HPLinks #18.
* A new Wormwoodania post, “Remembering Scott Connors”, the Clark Ashton Smith and weird fiction scholar who has recently passed away. Related is last week’s news that S.T. Joshi intends to spend 2025 writing the long-awaited Clark Ashton Smith biography, a book Connors had apparently started but was unable to bring to publication.
* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog surveys 2024’s accomplishments in producing valuable new data and scholarship about Lovecraft’s wife.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine for Winter 1992, with the lead article being the memoir “H.P. Lovecraft Meets Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser” by Fritz Leiber.
* The Fossils website has a new “scan of the article “The Phenomenon of H.P.L., a ten-page biography of H.P. Lovecraft by Helen V. Wesson originally published in The Fossil for July 1957.”
* Now free on YouTube, S.T. Joshi’s presentation “Lovecraft and the Physicists: Coming to Terms with Relativity and Indeterminacy”, given at the recent ‘Lovecraft et les sciences’ conference in France. Two hours, but the length is partly due to the lack of an AI insta-translator. Thus there are many pauses needed for manual translation.
* A third Lovecraft book of translated letters for Spanish readers, El Terror de la Razon. Cartas III (2024), new from publisher Aristas Martinez. The blurb reveals that the first section flows around the idea of… “‘The Terror of Reason’, his ideas about humanity and the cosmos that he disseminated in his most famous stories [and fashioned into] visionary thought that would later inspire a new generation of posthumanist philosophers”. Then the second part of the book focuses on the evolution of the man’s political ideas and ideals, in his own words. I’d hope there are copious footnotes enabling younger readers with no personal experience of the 20th century to (for instance) distinguish national socialism from soviet socialism, and to know what a ‘blackshirt’ was, etc. e.g. when he signs off “Yrs for the blackshirt march on Washington” — Lovecraft to Galpin, July 1934.
* New from Brazil in open-access, a Spanish-language journal article with the translated title ‘Gods, Monsters, Aliens: Lovecraft and the Post-Human’.
* The free bundle of Lovecraft tales, specially set up for deep textual analysis with a computer, is now available as lovecraftr version 1.2 (December 2024).
* Further to my July 2024 post on “that Canton madhouse”, Tentaclii reader Luke has written to say that he’s spotted a possible state institution at Canton (this being the Canton to be seen from a tall railway viaduct, when on the rail route from Providence to Boston). This was the ‘Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children’, later the ‘Massachusetts Hospital School’. Opened in 1907 and continuing to the present day, located on an 160-acre slope going down to meet the large local lake then called ‘Reservoir Pond’. Lovecraft had written “I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse”. Yet this real place was not a “madhouse”, but rather an institutional residential hospital with vocational training (farm work, craft workshops etc) for ages 2 to 20. This possibility is certainly worth considering. But, so far as I can see, the location and relatively low-rise appearance (compared to the vast castle-like state madhouses of the time) suggests it may not have made much of an impression on passing rail travellers, even if it could have been seen from a train window…
Note that Luke plausibly observes that the use of “poor little cousin” indicates that the Innsmouth-tainted cousin may have been sent away when a child. He was “little” but then “I had not seen him in four years”, and then a few more years pass before the rescue plan. All of which suggests a boy of perhaps 12 or 13 at the time of the rescue. A boy who would not yet have been transferred to an adult institution. Thus, to find the key state institution for “deformed” children at the real Canton is certainly intriguing.
* A new Skull Session podcast interview with Will Murray… “Will Murray and I discuss his long and varied career writing for Marvel Comics and magazines” and the influence of Lovecraft.
* It’s official, there will be a “4k restoration” version of the Re-Animator movie, complete with bubbling vats of newly-brewed extras. Likely to appear in early April 2025, and to ship with a 150-page book. The much-loved 1985 comedy movie adapted Lovecraft’s Home Brew magazine shocker-serial “Herbert West: Reanimator”.
* In Denmark in August 2025, a three-day conference on ‘Otherworldly Entertainment’…
Today, videogames continue to be one of the biggest platforms for horror, magic, gothic, and occult entertainment, even outperforming cinema and television. Despite [this deep reach into] broad audiences, [the topic] remains severely understudied.
* A paying Lovecraft-related job for a “Dark and mysterious painterly illustrator” wanted for the early stages of a commercial project. Predictably it’s a ‘rush job’ and over Christmas and New Year too. But the offer looks quite serious and there should be just enough time. Sadly the application is by a “super detailed and borderline complicated form” (‘exit stage-left: half the creatives in the room, screaming…’, etc).
* Tartarus Press on the T. Lobsang Rampa books. I recall these being prominent on home bookshelves, as a young child. Not my own shelves, as I never read the Rampa books. But it’s fascinating to learn now that the supposed mystical Tibetan lama who peeped out at me from the book-cases as a child, was… “in fact the son of a plumber from Plympton in Devon [southern England] called Cyril Hoskin”. He became a sometime fitter of corsets, sometime photographer, in the dreary greyness of post-war London. After his first 1956/57 best-seller…
with each subsequent book, Rampa casually shared his knowledge of astral travel, civilisations on Venus, UFOs, etc. One of his books was even meant to have been dictated to him by his cat.
The newspaper expose didn’t matter. He just went into full character for the rest of his life, claimed ‘reincarnation’ and much else… and credulous readers still lapped it up. Tartarus is now seeking anyone who can help with the research for a new full biography of this strange and strangely popular Englishman.
* Islands magazine recommends a visit to an “Underrated Literary Gem Filled With Rare Finds In Rhode Island”. This being the John Hay Library in Providence. Along with the huge Lovecraft collection, evidently the visitor can find there what sounds like one of the world’s finest collections of miniature toy soldiers, and for the especially ghoulish… four books bound in human skin.
* And finally, at the Grolier in New York City, “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works”. Their exhibition runs until 15th February 2024. The Necronomicon is, regrettably, represented by a rather naff plastic ‘joke’ case (supposedly holding ye dreadfull tome).
— End-quotes —
“Hope ya kin get your Black Cat file [i.e. a complete ‘reference file’ run of a past magazine]. I used to buy that reg’lar-like, and recall the swell weird stuff it had.” — Lovecraft to Morton, 23rd February 1936.
“I have been re-reading [your new story] “Marsh-Mad” — & the more I analyse it the better I like it! I shall make every effort to get this in the official organ [but, if not then it] is far too good to waste on any but a first-rate paper! Try it on the Black Cat.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 29th August 1918.
“Once again I’ve followed a Mortonian [Morton] tip, as I did when sending “Dagon” to the Black Cat and “The Tomb” to the Black Mask and have slipped Weird Tales five of my hell-beaters” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923.
We know Lovecraft began to “notice” the magazine Black Cat in 1904, but I know of no scholars able to pinpoint the exact date at which he ceased to buy or read the title.
