Welcome to HPLinks #16.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— End-quote —

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

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