn Budget announcements? I see the increasingly popular expat destination of Dubai now has a special museum and cafe to make fantasy fans feel welcome, Legendarium Fantastic Museum Dubai. The slick website alone is impressive, and gives a crisp and colourful view of the themed exhibit rooms.
— End-quotes —
“That metropolis [New York City in 1922, when Lovecraft first saw it and was not yet disenchanted] wouldn’t be much without honest old Mac! And because it is [now] a vision-metropolis; “out of space, out of time”, and without linkage to the mundane, the material, and the perishable; it indeed never need be without him. Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces, and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod [as a] phantom among phantoms…” — Lovecraft fondly recalling his passed-way friend Everett McNeil.
In the notorious Hell’s Kitchen slum, McNeil’s… “little flat [is] an oasis of neatness and wholesomeness with its quaint, homely pictures, rows of simple books, and curious mechanical devices which his ingenuity concocted to aid his work — lap boards, files, etc., etc. [Due to poverty, for many years] He lived on meagre rations of canned soup and crackers,” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 114.
“I recall the first time I saw him — at Dench’s, by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [by the old then-rural Dutch ‘marsh country’ of New York City]. He used to like to go there […] And I recall how he shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination […] and through it all the little white-haired guide plodding along with his simple, idyllic dreams of sunny Wisconsin farm-worlds, and green, beckoning, boy-adventure worlds…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 94. McNeil was a farm-boy from Dunkirk Township, Wisconsin. He upped and walked to New York to seek his fortune, aged 32. He achieved success as a professional writer there from 1906 onwards, got into the movies and then became one of the best-known writers of historical-adventure books for boys. Despite this his publisher Dutton trapped him into a series of what Lovecraft called “vile starvation contracts”.
“And I remember when good old Mac display’d Hell’s Kitchen to Little Belknap and me — a first glimpse for both of us. Morbid nightmare aisles of odorous Abaddon-labyrinths and Phlegethontic shores — accursed hashish-dreams of endless brick walls budging and bursting with viscous abominations and staring insanely with bleared, geometrical patterns of windows — confused rivers of elemental, simian life with half-Nordic faces twisted and grotesque in the evil flare of bonfires set to signal the nameless gods of dark stars — sinister pigeon-breeders on the flat roofs of unclean teocallis, sending out birds of space with blasphemous messages for the black, elder gods of the cosmic void — death and menace behind furtive doors […] fumes of hellish brews concocted in obscene crypts…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 122.
My detailed biography of McNeil is titled Good Old Mac.
22 Wednesday Oct 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH
HPLinks #60.
S.T. Joshi’s Blog brings news of the English translation of A Guide to Lovecraft’s Providence… “a 131-page booklet with numerous full-colour illustrations of important sites relating to Lovecraft in his native city.” The Amazon blurb reveals it to be the product of… “four tours carefully prepared on the spot, original maps and photos, quotes, biographical, historical, and topographical references to accompany you step by step on the tracks of Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. Available now as a paperback.
* Now officially free on Archive.org, Murray Ewing’s new biography I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay. Author of A Voyage to Arcturus (2025). Also available for purchase in hardback.
* A forthcoming book in French will attempt to answer the question… “How could an obscure ultra-conservative writer, born one hundred and thirty years ago, become omnipresent and central in current pop culture?”, seemingly via a broad 500-page survey of the life and work. L’Oeuvre de Lovecraft: Terreur cosmique et angoisse humaine is due in early December 2025 from Third Editions.
* From Japan, a detailed abstract and outline for “Negative Jungian Psychology: The Abyss of the Unconscious and Monstrous Archetypes” (2025). Suggests that… “archetypes can manifest not only as symbolic patterns such as the Hero or the Mother, but also as monstrous and incomprehensible figures akin to the deities of the Cthulhu Mythos”
* I spotted, too late, a public talk on Lovecraft given at the Swedenborg Library in Chicago on 21st October 2025. Unusual for being from a highly experienced academic folklorist interested in Lovecraft. Some listings suggested a possible new book. However, I now think this was artifact of the event service’s broad-brush tagging of ‘Literary Events – Talks – Debates – Book Launch in Chicago, United States’, and that there is no new book. The speaker was the author of “A last defense against the dark: Folklore, horror, and the uses of tradition in the works of H.P. Lovecraft”, which appeared in the Journal of Folklore Research in 2005. He can be heard talking on the topic on a 2022 podcast “Folklore and Lovecraft with Dr. Tim Evans”, which is freely available online. And if you search for “A last defense against the dark” on Google Scholar you should be able to find it free via a Academic.edu copy (Scholar has a special relationship with them, allowing free download for non-members, so I can’t link it here).
* The latest edition of the scholarly journal Mythlore is mostly Tolkien, but there are also book reviews of Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature; Once Upon a Place: Forests, Caverns & Other Places of Transformation in Myths, Fairy Tales & Film; and Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. Freely available online.
* PulpFest calls for contributions to The Pulpster 35, their magazine/journal for the forthcoming 2026 event.
* In Delaware, the substantial exhibition Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection runs until 9th December 2025. Accompanied by a 200-image catalogue. The show includes original… “rare masterpieces that defined the visual language of beloved classics” in fantasy and science-fiction.
* The Robert E. Howard Foundation has put out a call to “Save the REH Museum” in Cross Plains, Texas.
… the hard-working folks of Project Pride in Cross Plains have restored and cared for the House since acquiring it back in the 1980s, their small volunteer army cannot address the extensive repairs that will be needed. Professional restoration is required for this 100+ year old home on the National Historical Register, and it is needed now, before the damage gets worse.
* Also in REH this week, Spraguedecampfan’s blog takes a long look at Robert E. Howard and his School Writings (now published), and on YouTube Gates of Imagination has a new fine free audiobook reading of a Solomon Kane tale, “The Hills of the Dead”.
* In the world of Lovecraft theatre, this week I read that… “The Ada Shakespeare Company will present ‘Tales from the Shadows’, an original stage adaptation of two short stories: “Cool Air” by H.P. Lovecraft and and “The Shadow on the Moor””. In Ada, Oklahoma, from October 23rd through 26th October 2025.
* And finally, in 1920s Lovecraftian gaming, this week there’s news that Asmodee Picks Up Cthulhu: Death May Die…
In a move that has sent ripples across the tabletop community, global gaming giant Asmodee has officially acquired the intellectual property (IP) and games for Cthulhu: Death May Die. This acquisition is more than just a transfer of ownership; it’s a profound inflection point for the popular miniatures game…
— End-quotes —
“Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock” — Lovecraft, in the tale “Polaris”.
“… the refulgent orange-red star Arcturus. This orb is of great size, even as stars are reckoned, being about 100 times larger than our own sun. It is also distinguished for its rapid “proper motion”, it having traversed a distance in the sky equal to twice the apparent diameter of the moon since the days of classical antiquity. This fact reminds us that, although we are accustomed to call the stars “fixed”, they are actually rushing through space at incredibly rapid rates; only their enormous distance giving them that comparatively unchanging aspect which we know. Delicate instruments are able to record the changes in a star’s position during many years; and the spectroscope, whose prismatic image or “spectrum” of an object moves in one direction when the object is receding and in the other direction when it is approaching, enables us to learn that many stars apparently at rest are in reality moving in the line of sight; that is, moving exactly toward or away from us. The rates at which the stars are travelling differ greatly. All are very high, yet the distances involved are such that a period of over 3000 years is necessary for us to perceive any distinct alterations in the figures of the constellations.” — Lovecraft, “June Skies”, writing for a popular New England rural audience, June 1917.
“It does not matter what happens to the [human] race — in the cosmos the existence or non-existence or the earth and its miserable inhabitants is a thing of the most complete indifference. Arcturus would glow just as cheerfully if the whole solar system were wiped out.” — Lovecraft, “Nietzscheism and Realism”, 1921.
“All is chance, accident, and ephemeral illusion — a fly may be greater than Arcturus, and Durfee Hill may surpass Mount Everest — assuming them to be removed from the present planet and differently environed in the continuum of space-time.” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923. An initial musing on the new Theory of Relativity, for which a first scientific proof had only come a month earlier.
“A slight change of angle could turn [Randolph] Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanil itself…” — “Through The Gates of the Silver Key”, Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, finished April 1933. Lovecraft is using ‘plastic’ in the scientific sense of ‘highly malleable and easily moulded’.
15 Wednesday Oct 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts
HPLinks #59.
Something of a ‘video and films special issue’, this week. Purely by chance, though I guess it may also be partly because universities and academics are swamped with work due to the start of the new teaching-year.
* PulpFest.com has a page collecting many links to Recordings and Reviews of PulpFest 2025.
* Feuilleton takes an extended look at Innsmouth, Japanese-style. This being the…
Japanese TV [movie] adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which was written and directed by Chiaki Konaka in 1992.
* Also in movies…. new on Reddit is an appreciation of “Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), an underrated Lovecraftian masterpiece”. Looking into it, I learned that the movie was butchered by the studio execs for cinema release, and as of 2025 there’s still no Director’s Cut. You either love or hate the 1983 result, it seems, judging by reviews. Some love it enough that a remake was seriously planned in 2023. Though many reviews by horror buffs are negative, I must warn readers, so don’t blame me if you view and find it unsatisfactory. The early-80s Tangerine Dream soundtrack doesn’t endear it to some. However, a little more digging by me revealed two possible aids to liking the movie: 1) a basic low-res fan-edit on Archive.org which simply splices on the longer and apparently more coherent ending (used for a TV broadcast); and 2) a five-issue mini-series comic of the original novel, with a single-volume hardcover graphic-novel version announced in May 2021 (the latter seems to have sunk without trace, perhaps due to Covid). Amazon UK “knows a’ nurthing” about the comic in any form. The 2005 comic adaptation can however be found on Archive.org, and it may help fill gaps in the extended movie.
* An abstract for the recent Netherlands conference paper “Evil in Cosmic Horror” (2025). Focuses on movies, and specifically Event Horizon (1997).
* More news of theatre/music activity in Germany. New Original Soundtrack For New Lovecraft-Inspired Theater Production in Germany…
Westend Theater Wuppertal invited the music project Dos Asmund to compose music for a new theatre production based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The result is the soundtrack for the play LOVECRAFT. The premiere took place on 11th October 2025. Additional public dates are already being planned.
The resulting album is now on Bandcamp.
* I see the Italian heavy metal singer and comics maker Enrico Teodorani is creating various Lovecraft tribute and Lovecraftian comic-strips. His growing list of horror strips alerts me to 2025 Italian collections such as Le tenebre di Lovecraft, from the Associazione Culturale ESESciFi, and Il libro blasfemo di Cthulhu from Dagon Press (Italy). Several of his strips are in the new Eyrie #32 (2025) which can be had on Amazon, and his blog reports… “Two short comic stories by Enrico Teodorani (one of which is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft) will be published in issue no. 4 of the Bloody Gore Comix anthology”.
* Le tenebre di Lovecraft turns out to be an illustrated 420-page anthology of stories + essays and comics, published in Italy in August 2025.
* A German hardcover edition of Providence: Omnibus: Alan Moore’s Lovecraft-Mythos endlich als hochwertige Gesamtausgabe is listing on Amazon, set for 21st October 2025.
* Also in comics, the creator of Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom now has his new Cats of Ulthar: A Tale Reimagined. A 26-page one-off comic-book published August 2025, apparently aimed at child readers. It…
follows a family of cats on the eve of returning home, where a father recounts to his children the tale of their grandfather, which begins as a bedtime story and becomes a dark memory of captivity, vengeance, and rebirth.
* And finally, something scholarly (phew…). Footnote remover, a new free online service to remove all footnotes and in-text superscript numbers from a PDF file. Perhaps useful if, for instance, you wanted to make a text-to-speech audiobook of an annotated text. Or ingest something like Lovecraft’s letters into an AI.
