HPLinks #41 – Derleth’s portraits of the Kalems, Madness sketch, Ethnos article, Crumb, and more Doom…

HPLinks #41.

A slightly smaller HPLinks this week, because I’m set to install Windows 11. Then there’s all the work that follows on from such a gigantic move to a new OS. Eeek! Don’t worry, though, it’s a ‘superlite’ version of the installer ISO with absolutely no bloat, junk, sign-in, apps, ads, privacy-invasion, forced updates, hardware requirements or other Microsoftie nonsense. Just the OS, and a fast stripped-down one at that. Being installed to a new SSD drive too. This seems the best way to go as Windows 10 dies and Windows 7 can no longer support local AI installs. I seriously considered the Linux OS for two weeks, but in the end… too much trouble to fathom/learn all its arcane ways, and also seemingly far too easy to break the OS just by trying out some new software. Thus I was pleased to discover the now-mature Windows 11 ‘lite’ and ‘superlite’ installers, in which the horror of 11 not just ‘suppressed a bit’ but actively ripped out. After install, my task will then be to make Windows 11 look as much like faithful ol’ Windows 7 as possible. I may be some time.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s making available the out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft’s Favourite Horror Stories, Volume 1 under his own Sarnath POD and ebook imprint. He adds… “I will reprint volume 2 of this series in a month or so.” He also gives Derleth’s description of the people present at a September 1938 post-Lovecraft Kalem meeting, via Derleth’s newly transcribed journal for 1938. One example…

Arthur Leeds, an aging man betraying all the marks of faded gentility, with tired eyes, a well-trimmed moustache, iron grey hair standing out against his dark skin, an odd little old-fashioned wing collar contrasting his black coat, his neatly combed hair with the aspect of wetness and cleanliness.

It looks like this is the first time these descriptions have seen print. See Joshi’s post for more such vivid descriptions of the Kalems, in a long quote. Joshi adds, re: Lovecraft and Kalem mentions by Derleth… “I will eagerly await the examination of the journal of 1939 (which David E. Schultz has already transcribed)”.

* New at Project Gutenberg this week, Arkham House: The First 20 Years 1939-1959 in what appears to be plaintext free of OCR errors.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, their Mountains of Madness Sketch Replica

* Currently on eBay, a catalogue for a 1979 ‘Lovecraft art’ exhibition in France.

* New in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (June 2025), “Cthulhu Anthropology: H.P. Lovecraft and the Discipline of Difference”. Freely available online. The first half of the article is largely a mix of academic obeisance and ‘Lovecraft for beginners’, but the second half (starting at “The Other as Danger? Lovecraft in Anthropology”) has some meat. Though the author is regrettably unaware of the specific non-Boas currents in anthropology which Lovecraft was tapping into, other than making one glancing and unelaborated mention of James Frazer…

Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ plays a major role [in The Call of Cthulhu]

This may be news to S.T. Joshi, who states in his book on Lovecraft’s philosophical thinking and intellectual influences that…

I cannot see that Lovecraft was much influenced by Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, for all the frequent citations of it in his stories” (H.P. Lovecraft, The Decline of the West, p. 24)

Here is Lovecraft stating the matter for himself…

I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as [Sir Edward Burnett] Tylor, [Sir John] Lubbock, [Sir James] Frazer, [Jean de] Quatrefages [de Breau], [Margaret] Murray, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn, [Sir Arthur] Keith, [Marcellin] Boule, [Grafton] G. Elliot Smith, and so on.” — Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness.

All British, except for an American and two Frenchmen. The one American was a very prominent eugenicist who had studied at Cambridge University in England. One of the Frenchmen was a member of the Royal Society of London. The Anglophile Lovecraft was evidently looking largely to Britain for his reading on such matters, and the British despised the American anthropologists. In 1919 Lovecraft had also read deeply in the anthropology of religion, as the field then stood, and this evidently formed many of his enduring ideas. Jean de Quatrefages seems to have been essentially a biologist, and was the first to suggest that new races might be formed by inter-breeding. Marcellin Boule gave us the view of the ancient Neanderthal type as likely to have been brutish, hairy and ape-like.

* A new in-depth biography of another key American outsider creative, Robert Crumb, may be of interest to Tentaclii readers.

Also, note that some 170-pages of Crumb’s serious / biographical / historical comics are set to be newly collected as Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979 – 2004. So far as I know, he never did anything related to Lovecraft, but I welcome being corrected on that point.

* In Amsterdam at the Black Cat Library on 21st June 2025, a Soiree Lovecraft event with lecture. Seemingly to launch a new novel, which at a guess may feature Lovecraft the man? Booking now.

* And finally, a video of “All the Lovecraftian references in Doom: The Dark Ages”. In Spanish, but YouTube now has AI auto-dubbing into English.


— End-quotes —

[As a creative writer] “I am a paradox anyway — for there have been periods when astronomy, geography, physics, chemistry, & anthropology meant more to me than any form of pure literature or aesthetics.” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, December 1929.

“An abridgement of Frazer’s Golden Bough is valuable as a compendium of odd folk-beliefs” — Lovecraft’s “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (1936). With the faint implication that was all it was good for.

“I believe a Georgian doorway has more real significance for an ordinary American than an Inca masque or Italian primitive has. In order to make the Inca or Renaissance object of equal significance — equal relationship, that is, to the actual experience & tradition stream of the beholder — one would have to take exhaustive & specialised courses in Peruvian anthropology & cinquecento art & life. It is childish to imagine that the layman can have any real knowledge whatsoever of the life & feelings of the various cultures represented by museum objects, so that the illusion of reaching the heart of the past through such symbols is sheer moonshine. The little aesthete who raves over Etruscan vases & Minoan goldsmith work is really — apart from the element of abstract art appreciation — doing nothing more than playing around in the sand with pretty pebbles for which he invents vapid little stories. He is not half as close to a knowledge of the real thought & feeling of ancient Etruria or Crete as is the historian & archaeologist, whom he tends to despise as a dull, prosy old soul. [And in some more leftist-minded people such as Long,] certain theories of life & art [also] makes you dangerously liable to overlap into the zones of frivolous mock-under understanding & merely derivative experience, without your fully realising the transition.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.

HPLinks #40 – early fanzines, mad Jung, Meeplesmith, Doom and more…

HPLinks #40.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of the Lovecraft fanzine The Acolyte #4 from 1943, with a number of Lovecraft articles.

* Also new there, scans of the early fanzines Dream Quest #1, along with #2 and #5. These being from the late 1940s. General, but with an obvious continuing interest in Lovecraft.

* Talking of the 1940s and 50s, I spotted this in the catalogue description of an archive of personal papers that is now seemingly up for sale from Mark Funke Books…

… fanzines publishing anything at all by Lovecraft carry clearance from us.” [seller’s quote from a 18th March 1957 letter from John Stanton at Arkham House, sent to Boyd Raeburn].

* Translated from a Spanish review in Contrastes Vol. XXX, No. 1 (2025), in which the reviewer compares Jung’s mad delvings to those depicted by Lovecraft…

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV. The Black Books: Notebooks of Transformation in 7 volumes. Buenos Aires: El Hilo de Ariadna, 2024. The publication of The Black Books represents a fundamental event for understanding the thought of Carl Gustav Jung. […] the English edition of these previously unpublished notebooks appeared in 2021 under the direction of Sonu Shamdasani […]. This [new Spanish version] is a colossal, private, and numinous work, in which Jung, on several occasions, seems to lose control of his own psychic experience. Published in facsimile format, it allows consultation of the original manuscript, which adds an additional layer of depth to the reading.

At first glance, The Black Books can be compared to the work of Jung’s contemporary, H.P. Lovecraft. Jung’s descriptions of the “primordial” beast striking similarities to the stories of the writer of Providence. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is not very different from Jung’s archetypal visions, such as Atmavictu or Abraxas, that emerge in these texts. However, the distance between the two authors is significant: while Lovecraft cleaves to a materialistic and pessimistic vision of the cosmos, Jung opens up to the numinous dimension as a source of psychic and spiritual transformation.

* Be aware that Amazon shows the cover for the limited-edition ‘early Bird’ edition of the Druillet-Lovecraft book, which came with a slip-pocket and an additional set of prints as cards. What they actually ship is just the standard Druillet-Lovecraft book (Nov 2024) without such extras. At present the standard book is also currently still available direct from publisher Galerie Barbier in France, though I can’t help thinking that won’t last forever and it will probably sell out in due course. The sumptuous 288-page book has Demons et Merveilles (1976) reprinted in full, all the Necronomicon pages, the covers Druillet designed for Lovecraft’s books, plus additional “rare or unpublished paintings and sketches”.

Standard edition

* Nyarlathotep and Other Tales of Cosmic Dread (June 2025), a new album by David Thrussell & Flint Glass. No idea about the music, but the physical version has a pleasing look. Artwork possibly generative, but also possibly by ‘stefan alt’ who is credited with the design…

* Encountered at honest Abe’s used book emporium, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in French in 1975…

* Last noticed here in September 2024, Meeplesmith’s “Lovecraft’s Monsters” appears since then to have added new lines in its paintable miniatures. Including what is effectively a shoggoth…

* The big headline-grabbing videogame Doom: The Dark Ages is now available, and it appears to be a critical and sales hit even before its first patch.

Many are noting the very strong Lovecraft influences in the new game. A small sampling…

     – “like Lovecraft was on the writing team”
     – “really good during the Lovecraft part of the game”
     – “adds a Lovecraftian style to Doom, mixing green hues, water, and tentacles to the usual mix”
     – “appears to be heavily influenced by the Cthulhu mythos”

Apparently there are also many spoilers to be had in the game’s early reviews and YouTube videos, so it’s perhaps best not to delve too deeply there before playing.

If it’s moddable, there may be some interesting ‘even more Lovecraftian’ fan-mods in due course.

* Adventures Fantastic has a review of the new Robert E. Howard biography. And I see there’s another new free and excellent audiobook reading of an REH ‘El Borak’ tale, this time “Son of the White Wolf”. Download as an .MP3 file, to avoid the ads.

* A useful guide to REH adaptations, a new (nearly) Complete Chronology of The Savage Sword of Conan. This publication being Marvel’s Conan magazine which offered around 50 pages of b&w story per issue, in an oversized magazine with quality artwork and (mostly) complete-in-this-issue storytelling. In this new list and guide, the magazine’s issues are carefully and newly sorted by Conan’s age (or apparent age) in each tale. (Note that Marvel’s Savage Sword is not to be confused with their equally long-running monthly Conan the Barbarian title, which was sold on the spinner-racks among the superhero and funnies comics. These monthlies were recently bundled by Darkhorse into over thirty reprint volumes, titled The Chronicles of Conan).

* One for ticket-baggers to watch, 30th Anniversary H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland in October. Can’t be long now…

details will be revealed in summer 2025, and the first deluxe and VIP tickets will go on sale in our annual Kickstarter fundraiser (tentatively planned for June/July)

* And finally, in Providence… the local newspaper reports Lovecraft’s real “Shunned House” sells for $1.8M (Archive.is link, to let readers outside America bypass the EU-triggered censorship).


— End-quotes —

* “Vermont did not form the end of my visiting; since W. Paul Cook, on his second trip up, repeated the process of kidnapping a helpless old gentleman and bore me away for a week’s visit to Athol, where I had the honour of seeing him send to press, with his own hands, the sheets of my story The Shunned House, which when published will form my first cloth-bound book, (albeit only a thin affair of sixty pages, with a brief preface by my Belknap-grandchild).” — Lovecraft to Zelia Bishop, July 1928. (The project fell through, and the sheets passed through various hands).

* From “The House” (Lovecraft’s poem on the real Shunned House, July 1919).

The rank grasses are waving
     On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories sav’ring
    Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
    Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
    When the red sun has set

* Lovecraft’s own rough sketches of the real Shunned House in Providence…

HPLinks #39 – join the Esoteric Order, Lovecraft’s Dark Enlightenment, sculpting Lovecraft, Dunwich revived, Mayfair magazine, and more…

HPLinks #39.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a new acolyte to join his very own secret Esoteric Order. He also notes the ‘zine…

Nightlands no. 3 (Autumn 2024), containing my article ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Art’ (an article I wrote years ago as liner notes for an album that never appeared)

* In German, a philosophy journal article whose fragmented title might best translate into English as ‘The Dark Enlightenment of H.P. Lovecraft’, from Weimarer Beitrrge No. 68 (2022, freely available online 2025)…

… he develops an atheistic-materialistic philosophy not only in his literature, but also in essays and especially his extensive correspondence, which can be understood as a “dark enlightenment”. What Adorno and Horkheimer do in their dialectics of the Enlightenment, based on de Sade and Nietzsche also applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, for Lovecraft. His work unfolds an “intransigent criticism of practical reason” and its agent, the too “self-evident subject”. [Only by understanding the] basic positions of Lovecraft’s philosophy, as developed in essays and letters, does his poetics of form [become clear and] open us up to the full understanding of his literature. His works also provide directional concepts for the philosophy and philology of ‘the eerie’. […] Against this background [I engage in] a reading of his “The Color Out of Space” (1927)

* From Russia, “Preserving the Author’s Style in Translating The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (April 2025). A short conference paper, freely available online. Partly in English.

* Deep Cuts considers the very late “Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975), by Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman.

* “Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft” via 3D digital sculpting and texturing. A link from a few years back, but I don’t think I’ve linked to this ‘making of’ page before. Only to the results.

* New on Archive.org, a pack of three Historic Males SD 1.5 LoRAs including Lovecraft. These are free character add-ons for generating images with Stable Diffusion 1.5. Historical personage add-ons having been last week removed from CivitAI (the main Stable Diffusion download website) along with living celebrities. I guess CivitAI didn’t have either the manpower or the cultural savvy to know if a celeb was dead or alive, and thus they junked the lot.

Tip: you may want to put “Spock” in the negative prompt, if the LoRA wants to veer towards Star Trek’s Captain Spock. That seems to restore Lovecraft’s face. The above is an Img2Img style transform + the LoRA, starting from a Bondware Poser 13 render.

* Feuilleton has lengthy comments on the ‘history of Lovecraft in comics’ academic paper (linked to in my previous HPLinks). Reading this history has spurred him to finish his own unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror… “This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish”.

* The Alan Moore World blog has “Lovecraft was an American William Blake”

In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge.” (Moore, 1993).

Sadly, it appears that his Yuggoth Cultures was left in a London taxi-cab and thus lost. Not sure how the book overlaps with Moore’s comic-book series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, but I’ll take it on trust that Alan Moore World knows that the published comics and the lost book are different things.

* I missed noticing this event, but managed to snag the poster at a small size. A ‘Lovecraft festival’ on the videogame service Steam, which has now been-and-gone.

But from this I was able to track down the larger and more appealing artwork (same artist, no artist credited) that the poster was partly made from…

* Bounding Into Comics reviews the new Re-Animator movie 4K UHD set, and itemises the many additional extras newly packaged with the movie.

* The publisher Dark Horse is preparing to ship a ‘special hardcover’ edition of Richard Corben’s “Lovecraft and backwoods terror” graphic-novel Rat God. 184 pages with “remastered lettering”. Unfortunately it’s also being coloured, having originally been in greyscale. Due in the autumn of 2025…

Terrible things stalk the forests outside Arkham in this chilling original tale from comics master Richard Corben.

* Viking (an offshoot of Penguin Books, last I heard) is reported in the book trade as being set to publish Penguin Weird Fiction later in 2025… “an anthology of stories featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others”. The advance notice makes it sounds like the stories feature these authors as characters, but I suspect it’s not that interesting. Just another cash-in reprint, I expect.

* New on Archive.org, a set of Mayfair magazine (for several decades a leading mass-market British equivalent to the U.S. Playboy), which search shows had in its February 1970 issue a reprint of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”. George Underwood was the artist…

* Another new batch of short SF/fantasy readings at LibriVox. This time around there are four by Lovecraft’s one-time protege Henry Kuttner, all public domain. Also, I didn’t realise any stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley had slipped into the public domain. But at least one of her stories must have, since she’s in this collection.

* And finally, a reminder to those who may be visiting Providence this summer, that I have a free Lovecraft’s Providence Map online.


— End-quotes —

“”Polaris” is rather interesting in that I wrote it in 1918, BEFORE I had ever read a word of Lord Dunsany’s. Some find it hard to believe this, but I can give not only assurance but absolute proof that it is so.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“As to the charge of modernism against me because of my predilection for Poe & Dunsany, why, Sir, I refute it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner December 1919 (he instead hails his predecessors in the 18th century gothic, discovered and read in his childhood attic).

“When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of “The Gods of the Mountain”, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean”, “The City of Never”, “The Fall of Babbulkund”, “In the Land of Time”, and “Idle Days on the Yann”.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“… a few weird [stage] dramas such as Dunsany’s ‘Gods of the Mountain’ & ‘Night at an Inn’ have demonstrated how a natural expert can weave horror, dread, & mounting tension with skilfully managed dialogue.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, March 1935.

“I infinitely prefer Dunsany to Cabell — he was a genuine magic & freshness which the weary sophisticate seems to lack” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, August 1926.

“Imaginative artists have been few, and always unappreciated. [William] Blake is woefully undervalued. Poe would never have been understood had not the French taken the pains to exalt and interpret him. Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise.” (Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, January 1921).

HPLinks #38 – Lexicon bagged, history of Lovecraft in comics, Amazing tentacles, Baranger art-prints, Tower of Shadows, AI art-styles, a bad fire, and more…

HPLinks #38.

* The latest edition of the journal ImageTexT has “The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics”. The first part surveying some of the history of Lovecraft in comics. Open-access, freely available online.

* The Passing Place this week blogs about a new project, having newly embarked on what sounds like a researched… “book about Lovecraft’s creatures and worlds”. The author has some form there. Having already produced a 2022 book, though I don’t think I had noticed it here at Tentaclii, a book titled Lexicromicon: A bluffers guide to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

For those impatient for this forthcoming book, note that there’s already Anthony Pearsall’s fine The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places & Things in the Tales of H.P Lovecraft (2005). Which I only have as a Kindle ebook purchase, not ideal for a quick ‘pull it off the shelf’ consultation. But I’m pleased to say that Passing Place’s post fortuitiously prompted me to check eBay just now, and thus I’ve bagged the Lexicon. In VG paper from a UK seller for a reasonable £12… nice. Normally the price is stuck at three times that. Thanks again to my Patreon patrons, for the PayPal used to bring such little treasures winging onto my book shelves.

* The Pulp Super-Fan looks back at the ‘The Library Lovecraftian’ series, itemising what was in this ill-fated mid-1970s attempt at a small Lovecraftian fiction ‘zine. The third issue managed to attract “The Horror on the Beach: A Tale in the Cthulhu Mythos” by Alan Dean Foster (by then a well-known SF writer, I seem to vaguely recall), but after that it folded.

* New on Archive.org and new to me, scans of what appears to be a full run of Cimoc. This being a Spanish local equivalent of Heavy Metal magazine, and which ran 1981-1996. There’s a wealth of fantasy and science-fiction artwork here, even if you can’t read the stories. How many of these monthly Heavy Metal equivalent Euro-comics were there? Quite a few, it seems, as I also recently discovered the Italian equivalent L’Eternauta, having already known about the various Toutain-edited titles and licenced editions.

* Talking of which, this week up pops Les magazines de bande dessinee en France (2025). It’s a new open-access book with various chapters on the history of the ‘BD’ comics form in France. Includes, among others, in French…

   – Influence of the North American underground in adult comics magazines in France, 1969-1976.
   – Rock in comic-book magazines from the 1970s and 1980s.
   – The place of sex in comic-strip magazines for adults in the 1980s.

* Turns out the major new exhibition ‘Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo’ may have a Lovecraftian feel in their Old Europe macabre mistiness, if the images shown in reviews are anything to go by. On now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, until 29th June 2025, though with a hefty £17 ticket price. There’s a book catalogue.

* New on Archive.org, a fine scan of Amazing Stories for December 1929, with a delightfully tentacular cover that was new to me. One recalls Tolkien’s “The Watcher in the Water” here, and wonders if he ever saw the magazine in his friend Lewis’s pulp collection.

* Frontier Partisans has a brief “Centennial Salute to H. Rider Haggard”, 100 years after the adventure writer’s death.

* The Silver Key reviews the new biography Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author (2025), and finds it worthy.

* Limited edition French Paper Art Club fine-art prints, featuring The Art of Francois Baranger. Some are already selling out their editions, with the ‘Mi-Go from space’ print already gone.

* Publisher Fantagraphics is reprinting lesser-known Marvel Comics material as pleasing new books. The first is Lost Marvels Vol. 1: Tower of Shadows (2025) which collects the new comics (not reprint material) that appeared in the Tower of Shadows supernatural anthology news-stand comic from 1969-1971. Included adaptations of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” and “Pickman’s Model”.

Barry Windsor Smith in his Trimpe-emulating period, original artwork for a page of “The Terrible Old Man”.

* A new free Lovecraft Pulp Style LORA, a style add-on for Stable Diffusion SDXL-based image-generating AI models. The style is too ‘modern card-art for tabletop games’ for me, but some may like it and one user seems to have pushed it more towards Lovecraft’s landscapes.

* Talking of SD, I’ve been running workflow tests to see if a scene from Bondware’s Poser 12 can be translated to a new and convincing artistic style, using Stable Diffusion 1.5. The aim here was to keep exact Photoshop-layer registration with the original Poser render of the 3D scene (here deliberately made to look bad but also ‘SD friendly’). Such that the resulting image then can be consistently re-coloured and parts of it easily masked in Photoshop. Easy consistent clothes / heads / colouring / style being a Holy Grail in SD-made comics. Here a strong Controlnet, using a special type of render from Poser, holds the scene in place while allowing the SD style makeover to happen.

Using a difficult test scene from Poser I’ve had some success, as you can see. In this little demo a Lovecraft-alike visits an alien world and surveys the cosmos through his boyhood telescope. A wonky pose was applied to the Poser figure, meant for a steampunk airship with rigging for the figure’s hand to grasp. And it’s ‘too light, to too dark’, but that’s intentional. Plus getting a likeness of Lovecraft was tricky from a 768px starting render. Anyway… it’s a proof-of-workflow and you get the idea. Now I’m moving on to try to ‘Moebius’ the same scene.

* Talking of which, the new edition of The Comics Grid has the long article “Moebius and Digital Tools: From Experimentation to Remediation”. This examines how… “Moebius used digital tools throughout his career in a variety of ways, ranging from experimentation to remediation and back”. Remediation = ‘fixing unsatisfactory old artwork’.

* A while back I blogged about Novelforge, the offline creative writing editor software with style assistants and a one-time $60 purchase. A new version had added a choice of free remote or local AI creative-writing assistants. Those who tried it then may recall that Novelforge unfortunately lacks a dark mode, but… I now find this can be forced with the latest $10 WindowTop Pro utility. WindowTop forces any Windows software to use a dark mode, while also trying to keep the user interface’s other red-blue-green colours the same. The effect can be toggled with a few keyboard presses. I tried several ‘dark mode forcers’, and this was the one that worked for Novelforge while also keeping the red-blue-green UI icons etc intact.

* On display at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, until the end of June 2025, a selection from their new Lichtman Sci-Fi Fanzine Collection. The selection being exhibited aims to survey the collection’s “breadth and depth”…

… the Robert Lichtman Science Fiction Fanzine Collection amounting to over 15,000 items. This extensive collection spans nearly a century, dating from the late 1930s through 2022, and features commentary, fan fiction, criticism, conference proceedings, and other genres. Along with the printed works, the archive includes correspondence, original art, and several fanzine titles personally published by Lichtman.

It occurs to me that long-time fan collectors could now approach the Library, to see if their own collection might make a welcome and complementary addition (in due course)?

* And finally, Oregon Live has a long article recounting how last December, a couple purchased the sight-unseen contents of a storage unit in Lyons for $60, finding there…

“The original manuscript of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story, ‘Under the Pyramids’, which Lovecraft wrote on the back of old business letters.”

This turned out to have been stolen from…

James Strand’s collection [which was] probably the finest ever put together of science fiction and fantasy dealing with Lovecraft, [and also] Arkham House and the Arkham House writers. I can’t even think of an institution with a better collection.” (quote by L.W. Currey) […] Drug dealers and street-gang members quickly waltzed in after the medical examiner departed with Strand’s body [after his death]. They ransacked his library, stealing first editions, manuscripts and original art. [ Local police were not interested in the thefts, but …] The FBI [now] estimates $1 million in stolen books and comics have been recovered, but no one knows how many Strand books have disappeared into personal collections, burn piles or other storage lockers. If Strand kept a meticulous inventory, it disappeared in the looting of his home.

One hopes that, at least, no unpublished Lovecraft letters were lost. Such a pity the collection was never shipped to a university archive. But then in the case of some universities, you have to wonder if the archives themselves will be subject to purges a few decades along the line.


— End-quotes —

“I used to have the atlas [Mitchell’s Ancient Atlas], but it was lost during a household removal. Three removes [i.e. house moves], said old Dr. Franklin, are as bad as a fire!” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber Jr., December 1936.

“… the door of some Cyclopean furnace had been thrown wide, and the old mansion stood out black against a veritable holocaust of empyreal fire. The spectacle was a chromatick tumult unearthly and iridescent, nearly every colour having its place — even a vivid and sinister green which seem’d to typify the poisonous corrosion and putrefaction of the decaying elder America.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, November 1923, on encountering his own ancestral Simmonsville mansion amidst a violent sunset, during a walking tour of old family places.

“… [my] hands simply paralysed unless I hold’ em over the [portable oil] heater and thaw’ em out afresh for every beastly word. [Though] maybe I’ll survive through the night, since I see a fire has just been started in the furnace” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1925 (Lovecraft, shivering in his New York room on the edge of Red Hook).


HPLinks #37 – Fungal horrors, Lovecraft’s lexis, Spanish Lovecraft filmfest, Lovecraft in strings, Lovecraft tarot, and more…

HPLinks #37.

* The Palgrave Handbook on Fungal Horror in Popular Culture has a call for submissions, though with a rather tight deadline of 1st June 2025. Edited from Sweden in English, the forthcoming book has “33 commissioned chapters” but apparently now seeks… “approximately 10 additional original essays” of 7,000 words. The book will be academic but broad in scope, covering…

popular culture such as, but not limited to, literature, film, television, comics/graphic novels, computer games, art, and memes.

* New from Italy, the essay “Alice in Borderland and Lovecraft: liminal worlds, mental abysses and the nihilism of the unknown” (2025). In Italian, but here linked in a Google Translate version (should work). Examines the Alice in Borderland Netflix TV series (adapting a Japanese manga comic) via Lovecraft.

* New from Brazil and under full Creative Commons Attribution, an article which translates as “Lexis and the Construction of Cosmicism in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft: a corpus linguistics perspective”.

* Spain’s major International Fantastic Film and Terror Festival (‘PUFA’) returns for its second year, with the 2025 festival… “dedicated to the literary universe of H.P. Lovecraft”. 30th June to 6th July 2025.

* Creative orchestral news from the Ukraine, 6th May 2025…

At the end of the concert program, ‘After reading Lovecraft’ by contemporary Ukrainian composer Oleksandr Rodin was played in Kharkiv for the first time. The audience heard mysterious reflections of Lovecraft’s horror stories and philosophy, evoked through the sounds of a string orchestra. […] Kharkiv Music Festival took place at Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, one of the safest places in the city and located just 19 miles south from the Russian border.

* The HPLHS Store’s “new to old” listing page pops up a H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – Best of 2023 DVD. So I guess it’s new, or perhaps new stock?

* At RPG web-a-zine Noble Knight, a new “Publisher Spotlight: H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society” plus a mini-interview.

* A new Italian ebook I mondi del Professor Challenger : politiche, tecno-logiche, ambienti (‘The Worlds of Professor Challenger: politics, technology, environments). Being the latest #88 (2025) issue of the book-a-journal Studia Humaniora. Professor Challenger being the Conan Doyle adventurer character. Freely available for download as a Creative Commons .PDF (see bottom of page).

* Talking of reflections on Conan Doyle… new to me is the story collection Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of H.P. Lovecraft Volume One (2023) and Volume Two (2023). A mega anthology featuring Will Murray, among others. Which is a good sign, though the reviews for volume one are variable and there are none for volume two. Sounds like the books might not suit Sherlock purists.

* A new call for submissions to Gramarye, the journal of the venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, based here in the UK and the first such centre. Deadline: 21st September 2025.

* A new free reading of the Solomon Kane tale “Red Shadows” by Robert E. Howard, read by the fine and increasingly prolific Josh Greenwood. Use the freeware MediaHuman Youtube to MP3 converter to get it without the YouTube adverts.

* SFcrowsnest this week reviews the book An Informal History Of The Pulp Magazines by Ron Goulart.

* New to me, The H.P. Lovecraft Tarot | Second Revised Edition (2002). Never heard of it before. Time for a third and AI-enhanced edition, perhaps?

* The remastered Elder Scrolls: Oblivion videogame has added an apparently new official “Side Quest With A Lovecraftian Twist”

‘A Shadow Over Hackdirt’ stands out for its chilling vibe and gripping tale. This quest pulls inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft, dropping you into the unsettling town of Hackdirt to investigate a merchant’s missing daughter. The place feels off from the start—quiet streets, strange locals, and an eerie sense that something’s watching. As you dig deeper, you uncover … [spoilers]

Oblivion was the successor to the all-time classic Morrowind. I played Oblivion to the end in the original, and I’d suggest it’s well worth considering in its big new ‘remastered’ blockbuster version. Blander and more generic than a re-play of Morrowind + mods, but very enjoyable as fantasy RPGs go.

* And finally, AI is getting startlingly good at precisely geo-locating the exact spot an image was made, just by closely examining what it shows. Astral Code has a long article and the tests to prove this, and it appears that even a photo of some random beach sand can be good enough. Could this emerging technology help Lovecraftian and pulp author researchers identify the ‘until-now unknown’ location of historical-biographical images? One wonders if it might also work on old postcard images of places?


— End-quotes —

“I have always been fond of maps & geographical details (I’ve drawn a map of ‘Arkham’ to keep my local references straight), & my lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“In the Boston North End [the] old tangled alleys have now been swept away. […] I remember when the precise location of the artist’s house in the story [“Pickman’s Model”] was hit by the razing process. It was in 1927, and Donald Wandrei […] was visiting the East for the first time. He wanted to see the site of the story, and I was very glad to take him to it — thinking that its sinister quaintness would even surpass his expectations. Imagine my dismay, then, at finding nothing but a blank open space where the tottering old houses and zigzag alley-windings had been!” — Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, February 1934.

“For the past year I have had such a knowledge of Paris that I’ve felt tempted to advertise my services as a guide without ever having seen the damn place — this erudition coming from a ghost-writing job for a goof who wanted to be publicly eloquent about a trip from which he was apparently unable to extract any concrete first-hand impressions. I based my study on maps, guide-books, travel folders, descriptive volumes, & (above all) pictures — the cards secured from you [Galpin] forming the cream of the latter. Fixing the layout of the city in my mind, & calculating what vistas ought to be visible from certain points (pictures seen under a magnifying-glass furnish a splendid substitute for first-hand vistas), I cooked up a travelogue which several Paris-wise readers have almost refused to believe was written by one never within 3,000 miles of the place.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.


HPLinks #36 – Radio France, Lopez, German Cats, Space-Eaters, new Reanimator movie, a haunted ‘Arkham House’, and more…

HPLinks #36.

* A new Radio France podcast on Lovecraft, celebrating his publication in the highly prestigious Plaiades book series.

* A new article on “La influencia de Lovecraft en la ciencia ficcion por R.R. Lopez”. (‘The influence of Lovecraft on the science fiction of R.R. Lopez’). Freely available online. In HTML, so easily auto-translated.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated again. He notes he did a new podcast interview, now on YouTube. Also, that Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” is now translated into Hebrew and published, which sounds good. I presume it wasn’t translated before?

* New on YouTube, “The Space-Eaters” by Lovecraft’s good friend and fellow writer Frank Belknap Long. Presented as a 75-minute audiobook, with a suitable reader. Adverts, if you just press ‘play’ and view as a video. But no adverts, if you download it with Mediahuman YouTube to MP3 or similar freeware.

* Movie-industry trade paper Deadline reports “‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ Movie Remake In Works”. Sadly, it only hopes to be a “contemporary reimagining” of Lovecraft’s shocker serial, rather than a period piece. But it sounds like it has both talent and ‘cancel-culture resistant’ finance and it’ll happen…

… production and finance shingle [i.e. independent wholly-owned movie-financing outfit] Woodlake Entertainment is fully financing the project. Multi-Emmy-nominated artist- and producer Jeffrey Lewis and Keith Previte will produce for Woodlake, with the Lovecraft adaptation the first in series of elevated genre pics the company plans to develop and finance.

* In the Norwegian folklore journal Folkminner, “Ett groteskt och gigantiskt fettberg – om uppkomsten av monster i London”, on the latest real-life variant of a ‘London sewer-monster’. In Norwegian, but easily translated from an HTML page. Freely available online.

* Wormwoodania gets “‘Steeped in Antiquity and Fantasy’: Some Esoteric Seventies Music”. Specifically, of the British earth-mysteries / gothic / fantasy sort, digging out highly obscure bands which were issuing music from the late 60s / early 70s… “Fantastic literature pervades the ideas and images of many of the bands.”

* Nothing of note in the latest monthly update from the German Lovecraftians, but I see elsewhere that Gou Tanabe’s graphic-novel of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” is making its appearance in a 224-page German translation soon, as Die Katzen von Ulthar along with other tales from the Dreamlands. Set for a 1st July 2025 release.

* The sumptuous new Illustrator’s Quarterly #45 book-a-zine reportedly includes… “a Gallery of Doc Savage artists: pulp illustrator Baumhofer, James Bama, Ken Barr, Bob Larkin, Boris Vallejo, and Alex Ross.”

* A book title that’s new to me, on the history of the pulp-and-paperback industry — Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback (2024). Appears to be a well-researched academic book.

* The Politically Incorrect Guides series has just published the Politically Incorrect Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy. 216 pages (reported as “243 pages” in Kindle ebook format). I’m not sure how deep it goes, given what are likely to be fairly short-and-sharp chapters. I think I’d want to see an author index before I shell out £15, and there’s no index to be had via Google Books.

* My regular Tolkien Gleanings reaches posting #300. The latest Tolkien links, with a strong emphasis on noting the latest scholarship and insightful fan blog-posts. No blather about movies, TV, fan-awards or cos-play events.

* And finally, be sure to make the Elder Sign and pass by, if you encounter the new ‘Arkham House Publishers’ outfit at arkhamhousepublishers.com. Apparently hailing from Sauk City, but unconnected to Derleth or his estate. Not only will this vanity press ‘publish’ any book you pay to have published, but they can also have their AI-fuelled shoggoths-on-typewriters write it for you. I’m not against AI assistants, you understand, but using the press name seems rather underhand and could mislead both writers and book-buyers.


— End-quotes —

“By 1899 my poetical outbursts had become quite numerous, one collection [at age eleven] being still in my mother’s possession. It is a book made of cheap pad paper, bound with pins, & is entitled “Poemata Minora”. It contains an ode to the moon, regrets on the passing away of the pagan religion, musings on the downfall of Rome, & such like things!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1916.

“The visible world is my circus and prompt-book, but I don’t take it very seriously and don’t give much of a damn what becomes of it. To me the most important thing — and the most primarily interesting thing — is opportunity to think and dream and express myself as I please.” … “As for a book of my stuff — I don’t think it’s worth bothering very energetically about.” — Lovecraft to Moe, and Lovecraft to Derleth, both March 1923.


HPLinks #35 – a different Alcestis, Hobbes and other philosophy, magic detectives, Brown, modernism, Moebius, pop-ups and more…

HPLinks #35.

* The HPLHS Store now has the new Alcestis book version in stock…

… not only had the pair of them written a new prologue for the piece, but also presented after that a version of the play itself that was substantially different from other known translations, so we consulted with a classics scholar. In the end, instead of the lovely but simple pamphlet containing Sonia and Lovecraft’s version of Alcestis, we originally intended to produce, we are creating a casebound volume containing an explication of all of the new discoveries about this piece in the form of a paper by Helios Editor/Publisher N.R. Jenzen-Jones and classics scholar Carman Romano; Sonia and Lovecraft’s edition of Alcestis, complete with their prologue, and newly commissioned illustrations by several of our favorite artists.

* “Music for a blind idiot god: towards a weird ecology of noise” (2024). On “the horror of noise” in Lovecraft and others. Freely available for download.

* In the latest issue of the open-access journal Diaphonia, “Uma interlocucao entre estado hobbesiano com “O mito de Cthulhu” na literatura de H.P. Lovecraft”. It’s an awkward title to translate but, with reference to the abstract, this would about cover it: ‘A discussion between the absolutist Hobbesian state and the totalitarian sovereignty of Cthulhu as described in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Freely available online.

* A new contribution on ‘The Weird’ from Graham Harman, a leading philosopher in the field, “Weird Fallibilism: Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Justified True Belief” (2024). Freely available for download. Drawing on Lovecraft, he suggests the description of ‘weird fallibilism’ for a situation in which… “1) truth never corresponds to reality, and (2) objects never correspond to their own qualities”.

* A review in the new edition of Mythlore of the academic book Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery (2025). The review is freely available online.

* The new academic book Deviant Landscapes: A Journey to Exotic and Imaginary Places and Spaces (2025). Intriguing title, but the only somewhat relevant chapter appears to be “Atmospheric Narrative Landscape, Stimmung and Place-Making in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence — A Fable””. Stimmung is German and means broadly ‘mood/atmosphere’.

* The recent visit by S.T. Joshi made me aware of the wider Weird Fiction Collections at Brown University. It’s not just the Lovecraft letters.

* Brown University Master of Fine Arts student Roman Johnson is reported to have been given the latest S.T. Joshi Fellowship by Brown University. No details yet about his research topic or aim.

* A Masters dissertation for Texas State University, “Our Eyes are Yet to Open: H.P. Lovecraft and Modernist Horror” (2023). Freely available online. The abstract shows a clear focus and the author examined the essays and letters as well as three tales…

examines Lovecraft’s essays and correspondence to highlight his concerns and philosophical perspectives with his modernist contemporaries. [A study of three tales shows that] Lovecraft’s fiction exhibits various themes and techniques associated with literary modernism more prominently than one might initially assume. [Integrating aspects of early modernism] allowed him to express his fears and philosophical viewpoints about modernist concerns through terrifying and cosmic imagery.

* Robert Silverberg on HPL’s “gloriously overwrought” Shadow Out Of Time, an article extracted to HTML from Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (December 2005).

* Now on Google Books with a preview, the new biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* In the field of vintage comics appreciation, Deep Cuts has a new long post. Finding that there was an Italian edition of the Heavy Metal magazine ‘Lovecraft special’. The images shown reveal that the cover used an enlarged and coloured version of that issue’s fine b&w Moebius drawing. The long post has exhaustive details of the different editions, and many interior page and details. Here’s a good cover image I snagged from eBay, where collectors will still find several copies of the Italian edition for sale.

* Newly listed on eBay UK, Lovecraft’s Selected Letters: 1929-1931 from a UK seller and at a sensible £20 price. Though sadly there’s no ‘Click & Collect’ on offer, or I’d have had it. Still, some Tentaclii reader (with a big and accessible letter-box, able to take chunky books) may want it at that price.

* And finally, also on eBay and new to me, the Necronomicon Pop-up Book (2017) by ‘Skinner’ and Rosston Meyer…


— End-quotes —

“144. Hideous book glimpsed in ancient shop — never seen again.” — from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story germs and ideas.

“To Whomsoever May Open This Book: This is set down as a Warning to you, Sir or Madam, that you are not to open this Book beyond the Place mark’d by a red Riband. It wou’d be better for you to throw the whole Book unopen’d into the fire; but being unable to do so myself, I cannot hope that you will. I do nevertheless adjure you to look nowhere in it beyond the Riband, lest you lose yourself to this World, Body and Soul; for truly, it is a Tomb for the Living.” — Lovecraft pens an original ‘book warning’, in his best circa-1780 style, in a letter to Morton of March 1937.


HPLinks #34 – Providence, Witch House, cosmic DC, Dexter Ward and more…

HPLinks #34.

* In the new April 2025 issue of the academic journal Horror Studies ($ paywall), the lead article is “Dark Epiphany: The Lovecraftian in twentieth-century existential literature”.

* A call for papers from the British Fantasy Society. Their BFS Journal plans a special issue on ‘War in Fantasy’. I’m guessing that an article on “Dagon” and “The Temple” as wartime stories might have a chance? Or perhaps Derleth’s elaboration of the Mythos as a cosmic battleground?

* Newly published, issue 25 of the scholarly journal The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural, and Fantastic literature. A special issue on the author Le Fanu, it includes an overlooked poem by him and “a recently rediscovered monograph of Le Fanu written by his publisher”. Also a topographical article on his associations with places in Dublin.

* HorrorBabble has a new free audiobook of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”. This is a new 2025 recording and also includes subtitles (presumably for those who like to ‘read along’, or perhaps who need to see words spelled as they are spoken?).

* New on YouTube, Ray visits “H.P. Lovecraft Locations in Providence, RI”. He offers a swift 13 minute tour, made with a more-or-less steady camera and deftly edited.

* S.T. Joshi has also been in Providence, and his latest blog post is “A Trip to Providence”. Joshi dived into the immense Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown, which he catalogued forty-five years ago, but which he can now survey with a more experienced eye. He found, among other items, more unpublished letters (now destined for the “forthcoming edition of Smith’s Miscellaneous Letters”), and nine unpublished juvenile stories.

* Joshi’s new blog post also notes that the Best Adventures of Solar Pons is appearing in two paperback volumes, with the first having already appeared. These are the Sherlock-alike stories penned by August Derleth. Looks very affordable and the tales are something I have wanted to read for a while now, but… at present Amazon UK is iffy about shipping to the UK and there’s no eBay listing.

* New this week. “From Beyond: Five DC Titles that Scratch that Cosmic Horror Itch”. It’s a glossy listicle, but one from DC Comics itself. As such it’s a useful survey of Lovecraftian themes in their titles, made even more useful by good page illustrations from the comics discussed (DC being notoriously touchy about others showing their interior artwork).

* Talking of comics, some readers may be interested in the newly published book Drawn to the Stacks: Essays on Libraries, Librarians and Archives in Comics and Graphic Novels (March 2025). Apparently the first such book on the topic. The contents list suggests it is heavily and predictably leftist, but also that it has a number of essays addressing specific weird and supernatural titles. Also of note are the new books Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and the Divine (2024), and Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (2025).

* The new ‘post-apocalypse in the English countryside’ videogame, Atomfall, apparently has a touch of Lovecraft. The indie British-made game is described by DigitalSpy as a blend of…

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – whose name is given to Wyndham village in the game – and [the 1970s British TV series] Survivors, with some Wicker Man thrown in, and a bit of eldritch flair akin to something from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space.

* A new free reading of a long ‘El Borak’ desert adventure tale by R.E. Howard. “Hawk of the Hills” runs just over two hours, and has a good narrator.

* Robert E. Howard Days 2025: Events Schedule for June 2025. This year’s theme is ‘100 Years of Robert E. Howard’.

* Also R.E. Howard related, I note a minor update for the Stable Diffusion LORA plug-in Stygia, now at version 1.2. Designed for generating background images suitable for Conan tales set in Stygia or similar. These early (and arguably the most ‘creative’) SD releases are now very well supplied with LORAs and the tide is ebbing. Thus from now on I shall probably only mention Lovecraft / R.E. Howard / 1930s-noir SD LORAs in HPLinks — rather than in their own post.

* Talking of AI, AI 2027 is a dedicated and new ‘future scenario’ website, which actually goes out to 2030. Gripping, detailed, very lengthy and fairly plausible stuff which arises from serious think-tanking and war-gaming. Possibly of interested to Lovecraftians, in terms of the competing visions of future-AI as a blind tentacular all-devouring Lovecraftian monster, or a benign super-shoggoth that will “advance civilization by decades in a year or two”.

* And finally, I see from a current eBay listing there was a 1974 Signet mass-market U.S. paperback reprint of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, although this was “abridged”(?) and the book padded by Derleth with several other tales by other authors. New to me…


— End-quotes —

“One long-destroyed tale [I wrote as a boy] was of twin brothers — one murders the other, but conceals the body, & tries to live the life of both — appearing in one place as himself, & elsewhere as his victim. (Resemblance had been remarkable). He meets sudden death (lightning) when posing as the dead man — is identified by a scar, & the secret finally revealed by his diary.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1916.

“[Dexter Ward] may get to 75 pages or so before its natural and logical conclusion appears. It centres around old Providence…” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“… of the tale now drawing toward its close [in its writing], and which I shall call either The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or The Madness out of Time. Like Midas of old, curs’d by the turning to gold of everything he touch’d, I am this year curs’d by the turning into a young novel of every story I begin. [… Ward ended up as 51,500 words, but… ] the typing of manuscripts of this length is utterly beyond the powers of a feeble old gentleman who loses interest in a tale the moment he completes it.” — Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, February 1927.


HPLinks #33 – Two Hearts, death and rebirth, mapping Lovecraft, Kitbash Kit, Cairn RPG as 1920s Lovecraft, and more…

HPLinks #33.

* New from the HPLHS, Two Hearts That Beat As One is Sonia’s autobiography…

Businesswoman, milliner, writer, publisher, patroness — known to many as the woman who was married to famed ‘weird fiction’ writer H.P. Lovecraft — Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis was a woman of many names because she lived a rich and fascinating life. Scholar and editor Monica Wasserman, working with Helios House Press, is delighted to be publishing a beautiful case-bound hardcover edition of Sonia’s autobiography.

* Also new from the HPLHS, a set of HPLHS Vintage Prop Maps, including what appears to be a newly-made one showing the unexplored parts of the world at the start of the 1930s.

* Inklings-Jahrbuch 41: Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic, being the proceedings of a 2023 Symposium in Magdeburg, Germany. Now newly and freely available online. Includes, among others, “Death as a Character and Its Philosophical Depiction in Children’s Books” and “Immortality and Digital Rebirth in Science Fiction”.

* New in the open-access education journal Writing in Practice #9, the long article “Maps to Arkham: Lovecraft, Landscape and Visual Poetry”. Discusses creatively approaching Lovecraft via Situationist methods of walking in a city…

… his walking habits still embody a radical response to place and his negotiation of urban commercialism, coupled with a sense of alienation from the normal life of that environment, has fed into some of the fragmented visuals in ‘Maps to Arkham’. The sense of failure and the city are bound up in his fiction, much of which revolves around nightmarishly huge and hostile urban environments

* New on the Kitbash store, a Lovecraft Kit of 3D models of buildings, which you can then use royalty-free to assemble custom scenes for use with 3D digital artwork or games. A hefty price, but Kitbash are known for quality and they sometimes give away complete kits free — so it might be worth checking their store at Halloween 2025 for a freebie or two.

This Kit brings eerie New England streets to life, with shadowy apartments, a looming city hall, a forgotten library filled with forbidden tomes, and a museum hiding unspeakable artifacts. A solitary lighthouse stands against the dark, its beam barely piercing an endless mist. From dimly lit taverns to cursed houses, every corner whispers madness.

* Free on Itch.io from 2024, “a re-skinning of Cairn RPG, so that it takes place in a 1920s Lovecraft inspired world”. In a 71-page A5 PDF illustrated booklet for RPG gamers, which gives Cairn a comprehensive makeover. The adapted Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike source, Cairn RPG is new to me but appears to be a streamlined game with very compact rules and thus suitable for absolute beginners. It has a strong fan-base and is popular because free/easy/fun. The description for its ‘Seven Silver Spheres’ introductory fantasy-forest adventure gives a flavour of a typical setting. I see the free ‘Barrow Delver’ is the game’s solo play ‘oracle’ and the free Cairn: Pocket Edition is a two-page at-a-glance wall-chart for the rules. There appears to be no AI-powered version of all this, at present, so you’ll need pens, paper and various gaming dice.

* Thomas Phinney’s Cristoforo font, free in .OTF format and free for any re-use. Be warned, however, that I think that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ done in this typeface would probably infringe a key Chaosium trademark. The font is a revival of Hermann Ihlenburg’s Victorian era typeface Columbus.

* Amazon UK is now listing the English translation of Gou Tanabe’s 194-page manga-style graphic novel of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. Due on 1st July 2025, from publisher Dark Horse.

* In Italy, the first issue of the new VersiPellis: rivista di miscellanea a tema fantastico e weird (February 2025) has, among others, the article “Lovecraft and Theosophy: an unconscious inspiration?”, and…

an editorial which makes it clear the desire to build a project that is not a simple container of stories or articles, but a meeting point between enthusiasts and scholars of the fantastic.

“23 pages of comics”. The editors are not averse to considering AI-assisted comics for publication, which may interest some.

* And finally, H.P. Lovecraft Ghibli edition, created with the new type of image generating AI. This works more like a Photoshop filter, in terms of being faithful to the input image, and need only a mimimal prompt for style rather than content. The image itself is not amazing, but works as a demo for the ‘style overlay’ technology behind it. This method of using existing images will change a lot of things in the creative world, once it’s open sourced and can easily be run locally on a PC. Currently, it’s only available as part of ChatGPT 4o.


— End-quotes —

“A drawing of myself by myself would have to be something like the accompanying enormity — which succeeds marvellously in looking like nobody I ever saw in or out of the mirror. I might get a job drawing portraits for Wonder Stories.” — Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, August 1931. Lovecraft includes a rough pen-sketch of his side profile.

“I have a curious and anomalous sense of kinship with the hawk-nosed, broad-templed Roman physiognomy. […] All other non-Nordic physiognomies repel me violently but the Roman features […] as displayed in the realistic portrait statuary of the republican age [of Ancient Rome], produce in me a profound feeling of stirred memories and quasi-identity. I have the curious subconscious feeling not only that people around me once looked like that, but that I once looked like that. Which is rather amusing in view of the fact that I am actually the utter reverse of Roman in appearance — tall, chalk-white, and of a characteristic and unmistakable Nordic English physiognomy.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, December 1933.

“It is said that the Belgian stratospherist Prof. Piccard cuts his own hair — but when I look at the result in newspaper portraits I feel I am the greater artist!” — Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933. In later years Lovecraft cut his own hair with clippers, to save money.


HPLinks #32 – fire, DOOM, theatre, Blackwood, London, and the 100th anniversary of Lovecraft’s travel-writing…

HPLinks #32.

* The German Lovecraftians report that the Miskatonic Theatre in Hamburg-Harburg “was completely destroyed in a fire on 9th March 2025”. This was billed as the only dedicated “horror theatre” in the world and one which had “staged many Lovecraft works”… .

Local news reports confirm the fire, and state that “The theatre was fully ablaze” when the fire brigades arrived. Four people suffered minor injuries, and a cat was bravely rescued from the second floor. The theatre had been previously targeted for the wholesale burglary of all gear and valuables, which the players had nevertheless recovered from. But, in the theatrical spirit of ‘the show must go on’, after the fire the… “last four performances of the theatre’s current play ‘The Whisperer in Darkness'” were moved to “a centrally located alternative location in Hamburg”. A subsequent ongoing crowdfunder has so far raised over $17,000 U.S., and the players plan to continue their “Lovecraftian repertoire in radio play format”. Donations are still welcome via GoFundme.

* Helios House Press is offering a new book version of the Lovecraft/Sonia stage collaboration Alcestis: A Play. New scans of this have also recently been added to the online Brown Digital Repository, and can be perused there for free.

* The latest Cormac McCarthy Journal compares the author with Lovecraft, in the article “Hinterland Horror: Geographical Extremity as Revelation in Blood Meridian and At the Mountains of Madness ($ paywall).

* This week The Pulp Super-Fan likes what he finds in a selection of issues of The Lovecraft Annual scholarly journal.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s recently been in Providence doing research, and in new books he notes the arrival of the second volume of Blackwood stories. I see from the Hippocampus Press website that the next two volumes are due soon, and I’d guess they’re likely to arrive on the doorstep before midsummer at the latest…

A Descent into Egypt and Others: Collected Short Fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Volume 4 — May

The Wendigo and Others: Collected Short Fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Volume 3 — May

* A new public-domain LibriVox recording of “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming” by R.E. Howard.

* The latest H.P. Podcast ponders Asperger’s Syndrome & Lovecraft’s Universe.

* A sumptuous new Moebius paperback may interest Tentaclii readers. Due in April 2025 (delayed from January 2025), in an unusual format. In Arzak: Destination Tassili — Corpus Final, the words are in French but… all are removed from the artwork and placed on the facing page, thus leaving the artwork to shine alone. At the back of the 248-page book there’s also a pure wordless b&w version of the posthumous sequel (Moebius died half-way through creating it). Note that…

This is the first publication of any part of Tome 2 [i.e. the sequel, in 29 finished pages] in any form.

* The hit Lovecraftian videogame The Sinking City is being remastered in Unreal Engine 5, which is the latest version of the advanced ‘industry standard’ game-engine. For PC and also for other platforms. All owners of the original will get a free upgrade to The Sinking City Remastered when released.

* DOOM expert Nathan has kindly added four more Lovecraft DOOM II game expansion WADS (i.e. fan-created extra game-levels and makeover mods), in a comment on my “Lovecraft in DOOM II” post. He also annotates the titles with descriptions and comments.

* I don’t normally note the various new Lovecraftian anthologies here, but I’ll make an exception for Into the Cthulhu-Universe: Lovecraftian Horrors in Other Literary Realities (April 2025). This has stories from a clutch of ‘name’ Mythos authors, who take the Mythos into other well-known “literary landscapes” (Tom Sawyer, John Carter of Mars, Alice in Wonderland etc).

* New in hardback and Kindle ebook, London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (2025). Lovecraft made a very close and extended study of ‘olde London’ at one point, for his own amusement, but sadly this mental time-travel was never used in fictional form.

* And finally, Lovecraft’s travel writing began 100 years ago in April 1925…

perhaps we should look back a few years, to his whirlwind one-day visit to Washington, D.C., on 11–12 April 1925 for the true commencement of his travel writing

This from S.T. Joshi, noting that we know that… “Lovecraft prepared at least one carbon copy” of an unusual and very long close-typed letter dated 21st April, to his aunt. Presumably to circulate among other colleagues. Thus April 1925 is the date at which his circulated travel writing began.


— End-quotes —

“I studied Old London intensively years ago, & could ramble guideless around it from Hampstead Heath to the Elephant & Castle!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.

From Lovecraft’s early 1916 poem which imagines a decrepid bookshop in Old London, filled with the mouldering relics of the 18th century wits…

Where crumbling tomes upon the groaning shelves
Cast their lost centuries about ourselves.
Mine be the pleasure of the grimy stand
Where age-old volumes sleep on ev’ry hand.

[…]

What shades scholastic thro’ the twilight flit
Where Knapton’s sagging folios loosely sit!
The skull-capp’d dealer, crouching on his stool,
O’er the vague past can claim a wizard’s rule:
On his seam’d face the myriad wrinkles play,
And subtly link him to the yesterday.

[…]

Hail! sportive Rochester, bestir thy feet,
And mince in fancy o’er the cobbled street!
House after house appear in gabled rows,
And the dim room Old London’s spirit shews!
Upon the floor, in Sol’s enfeebled blaze,
The coal-black puss with youthful ardour plays;
Yet what more ancient symbol may we scan
Than puss, the age-long satellite of Man?
Egyptian days a feline worship knew,
And Roman consuls heard the plaintive mew:
The glossy mite can win a scholar’s glance,
Whilst sages pause to watch a kitten prance.

Outside the creaking door a nation boils,
And Progress crushes Learning in its coils.
The blessed Past in mad confusion fades,
And Commerce blasts Retirement’s quiet shades.
Unnumber’d noises, in demoniac choir,
Wake the curs’d Pit, and stir the seething fire.
A million passengers, in hast’ning heat,
Jostle their fellows, and disturb the street.

“18th century England probably averages as high as any combination of time and place for a person of my particular psychology. I would have lived as a country squire of liberal tastes, visited London occasionally, fought on the government side in 1715 and 1745, and been a Tory [conservative] in politics.” — Lovecraft speculating about his place in the society of 18th century England, had he lived in that period. To Robert E. Howard, September 1931.

“In Hyde Park [Corner in London] I beheld the nightly swarm of amateur orators whose soap-box eloquence provides so ample a safety-valve for social and governmental discontent. Around these hoarse and excited expounders of political, religious, ethical, economic, philosophic, and divers other doctrines there gathers regularly a hungry, ragged, argumentative horde such as Hogarth would have loved to draw. Each ardent prophet has his own private solution for his country’s ills and those of the world in general, and no two will commonly be found to offer anything like the same panacea. All, however, have their respective (if sometimes less than respectful) audiences, with whom they usually share a complete ignorance of the problems they discuss. No limit is placed on their radicalism of utterance, since it is a traditional British belief that free speech affords the safest possible vent for disturbed emotions and bewildered brains.” — Sonia’s London travelogue, in “European Glimpses” (December 1932), a travelogue heavily revised by Lovecraft and probably also enhanced in its opinions on English culture.


HPLinks #31 – letters for sale, astronomy talk, REH, “From Beyond” filmed, Great Old Ones return, and one last Houdini ‘miracle escape’ (perhaps)…

HPLinks #31.

* For sale, “Three autograph letters from Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 1929”. Newly at Honest Abe’s pulp and paper impoundment, but they could be liberated for a mere third-of-a-bitcoin. In one of these Lovecraft observes that…

Today neither Poe nor Baudelaire could expect the slightest hearing in a standard magazine.

* New on YouTube, a reading of “The People of the Pit” (1918) by A. Merritt, Since the tale was a precursor to the famous Lovecraft-fave The Moon Pool of the same year, it seems highly likely that Lovecraft encountered this story at some point. It’s here read, across 46 minutes, by the very able Josh Greenwood.

* On YouTube, a recording of “When The Stars Are Right: H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy, a one-hour talk by Edward Guimont at the Seagrave Observatory, 5th October 2024. Starts at 2.00 minutes in, when the audio improves greatly.

* New and free in open-access, the academic book Fear of Aging: Old Age in Horror Fiction and Film (2025). Includes the chapter “‘With Strange Aeons Even Death May Die’: Aging in the World of Cthulhu”. Meaning in Lovecraft’s Mythos, not the wider mythos, games, movies etc.

* New from the University of North Texas Press, the chunky new hardcover book Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Released 15th March 2025, apparently. It’s on Amazon UK already but is oddly listed in the “Paranormal” category, and it seems only Amazon US is able to ship it to the UK.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press report that they are now shipping new “Ultimate Editions” of the letters.

* And there’s a further rich haul of R.E. Howard, in the latest LibriVox Ghost and Horror Collection #78. Public-domain readings of four REH tales including “The Skull in the Stars”. Also one by August Derleth.

* New on Archive.org, Mad Dreams And Monsters: The Art Of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studio.

* Some New York City readers may be interested in Syd Mead: Future Pastime, a large retrospective exhibition of the paintings by the science-fiction master. Being staged at a venue near Madison Square Gardens, New York City, and open from 27th March – 21st May 2025.

* An open-access / Creative Commons Attribution book review in Spanish, of El Gabinete Magico: Libro de las bibliotecas imaginarias (2023) (‘The Magic Cabinet: A Book of Imaginary Libraries’). The review is in HTML, and thus easy enough to auto-translate. The book is the…

product of almost thirty years of reading” and writing, distilled into “seventy-five entries”, a book in which “a tremendous amount of work is crystallized, tracing sources and organizing data”… “As an additional tool, the work’s name index, arranged in double columns and with a smaller font size, contains fifty-four tight pages that include the names of the writers and literary works, characters, films, articles, stories, and poems cited, not excluding the implicitly alluded references, identified in parentheses, and the authors or works where the aforementioned characters are located, preceded by an arrow. In this way, the interested reader can independently track down a specific writer or character in imaginary libraries, among other information.

Given this amount of effort, it seems curious Lovecraft is never mentioned in the book (I have access to a copy that can be searched). One would have thought that “The Shadow Out of Time”, at the least, would have merited a passing mention.

* I spotted another eBay scan of a postcard that may be of use to Lovecraftian RPG gamers, as a ‘vintage’ game prop…

U.S. Navy Hospital Corps training lab, Newport, Rhode Island.

* Here in the UK, “Filming set to begin on new horror film”. Billed as… “a respectful and faithful adaptation” of “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft and with some substantial acting names attached to the project. But also…

stretching the boundaries of the genre with modern, scientific concepts” and modernising the tale… “a physics researcher tracks down her disturbed mentor to stop an experiment that could rip open a portal to a dimension of unimaginable horrors.

* Veteran Lovecraftian band The Great Old Ones release their new Lovecraftian album Lands Of Azathoth on 27th March 2025.

* Did you think the Fanac Fan History project had come to an abrupt halt? Nope, it’s just that the Site Update History has moved to a new URL. Today’s additions, one sees, include the [ERB] Burroughs Bulletin #23 (New Series). Lots more scans of ye olde skool fanzines to discover, and all free. Dig in.

* The Cancer of Superstition has supposedly been “found” and was due to be published as a new book on 24th March 2025. Paper only, and I guess it should be arriving in the mail about now for the pre-order buyers. Probably best to wait to see what the reaction to the actual book is on the Houdini forums, before ordering, I’d suggest.

* And finally, an excellent new March 2025 reading of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” from The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. The very listenable voice of Josh Greenwood reminds me a little of the great Gordon Gould, but with more rumble and bounce. There’s an advert and intro, then the story. The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is definitely one worth following.


— End-quotes —

“Most of my nearly 43 years in New-England I have spent in semi-numbness & shivering from the rarely-interrupted cold […] as you can well appreciate from remembering [how] the poor old man shiver’d in Cleveland back in [19]’22, when the 5 o’clock lake breeze began to rattle the library windows!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, June 1933, delighting that he at last has reliable steam-heat in his rooms (he had moved to 66 College Street, and a house supplied with abundant heat by the adjacent boiler-room of the John Hay Library).

“At about 12:30 a.m. I was seated at my table writing when a curious & persistent popping or crackling outdoors arrested my attention. Lifting the dark curtain & peering out, I beheld a red world as light as day, with the falling snowflakes glittering weirdly. Seeking the source of the uncanny glare, I repaired to a north window. There, in full view, was the most impressive sight my eyes have ever beheld. Where that evening had stood the unoccupied Chapman house, recently sold & undergoing repairs, was now a titanic pillar of roaring, living flame amidst the deserted night — reaching into the illimitable heavens & lighting the country for miles around. The heat was intense — even here in the house — & the glare was stupendous. […] A high east wind was blowing, & the sparks flew freely, but ice-coated roofs saved the neighbourhood.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1920.

“And it is recorded that in the Elder Times, Om Oris, mightiest of the wizards, laid crafty snare for the demon Avaloth, and pitted dark magic against him; for Avaloth plagued the earth with a strange growth of ice and snow that crept as if alive, ever southward, and swallowed up the forests and the mountains. And the outcome of the contest with the demon is not known; but wizards of that day maintained that Avaloth, who was not easily discernible, could not be destroyed save by a great heat, the means whereof was not then known, although certain of the wizards foresaw that one day it should be. Yet, at this time the ice fields began to shrink and dwindle and finally vanished; and the earth bloomed forth afresh.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, 1935.

“I literally don’t know what it is to be too hot. The hotter it gets, the more energy I seem to have — mental and physical alike. I perspire freely, but am comfortable for all that I can relish temperatures of 97° and 98°, and never want it cooler than 80°. Of course, I don’t know how I’d be in those inland regions [of the USA] where the summer temperature gets up around 120° — but judging from the available evidence I could stand it better than most.” — Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, October 1935.


Add-ons for Stable Diffusion, another round-up

Here’s another small selection of Lovecraft-adjacent Stable Diffusion 1.5 add-ons, new since my last such update. These are free ‘style add-ons’ for free Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI models, which are used to generate images in free software such as Invoke AI. A gaming-quality graphics-card must be slotted into the PC, such as an NVIDIA 3060 12Gb.

* Carbonite Style is Star Wars-y (Han Solo trapped in carbonite) also has obvious uses for making Cthulhu-style bas-reliefs.

* Medieval Slums. With a rather slick ‘wallpaper’ style, but you could tone that down with the slider / prompt.

* Carnivorous Plant.

* Dreamlike Surrealist Painting.

* Rural Eldritch (currently in paid ‘early access’, thereafter to be released for free in ten days).

* Vintagecomic. Excellent, when used with the right model. Also gets the print/texturing right.