HPLinks #70 – full PhD, reviews, Spectral Realms, CAS conference,

22 Thursday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #70.

* The PhD thesis Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025) is now available for full download. Previously there was only a long abstract.

* Hippocampus Press has newly listed Spectral Realms No. 24. Full of new poems, plus the new S.T. Joshi article “Clark Ashton Smith: Before The Star-Treader”.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post has his report on the recent Clark Ashton Smith conference…

All in all, the conference was a rousing success. The panels were videotaped, and I imagine they will be uploaded onto YouTube or some other such platform in due course of time. We hope to reprise the event — and make it span two days rather than just one — in two years’ time.

* The contents list of the new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida.

* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews the book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, and also usefully describes the appendices.

* SpraguedeCampFan reviews Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard, in part one of a series of posts.

* The Robert E. Howard Days organisers note “Only Five Months until Howard Days!”.

* More scans of the old fanzine Dagon have arrived on Archive.org. Mostly gaming and Mythos tales, but note that Dagon No. 15 (1986) has Robert M. Price on “Mythos Names and How to Say Them”.

* The Bayou Film Festival (Lafayette, USA) will premiere Dreams of a Dead God on 24th January 2026. The new 36-minute movie tells of the events in Louisiana after the events of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Part one-shack drama and part ‘found-footage’, it seems.

* The Humble Bundle website has a Chaosium RPG bundle, with proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund. Valid for the next two weeks. Talking of wildlife, note the the full bundle also includes the books Petersen’s Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors and Malleus Monstrorum Vol. 1 Monsters of the Mythos.

* An announcement for Lovecraftian Days 2026, set for the city of Prague from 9th-16th April 2026. This will be a…

week-long celebration dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror legacy and its influence on gaming. The festival will bring together dozens of publishers and developers worldwide for a week of new game announcements and releases, exclusive demos and early access opportunities, special discounts, developer interviews, and community events.

* And finally, “a bizarre [theme-park] attraction very much inspired by the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. It was located in a park called Mirapolis”. That was the first theme-park in France and it was based around attractions inspired by imaginative literature. Parts of the Lovecraft section’s mechanicals were later re-used in a U.S. dinosaur attraction in 1994. On YouTube, theme park historian Poseidon Entertainment goes in search of “The Lost Lovecraftian Horror Ride”.

— End-quotes —

“… he [Lovecraft] tried all the soporific stunts at Revere” [… we went] “to Revere Beach, where Mr. Lovecraft dropped eighty-five feet and was all over.” (Mrs. Miniter, recalling Lovecraft on a roller coaster / water-drop ride at the Boston Revere Beach, in Lovecraft Remembered, page 83).

“Lovecraft and Albert Sandusky did the eighty-five-foot-drop switchback three times in succession [at Revere] and complained bitterly of the tameness of it all […] Picture, if you will, the philosophical form of one Henry Padget-Lowe, Edward Softly, Theobald Jr., H.P.L. [i.e. Lovecraft and his psuedonyms], popping out and coming bouncing toward us. It was a screaming scream.” — George Houtain, recalling the same day at Revere Beach.

As well as riding all the rides, according to Randy Everts Lovecraft also had his palm read by a palmist and answered a ‘psychological questionnaire’ in the sideshows at Revere.

He also passed by Revere Beach on his way to Salem a little later, on a more sedate set of rails…

“I set out for my favourite antique Salem region. This time I went on the electrick coaches [electric tram-cars], twice having to change (at Revere Beach and at Lynn) before attaining Salem. ‘Tis a ride of extream attractiveness, and must have form’d a diversion of prime magnitude in the days when open cars ran direct from Boston to Salem. But all things decay, and nothing more so than the rural tramways of New-England.” — Lovecraft to Galpin and Long, 1st May 1923.

HPLinks #69 – Derleth at the Weird Tales offices, CAS conference report, Lovecraft’s personal museum, and more

14 Wednesday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #69.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog for 31st December 2025 has a long free extract from the newly-published August Derleth Sac Prairie Journal for 1939. A diary in which we get vivid glimpses of… “Derleth’s preparation of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others” and an account of a visit to the Weird Tales offices under Farnsworth Wright.

* The Catholic subscription-only podcast Reconquest (Episode 498) this week considers “Lovecraft’s Lore and Catholicity: A Stark Contrast”.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has it that there’s a Truth Seeker “podcast on Lovecraft and religion” on Vimeo. Yes, Vimeo still exists it seems. Sadly I couldn’t get past Vimeo’s blocker-bot, but perhaps you can.

* From Mexico in Spanish, in the latest edition of the open-access journal Revista de Filosofia, “Los cuentos del gusano. Verdad, evolucion y antinatalismo en la ficcion de lo extrano de H.P. Lovecraft y Thomas Ligotti” (‘Truth, evolution and antinatalism in the strange fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti’). Freely available online, and these days easily auto-translated from the PDF.

* There’s a new £140(!) academic book in the Palgrave Gothic series, Uncanny Doubles: Doppelgangers, Twins, Clones and the Gothic (2026). One of the chapters is “Lovecraftian Dualities and Nonhuman Bodies: The Case of the Whateley Twins in “The Dunwich Horror”.

* Kalimac’s Corner blog reports from the recent U.S. conference on Clark Ashton Smith.

* New on Archive.org, an early work-in-progress PDF of Clark Ashton Smith In Early Fiction Magazines, with covers where possible.

* Deep Cuts considers “Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner and “A Glimpse of H.P.L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana. The latter post also digs up the drawings by…

“Betty Wells Halladay from [Lovecraft’s shelf collection of] objects [, as later] owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library. Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945”

* The same drawings are also new on Archive.org, found in good scans of the booklet of memoirs Rhode Island On Lovecraft (1945) (first and second edition).

* The new documentary film Lovecraft in Florida (no relation to the new book, it seems) is to have its world premiere at the Pensacon convention (Pensacola, Florida) in February 2026.

* New Pulp Tales has a new interview with author Ramsey Campbell. The short text-only interview is… “the first in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month”.

* SFcrowsnest reviews the magazine Cryptology #4 (July 2025) and notes that…

“Writer Will Murray’s second part of his look at Charlton horror comics is a demonstration of creators being given freedom to do what they liked because the company couldn’t care less – as long as their printing presses could be kept running continually. It also allowed new talent to learn their craft before moving onto the more profitable companies.”

* TDT podcast blog has a quick review in Spanish of the new Spanish book Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft: La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1 (‘We will always have Lovecraft: The influence of his cosmic horror on popular culture. Vol. 1.’). I also found what looks like a video from the book’s author at a university repository, talking about the new book in Spanish.

* The major new biography The Buried Man: A Life of H. Rider Haggard (2025).

* Les Heliocrates podcast examines the broad themes of Lovecraft & R.E. Howard: a correspondence beyond its time. In French, but YouTube autodubs it into English. Skip to three minutes in, to get to the start of talking about the letters.

* A new print magazine, RevERBerate: A Magazine of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The third issue moves to the print format, and apparently includes a survey of… “the early African explorers whose feats influenced Burroughs’ writing”.

* E. Hoffmann Price’s “Satan’s Garden” is a new free public-domain audiobook on LibriVox. 158 minutes.

* From Poland, the undergraduate final dissertation, Arabowie oczami Ameryki. Jak ukazywano swiat arabski w amerykaaskich magazynach pulpowych dwudziestego wieku (2025) (‘Arabs through the eyes of America: How the arab world was portrayed in American pulp magazines of the twentieth century’). Not online, but there is a cogent English abstract. Looks like the author takes a balanced view as a historian, and I’m guessing that (if an editor asked) it might become a trimmed English translation in a pulp history ‘zine?

* Everything you need to know about Selling at PulpFest 2026.

* And finally, Francois Baranger is lining up further editions of his richly illustrated large-format Lovecraft books. His “The Haunter of the Dark” will be hovering over the bookshops in the late autumn of 2026 in French, while his “Shadow over Innsmouth” is apparently due in English later in 2026.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft was fond of small sculpture and bas-relief tiles, and at the end of his life the shelves of his small bedroom area was adorned with gifts of small figurative sculptures made by Robert Barlow, C.A. Smith, ancient artefacts given to him by Loveman, and curious items picked up on his travels.

“My generous host [Loveman, in New York City] presented me with two fine museum objects (don’t get envious, O Fellow-Curator! [i.e. Morton]) — to wit, a prehistorick stone eikon from Mexico, and an African flint implement, with primitively graven ivory handle” — Lovecraft to Morton in January 1933, Selected Letters IV.

“I saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s […] Loveman quite overwhelmed me by giving me several objects for my collection of antiquities — a real Egyptian ushabti (small funerary statuette) 5000 years old, a Mayan stone idol of almost equal antiquity, & a carved wooden monkey from the East Indian island of Bali.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, January 1934.

“As for my newly-acquired Bird of Space … he looks something like this — standing about a foot tall. He is carved out of a piece of horn — I don’t know of what animal, though the colour is black — & highly polished & lacquered on the exterior. Wings & feathers — as well as eyes — are suggested through some very delicate engraving. The posture of the bird — as if looking into the sky preparatory to a hop-off for unknown trans-galactic reaches — combined with its generally weird aspect to suggest the title Bird of Space. […] Loveman was amazingly generous to give me this object. I had admired it for years in his home, but never thought of hinting for it. On the last night of my visit we fell to talking about it, & as I left he pressed it into my hands as a final thunderbolt surprise. That’s just like him! I’ve put the Bird on the top of a new low bookcase in company with a Japanese idol & a Kim Ling vase. Some time I mean to take a photograph of this & other objects in my ‘museum’ — and when I do I’ll send you prints. I have an Egyptian ushabti, Mayan images, & other odd & curious things …” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

HPLinks #68 – Lovecraft in Florida, Borges reconsidered, DOOM, the London Lovecraft Festival, and more…

30 Tuesday Dec 2025

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HPLinks #68.

* Just released, the long-awaited new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Available in hardback or paperback, and I see the book is already on Amazon UK.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the British fanzine Dagon 17 (April 1987). Among other items, there’s an article by Robert M. Price on Lovecraft’s uses of Theosophy, and another by Will Murray asking “Was there a real Brown Jenkin?”.

* In the latest edition of the journal Revista Helice, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2025-2026), “Que opinaba Borges de Lovecraft?: nueva revision de argumentos” (‘What did Borges think of Lovecraft?: A new review of the arguments’). Freely available online.

* Feuilleton has a long article on “Illustrating Hyperborea”, which surveys the illustrations for the tales of Clark Ashton Smith.

* Grognardia considers Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” (1922).

* An unusual self-published pamphlet in Italian, newly published on Amazon, Tolkien vs Lovecraft: Confronto sul concetto di Morte (‘Tolkien vs Lovecraft: A comparison of their concepts of death’).

* The 2026 Robert E. Howard Awards are open for nominations.

* The Thorgal artist is to have a major new exhibition, opening in France in June 2026. Thorgal is a long-running Norse adventurer character who stars in a series of Belgian BD’s (short graphic-novels in the form of finely-produced oversized books).

* “The Magic Lantern Call Of Cthulhu”, to be presented at the Drayton Arms Theatre in February 2026. On other dates in that month, also a staging of “From Beyond”, and a new “Dunwich Horror Opera”. All part of the London Lovecraft Festival, 6th-22nd February 2026 in London, UK. Tickets on sale 1st January.

* And finally, new on YouTube is All the Lovecraftian references in DOOM: The Dark Ages. Which is the latest blockbuster entry into the DOOM series of videogames, and a game which is said to be very indebted to Lovecraft.

— End-quote —

from “BELLS” (Lovecraft, December 1919).

I hear the bells from yon imposing tower;
The bells of Yuletide o’er a troubled night;
Pealing with mock’ry in a dismal hour
Upon a world upheav’d with greed and fright.
[…]
In fancy yet I view the modest spire;
The peaked roof, cast dark against the moon;
The Gothic windows, glowing with a fire
That lent enchantment to the brazen tune.
Lovely each snow-drap’d hedge beneath the beams
That added silver to the silver there;
Graceful each cot, each lane, and all the streams,
And glad the spirit of the pine-ting’d air.
[…]
But on the scene a hideous blight intrudes;
A lurid nimbus hovers o’er the land;
Demoniac shapes low’r black above the woods,
And by each door malignant shadows stand.
The jester Time stalks darkly thro’ the mead;
Beneath his tread contentment dies away.
Hearts that were light with causeless anguish bleed,
And restless souls proclaim his evil sway.
Conflict and change beset the tott’ring world;
Wild thoughts and fancies fill the common mind;
Confusion on a senile race is hurl’d,
And crime and folly wander unconfin’d.

 

mead = a field of thick moist meadow-grass

HPLinks #67 – Lovecraft’s artists, “Zann” in China, Icons catalogue, Lovecraft’s arms, and more…

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

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HPLinks #67.

* In the new 2025 edition of the journal Synergies, “”There’s something those fellows catch — beyond life”: Visual Suggestions in Lovecraft’s Narrative” ($ paywall). From Italy, in English, the article is on Lovecraft and fine art and…

highlight[s] the visual roots of Lovecraftian aesthetics, [defining] its main characteristics, tracing them in the works of artists explicitly referenced by Lovecraft, such as Johann Heinrich Fussli, Francisco Goya, Anthony Angarola, Sidney Sime, Gustave Dore, John Martin, his friend Clark Ashton Smith and Nikolaj Roerich. Furthermore, by adopting a reversed perspective, the essay also aims to suggest that Lovecraft’s literary universe can influence the interpretation of the artworks he admired.

Yes, that can be true. When one looks at what happened to the people of the region Roerich so ably painted, it’s a real-life horror-story on a vast scale.

* An interesting obscurity I discovered via Archive.org. Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” as published in the China Mail newspaper (English-language, Hong Kong under British rule), in time for Christmas 1932.

* It’s reported that South America’s 7th H.P. Literary Festival (2025) has been successfully held simultanously in Mexico and in Argentina. The organisers have a Linktree page at Avalon Club de Rol, but unfortunately it appears their Festival information is only online at Instagram. Though perhaps the Argentine wing of the event is that mentioned by S.T. Joshi in his latest blog post (9th December 2025).

* Now available, the contents-list for the sumptuous new ‘Icons of the Fantastic’ exhibition catalogue…

Plate 1. is Hannes Bok’s “Pickman’s Model” (1950). The font and formatting of the online contents-list does not reflect the fine design of the book’s interior.

* From Spain’s Diabolo Ediciones, what looks like a fan-book titled Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft. La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1. (2025)…

In this first volume of We Will Always Have Lovecraft, Fernando Lopez Guisado explores the magnitude of his influence on popular culture, from music to board-games.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post reveals he has collected the work of a regular British contributor to the early Weird Tales magazine, which will appear in early 2026 as The Nameless Mummy and Others.

Arlton Eadie (1886–1935) was one of the relatively few English writers to appear regularly in the American pulp magazines. Some of the stories in my volume first appeared in Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine in Great Britain. Many of his stories have a distinctively English feel to them (one of them, “The Immortal Hand,” involves the resurrection of the hand of William Shakespeare) — which makes me wonder why the devout Anglophile H.P. Lovecraft didn’t find them worthy of note. But I find almost no mentions of Eadie in his surviving correspondence.

I see Eadie’s Weird Tales stories are also available in French translation in three volumes. A little searching just now reveals some outlines of his biography. Real name, Leopold Leonard Eady. Born in the military barracks town of Woolich, Kent, he came of age at the height of the British Empire in 1904. Found working as a men’s tailor in the city of Newcastle, Northumberland in 1914 (Kelly’s Directory of Northumberland, 1914), then Army records show he served in the Northumberland Fusiliers during the First World War. Married an Anna Frances [Eady]. He was a mystery novelist published in hardbacks, as well as a short-story writer. He died in the English seaside resort of Lancing, Sussex in 1935, leaving a modest estate valued at approx. £15,000 (in today’s money), and presumably also his book rights.

* Also due soon is S.T. Joshi’s collection of August Derleth on writing, titled When Imagination Ends: Essays on Speculative Fiction. This will include… “My Twenty Years with Ghosts” (1959), an [unpublished] essay dealing with his publication of weird writers with Arkham House”. Joshi also notes, from a French writer, a forthcoming “profound monograph on R.H. Barlow”.

* Geoliminal has a long illustrated article on “The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales”, with many clippings.

* New on Archive.org, H.P. Lovecraft’s coat of arms & bookplate as good scans.

* And finally, Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys the “Idols of the Cthulhu Mythos” to 1948.

— End-quotes —

“With the insatiable curiosity of early childhood, I used to spend hours poring over the pictures in the back of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary — absorbing a miscellaneous variety of ideas. After familiarising myself with antiquities, mediaeval dress and armour, birds, animals, reptiles, fishes, flags of all nations, heraldry, etc. etc., I lit upon the section devoted to ‘Philosophical and Scientific Instruments’, and was veritably hypnotised with it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Wilfred Blanch Talman of Spring Valley, New-Netherlands. He blowed in Friday morning, & has since been engaged in the noble task of getting Grandpa interested in heraldry. Never before was I so conscious of my humiliating ignorance of a subject of which every armigerous gentleman ought to possess at least a smattering; & I have now resolved to make a study of the subject, employing the famous & standard treatise of Fox-Davies. Friday afternoon Talman took me to the genealogical department of the publick library & shewed me how to look up the arms of various lines which converge in me, & he also was kind enough to draw several different coats of which I have possessed verbal descriptions only. This is a late date at which to rectify my ignorance, but better late than never. […] I’ve always had the [family] description, which I was too ignorant to interpret”. — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1927 (?).

“These damn things [family heraldic shields] seem to vary so much that a guy can never be sure of what’s right. Suppose one had one’s coach-panels and silver plate all fixed up one way, and then along came some evidence that it ought to be t’other way ! It’s a tense and exacting game, kid!” — Lovecraft to Talman, June 1928.

It was indeed an amusing game, and one which in 1927/28 no doubt helped him to recover from the trauma of New York City. But he would later rail against…

“The utter ignorance & sappiness of the snivelling, myth-swallowing, church-going stuffed shirts who go about cackling dead slogans & spreading the heraldic tail-feathers that proclaim them self-conscious members of a close corporation of “best people”! Not that they’re necessarily any more stupid & irrational than the rabble they hate, but that they add to an equal stupidity & irrationality the intolerable assumption of some mystical superiority unbased on personal merit.” — Lovecraft to Catherine L. Moore, October 1936.

HPLinks #66 – Hippocampus at 25, Long awaited, Outer Ones, 3D Lovecraft, and more…

10 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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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.

More Eddys

10 Wednesday Dec 2025

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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. It sounds like he tried to walk there from College Hill, and found their place was not well-heated.

317 Plain Street, still there.

Public domain in 2026

06 Saturday Dec 2025

Posted by in Unnamable

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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.

Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

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?

Apparently also a number of R.E. Howard’s Solomon Kane tales.

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.

HPLinks #65 – Lovecraft and Hermetism, cosmic theology, zombies, theatre, Necronomicons and more.

01 Monday Dec 2025

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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.

HPLinks #64 – Lovecrafter 14, Atlas Lovecraft, Lovecraft on Staten Island, NecronomiCon 2026, and more…

21 Friday Nov 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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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.

HPLinks #63 – HPL in Korea and Mexico, Horrorbabble’s HPL megababble, Roerich, and more.

14 Friday Nov 2025

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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.

HPLinks #62 – Lovecraft the interior designer, new CAS biography, a prop Necronomicon, musical fungi and more…

06 Thursday Nov 2025

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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”.