HPLinks #82.

* Sprague de Camp Fan reviews the two-volume Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

* The latest Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature is now freely available online. Mostly Tolkien and his circle/era, but note also the book reviews for…

   – William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark.
   – Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature.
   – Raven and Crow: The Mythology, Art and Science of Our Favorite Black Birds.

* In Space: A Student Journal for Public Audiences (University of Alabama), “On Lovecraft and The End”. The idea of cosmic indifference, it is suggested…

frees us to define our own values of what is important and what is not. It examines suffering, not as some divine trial, but as a shared human experience that connects us.

* New on Amazon, Tales of the Derleth Mythos (April 2026), seemingly an anthology newly collected by Robert M. Price. A collection of writers responding to, and in two cases freely re-writing, Derleth’s post-Lovecraft Mythos tales…

Two stories presume to improve on a pair of Derleth’s own tales. “The Round Tower” is both a compliment on and a criticism of “The Lurker at the Threshold”. The trouble is that the third part of Lurker ‘jumps the tracks’ laid down by the preceding two. “The Round Tower” attempt to set things right with a new substitute part three. “Footsteps Far Below” reproduces most of Derleth’s “The Return of Hastur”, but incorporates revisions which were suggested by Clark Ashton Smith but ignored by Derleth.

* Dark Worlds digs up “More Early Plant Monsters” from Victorian and Edwardian fiction.

* New at LibriVox, a public domain reading of “Marooned in Andromeda” by Clark Ashton Smith.

* Due in September 2026, a third edition of Wiley’s table-trembling survey volume American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft.

* The new Eurocomics BD Die Katzen von Ulthar und weitere Geschichten offers four Lovecraft tales, adapted for comics by Giuseppe Congendo and Antonio Montano.

The tales adapted are “The Terrible Old Man”, “The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Hound” and “The Outsider”. The cover appeals, but the German review at Warp Core (here translated) is not encouraging…

It becomes clear from the very beginning that this book is anything but easy to read and digest. The artwork, is anything but standard and indeed the illustrations are extreme. Extremely minimalist, extremely stylized, and extremely abstract. The drawings are limited to two colours per page, with speech bubbles adding a third. At times, it’s hard to know what to make of what you’re looking at. The narratives themselves are advanced almost exclusively through dialogue.

* New on Archive.org, the fanzine Infinity #2 (1973). A Berni Wrightson special-issue, but it also has a Frazetta interview.

* Also new on Archive.org, Xero #10 (1963). Has a useful long survey of Sax Rhomer’s output, followed by a Rhomer bibliography to circa 1962.

* The latest Journal of Inklings Studies has a book review of Phantastes: A Graphic Novel Adapted from George MacDonald’s Classic. The issue’s reviews are freely available online.

* Talking of comics, the UK’s 2000 A.D. comics magazine has a new comic-book take on Lovecraft’s pigeons (you’ll recall his Yuggoth sonnet on “The Pigeon-Flyers” of Hell’s Kitchen, NYC)… Lovecraftian pigeon monster.

* The quality of book covers matter to half of your potential Generation Z readers, it appears. A new UK survey from the reputable YouGov survey agency, using a somewhat reliable methodology which surveyed 2,097 UK book-buying adults, in March 2026. They… “found that 49% of 18-24 year-olds consider a book’s cover an important factor when buying, compared to just 27% of over-55s.” At a time when many people’s disposable income is being very significantly reduced, I’d suggest that having a quality cover may tip the balance towards success. There are many options for the self-publisher: a young designer/typographer who wants to burnish their portfolio; a small commission via DeviantArt; public domain images; and even AI generation if one knows what one’s doing with it and can combine it with Photoshop skills.

* Possibly of use for writers, the unique free offline utility Paragraph Tripler / Paragraph Expander. Paste in your text, and get all paragraphs tripled. So you can potentially see three somewhat different versions at a time, and then pick the best. Or keep track of first / second / final draft, at the paragraph level.

* And finally, an amusing guide to installing H.P. Lovecraft Air Conditioning. One of the nicest combinations of AI writing and niche marketing I’ve yet come across…

Color Palette: Deep blues, charcoal grays, and muted emeralds mirror the night ocean and shadowed chapters of Lovecraft’s fiction. Neutral walls allow accents to pop and prevent the space from feeling oppressive.

Textural Layers: Stone veneer, weathered wood, and aged metals resemble ancient structures like the fictional R’lyeh or the forgotten libraries described by Lovecraft. Textures influence perceived room temperature and comfort.

Ambient Lighting: Low-intensity LEDs, programmable strips, and candles with flicker can mimic the eerie glow of otherworldly luminance. Lighting should be controllable to maintain comfort while preserving mood.

Scent And Sound: Subtle sea-air aromas or resinous scents and a curated soundscape of distant surf, creaking timbers, and whispered chorales enhance immersion without overwhelming the senses.

Furnishings And Symbolism: Classic leather seating, vintage shelving, and arcane-looking artifacts evoke Lovecraft’s era while keeping seating comfort and airflow top priorities.

— End-quotes —

“I recall how he [Everett McNeil] shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination — Baudelairian Satanism and cosmic terror-twisted, fantastic Nordic faces leering and grimacing beside night-lapping beacon-fires set to signal unholy planets — death brooding and gibbering in crypts and oozing out of the windows and cracks of unending bulging brick walls — sinister pigeon-breeders on filth-choked roofs sending birds of space out into black unknown gulfs with unrepeatable messages to the obscene, amorphous serpent-gods thereof.” — Lovecraft to Morton, December 1929, recalling visiting Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. Unlike Red Hook, the roofs in Hell’s Kitchen were accessible and thus used as youth-gang headquarters, where pigeon breeding in rooftop coops was rife. The birds aided in gambling, crime communications, and stealing.

“Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafeningly above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which human priests do not often give. […] Then [he] turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to house the archaic father of all the rumoured shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the curious. […] the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it being indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of shantaks in the king’s dome is fed in the dark).” — Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

“I saw the ruinous, deserted old Randolph Beebe house where the whippoorwills cluster abnormally, and learned that these birds are feared by the rustics as evil psychopomps. It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves. If the soul eludes them, they disperse in quiet disappointment; but sometimes they set up a chorused clamour of excited, triumphant chattering which makes the watchers turn pale and mutter — with that air of hushed, awestruck portentousness which only a backwoods Yankee can assume — “They got ’im!” […] I saw the haunted pasture bars in the spectral dusk, and one evening was thrilled and amazed by a monstrous saraband of fireflies over marsh and meadow. It was as if some strange, sinister constellation had taken on an uncanny life and descended to hang low above the lush grasses. And one day Mrs. Miniter shewed me a deep, mute ravine beyond the Randolph Beebe house, along whose far-off wooded floor an unseen stream trickles in eternal shadow. Here, I am told, the whippoorwills gather on certain nights for no good purpose.” — Lovecraft visits Wilbraham, scene of “The Dunwich Horror”, July 1928.

“Whippoorwills are odd creatures — & (as you may recall from my “Dunwich Horror”) form the subject of gruesome myths in rural New-England, being regarded as malign psychopomps. About their notes — in Florida the local whippoorwhills have an ampler call than in the North, perhaps indicating their membership in another sub-species. Instead of a cluck followed by “ree notes, the prevailing cry seems to be longer & more complexly trilled — so that the small boys of Dunedin translate the message rather quaintly as “Chuck married the widow”. These birds were especially numerous in the thickets near good old Canevin’s abode at 1159 Broadway [Dunedin, Florida].” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1933.

“Whippoorwills? I’ll say we have ’em down here! Exotic ones too with a liquid rolling note apparently more complex than that their northern kinsfolk … I first heard them in the mystical dawn outside my window, and half imagined that they were voices calling across the ultimate void from Beyond.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, from Dunedin, Florida, June 1931.

HPLinks #77.

* The NecronomiCon’s Armitage Symposium has its calls for papers out. Set for 13th-16th August 2026, in Providence, Rhode Island. The Symposium…

is mainly dedicated to the life and works of the Providence-based weird fiction writer, the father of cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft, but also to his milieu: his literary predecessors, contemporaries, and current successors of the genre.

Submissions are welcome from all, if one can give an in-person presentation. Presentations will be considered in due course for Lovecraftian Proceedings No.7. Deadline: 24th May 2026.

* The NecronomiCon art-show, Ars Necronomica 2026, does not yet have details for the forthcoming show. Other than that it will run in Providence… “for most of August 2026”.

* New from Charles University, the PhD thesis Lovecraftova literarni tvorba v kontextu objektove orientovane ontologie (2026) (‘Lovecraft’s literary work in the context of object-oriented ontology’). Freely available online, in Czech with English abstract. Also in Czech, this week they have the official translation of Tanebe’s mammoth The Shadow over Innsmouth manga adaptation.

* The hub website hplovecraft.com has a new page for Collections of Lovecraft’s Works, made re-sortable by year, publisher or title.

* Deep Cuts considers two 1973 publications about Lovecraft and Sonia.

* Sechrist’s grandson has made contact, via my 2018 Tentaclii post on Edward Lloyd Sechrist (1873-1953). See the comments at the foot of the post.

* Parker’s Ponderings reviews “The Craziest Commonplace Book Ever” ($ paywalled, Substack), apparently through the lens of an interest in notebook-keeping methods. It’s Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, in a new illustrated version.

* One I missed back in 2016. Daniel Birmingham produced “At the Mountains of Madness” as a low-budget screenplay as the final dissertation submission for his Screenwriting degree… “Rather than scale the film to make it larger than life, I wanted to write a quiet, chilling piece that could be shot on a low-budget.” Now freely available online, from his university repository.

* The German Lovecraftians report on a forthcoming premiere for a drone-orchestral-visual “Colour Out Of Space”, in Berlin…

After more than 10 years of work and the creation of over 700 images, The Dunwich Orchestra will perform their complete production “The Colour Out Of Space” live for the first time, on 23rd April 2026 the venerable Babylon cinema in Berlin. The German Lovecraft Society is sponsoring the project as an official cooperation partner. Berlin-based comic artist and illustrator Andreas Hartung and The Dunwich Orchestra have adapted this horror parable as a dark, episodic visual show with an atmospheric soundtrack, entirely without words, drawing the viewer into a hypnotically slowed vortex of horror – a profound drone-comic visual spectacle.

* The Enki Bilal Collection, on show from June 2026 in Paris, France. The major retrospective will be ticketed and priced. Many Tentaclii readers will know Bilal from his distinctive artistry and storytelling in Heavy Metal and elsewhere.

The artist [himself] is opening the Enki Bilal Collection in the Marais district of Paris. Serving as both an exhibition hub and a creative studio, this museum [quality] exhibition space will showcase the painter and author’s works, allowing visitors to explore his creations firsthand. In addition, it will host temporary thematic exhibits, panel discussions, screenings, book signings, and meet-and-greet events. A retrospective exhibition showcasing Enki Bilal’s work is set to inaugurate the venue, running through September 2026.

* Also in comics, Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson was published last month as an affordable paperback and ebook. Wrightson’s various collected 1970s work for Creepy magazine. Including an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”, and with all the strips kept in b&w rather than being coloured.

* Publisher DMR has a new free ‘best of’ sword-and-sorcery story sampler book, The Battle Rages On: A Free Anthology from DMR Books. If you like what you read they have plenty more.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press has a new fundraiser book to aid the restoration of Howard’s home, titled First Cuts – the Drafts and Fragments of Breckinridge Elkins. Elkins being Howard’s irascible hillbilly from Bear Creek.

* Talking of Howard, I see Titan Books have published a new… “Solomon Kane novelette, Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black”, a $1.99 ebook read…

Journeying back to his native [English county of] Devon, Kane finds his homeland is not as he left it. A foulness has spread across England, changing it forever. The devils that inhabited far-off lands have infiltrated this blessed plot.

No sign of it via search on Amazon UK for “Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black”, but it turns out the ebook is there. It also turns out that this is No. 2 in a series and that a similar No.1 ebook slipped out just before Christmas 2025 as Solomon Kane: The Lair of the Mari Lwyd. No. 1 was set in Wales, and appears to have had good reviews.

* Talking of Wales, the Welsh regional newspaper Powys County Times brings news of a new Lovecraftian anthology with a regional Welsh flavour…

‘Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country’ brings together tales inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the influential American writer, and features stories by six Welsh authors […] The collection explores Lovecraft’s literary connections [with Wales], particularly his debt to Caerleon-born author Arthur Machen.

Sounds good, and better I see it’s on Amazon UK as a budget ebook. Amazon’s listings suggests Night Country may be a follow-up to the editor’s first Cthulhu Cymraeg (2013) anthology, rather than a reprinting.

— End-quotes —

Over Christmas and New Year 1927 Lovecraft dug out his crumbling copy of some old notes on the family tree… “I had copied it from my late great-aunt Sarah Allgood’s chart (plus a chart of the Lovecraft side) in 1905, and it had nearly fallen to pieces”. On re-copying for preservation, he discovers a… “shocking revelation of hybridism”…

“… who is this dame that my great-grandfather William Allgood married in 1817? Rachel Morris — yes, I knew that before. But where did she come from? Wales! [and] my great-great-grandmother, born in 1774 and died in 1845 […] was Isabella Purcell, daughter of Owen Purcell of Llanariba, and of his wife Susanna Rees, daughter of David Rees or Rhys. A Welsh gentlewoman of unmixed Celtick blood!” [and] my great-grandmother Rachel Morris had a mother wholly Celtic Welsh, and a father one-quarter Celtic Welsh.” — to Belknap Long, January 1927.

There is no Llanariba in Wales. Llan is common and simply indicates a place with an enclosed church and graveyard. a-riba or ariba is not Welsh, nor is there anything like it if one assumes an h for a mis-transcribed b.

Writing to Barlow in 1934, he still thought he had… “a good deal of Celtic blood from Welsh, Cornish, and Devonian lines.” Also in 1934 he wrote to Rimel… “Only lately did I learn that Rhys (on my Welsh side) is [pronounced] Reez. I had called it Riss.”

“Oddly — for one whose Devonian and Welsh and Cornish lines imply a good proportion of Celtic blood — my weird imagination is not at all Celtic. I not only lack but dislike the Celt’s whimsical angle toward the unreal world. When the genes were juggled around in the formation of my cerebral cells, the Teutonic ones seem to have pre-empted the fantastic division. However, I like to apply that Teutonic imagination to themes which may be far from Teutonic. The fact is, my instinctive loyalties and area of interest seem to follow cultural rather than biological lines … a tendency directly opposed to the Nazi tribal ideal. Undeniably, my own blood kinsfolk on the continent [i.e. the Germanic cultures] interest me less than my cultural kinsfolk, whose blood diverges sharply from my own as the stream recedes in time.” — Lovecraft to Barlow, June 1936.

HPLinks #76.

* From Spain, a new illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest, though here titled as En Busca de la Ciudad del Sol Poniente (trans: ‘In Search of The Sunset City’).

published by Alianza Editorial in its Singular Books Collection (LS). Translation by Francisco Torres Oliver, and illustrations by Gonzalo Gruber. A hardcover with 216 pages.

Finding the publisher’s page for the book also reveals it’s available from them in paperback and ePub. Turns out it’s even on on Amazon UK right now as a £13 Kindle ebook with free sample. The publisher’s website also has details of the artist…

Gonzalo Gruber, graduate in fine arts, forest firefighter, and tireless draftsman. Always immersed in impossible projects that combine his passion for art and nature. Like “Ear Ashes”, his elusive graphic novel/essay which now has more than 300 illustrations and is always in progress. In 2026 he immersed himself in the unique dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft, illustrating Dream-Quest for Alianza Editorial.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a useful and informative review of H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend (2024).

* The Independent Horror Society offers a short review of the recent London Lovecraft Festival.

* The Portland 30th H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, now successfully Kickstarted and set for mid September 2026.

* ‘Technologies of the Fantastic’, an online conference set for 13th-15th May 2026. The title seems somewhat misleading, since the organisers say they intend to focus on “the technologies of fantasy” in particular. Such as… “carefully constructed runes and magical glyphs that operate as locks and keys; in the textile metaphors of spell weaving; in the taxonomy of the naming [of natural elemental forces]”. Registration is not yet open, but it will be via Eventbrite.

* Guest Posts at Wormwoodiana, for “The Centenary of Amazing Stories” pulp magazine, part one and part two.

* Deep Cuts considers the Lovecraft recollections of his friend Mrs Miniter, which were preserved in various amateur journalism publications of the 1920s. In giving a talk to the amateurs, she wrote that Lovecraft delivered with a voice having a… “staccato utterance and an air of temporarily abandoning Greek for this time only”.

* New to me, the historical survey book The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (2008), from Yale University Press. No mention of Lovecraft, it seems, but the early chapters have plenty of cultural context, re: Lovecraft’s times and NYC.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog post notes that his Mythos fiction survey book The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos has appeared in Russian translation.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the 1970s Cartoonist PROfiles magazine. Cartoonist PROfiles #30 (1976) has a previously unpublished Dunsany comic-book adaptation introduced thus…

Back in 1966, Russ Jones, an advocate of more sophisticated and more ambitious comic book continuity formats, put together a Pyramid paperback entitled Christopher Lee’s Treasury of Terror. Classic stories by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Bram Stoker were robustly аnd intelligently illustrated by veteran comic-book artists, two or three panels to a page, sideways. Jones’ initial “great picture stories of supernatural horror” compendium should have merited a second edition: Jones planned a follow-up, and though adaptations and finished illustrations were assigned and produced, they never saw the black of the press.

The unpublished Dunsany here was from the planned second book. Turns out the ‘Lovecraft’ item in the first book was “Wentworth’s Day [1957] by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth”, hardly a “classic”.

And in Cartoonist PROfiles #24 (1974), an illustrated Tom Sutton interview with a fabulous 1974 Charlton cover in b&w. The cover as published was rather badly coloured.

* At Substack, The Obelisk reviews Bloch’s Strange Eons…

Strange Eons is nowhere near Bloch’s best work. In fact, one has to have a strong fondness for cheese to merely enjoy this paean to Lovecraft’s universe. Pretty much every twist in the narrative is followed by digressions on the greatness of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. That’s all well and good, but I can understand the criticisms of Strange Eons, especially in regard to its adolescent-esque prose. Bloch almost seems to be writing for a teenage audience here [and there are a vast] number of Easter eggs buried throughout. […] Ultimately, Strange Eons is best enjoyed as a kind of love letter to an old friend.

No free audiobook, it seems.

* William Emmons Books has the book review “Elak! Out From The Shadow Of Conan!”. This being a review of Henry Kuttner’s novelette Thunder in the Dawn, published in two issues of Weird Tales, 1938. The long review has plot spoilers. Thunder was written for a pulp audience used to a fast-paced story, yet as the review observes…

this novella starts to cross the bridge from sword and sorcery toward epic fantasy [and the hero’s quest] is at least creeping towards epic fantasy.

I see there’s a free and well-read audiobook of it on YouTube, running to 140 minutes. Long, but the latest version of the YoutubeDownloader freeware can handle it.

* And finally, U.S. Library of Congress archivists have discovered a lost 19th century film by Melies in some rusting old film cans. They realised…

we were looking at ‘Gugusse and the Automaton’ a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George Melies […] made around 1897, [which] was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century.

— End-quotes —

“I once owned an Edison machine of the primitive type, with recorder and blanks; and I made many vocal records in imitation of the renowned vocalists of the wax cylinder. My colleagues would smile to hear some of the plaintive tenor solos which I perpetrated in the days of my youth!! But sad to say, I gave the old machine away about a year ago to a deserving and not too musical youth who occasionally performs useful labour about the place. I wish now that I had retained it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917.

“Something over a decade ago I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results — mothers are not always unbiased critics — but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive, ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack [famous Irish principal tenor]. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1918.

“It took the bizarre & nondescript tonal & rhythmical hashes of post-war jazz to get me disgusted with popular ballads — & even now I relish the old-time [pre-jazz] inanities when they are revived on the radio …. though this may be merely because they recall the lost illusions & optimisms of the youthful period when I first knew & ululated them. […] with a gang of fellows whistling or howling the tin pan ditties of the period with overt & genuine gusto, as Grandpa must confess to having done in the lost golden days of ’06 & thereabouts!” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, February 1934.