HPLinks #53.
* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal has a new issue listed, Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism, No. 6 (Autumn 2025). Among others…
Mario Sanchez Gumiel contributes a profound analysis of the Spanish writer Pompeu Gener, whose work shows analogies with Lovecraft, Machen, and other leading weird writers. John C. Tibbetts supplies a broad overview of the weird work of English writer Saki (H.H. Munro)
* S.T. Joshi’s Blog also announces a new volume of his essays, Aspects of the Weird Tale (2025), featuring among others… “several new essays on Lovecraft [and] a long essay on the weird work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. Available now as a budget Amazon ebook, and on receiving the 10% free sample I also see an essay on the rural/city divide in Dunsany, and that the Lovecraft essays are on Lovecraft’s Egyptian mummies, poetry about Lovecraft, Arthur S. Koki on Lovecraft, “Mountains” (unknown focus), Lovecraft and Weird Art, and Lovecraft in Audio.
* Also on Amazon, the latest Lovecraft Annual No. 19 (2025) is now listed there and appears to be shipping. No sign of its fellow annual journal The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies since 2023, so far as I can find.
* New in English in a Turkish open-access journal, the substantial “Translating Violence and Horror in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos: A Comparative Study of English & Turkish Versions” (2025).
* From Charles University in Prague, a dissertation in English offering a “Literary Comparison of Beowulf and R.E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian” (2024). Freely available online.
* A stop-motion short advert, publicising a new Conan action-figure toy… “features the new Conan figure in battle with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu”. No link here, as Animation Magazine blocks all VPN users in an obnoxious manner.
* My Tolkien Gleanings newsletter is now available at a new URL. Tracking and linking news of Tolkien scholarship, though only occasionally noting items concerning The Silmarillion and the invented languages. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds etc.
* Free and available now, my distillation of Lovecraft for NovelForge AI, the $50 novel-writing software. The packages should work with the trial version of this Windows software, which so far as I know never expires.
* The Tolkien and Fantasy blog has a new post “Correcting the ‘Facts’ about A. Merritt’s Autobiographical Writings”. As you’ll recall, Merritt was admired by Lovecraft and idolized by the early readers of Weird Tales magazine.
* New on Archive.org, a run of the British edition of Astounding magazine. Looks like it’s 1943-1955, and perhaps not a complete run for those years.
* How high will it go? A copy of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters Vol. 1 (1911-1924) in fine condition, on eBay with six days to go.
* A new issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion.
* London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (2025).
* New to me, the forthcoming table-trembler The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026). Setting a new record in jaw-dropping academic book pricing, at £550 ($740), albeit for a brain-eating 1,900 pages. One hopes that the editor has read the recent essay in the Lovecraft Annual, which very persuasively demonstrates that Lovecraft created the modern zombie and states that the master’s standing as “the font of the modern zombie is unchallengeable” (Lovecraft Annual 2020). Lovecraft is, however, not mentioned in the book’s blurb.
* The risk of Californian wildfires, and concerns about his old age, are reportedly leading movie-maker Guillermo del Toro to auction off part of his magnificent collection. The auction is being held soon via Heritage Auctions, and one hopes there will be a fabulous free PDF catalogue. TheoFantastique has the details and links. I’m uncertain if del Toro’s life-size H.P. Lovecraft sculpture will be under the hammer. Possibly not, I would guess.
* And talking of large amounts of vintage pop culture, free at CivitAI is a new generator of Scooby-Doo backgrounds for use with SDXL image-generation models. Spooky old-school 1970s Scooby Doo-style animation backdrops galore, freely re-usable… just add your own prompts.
* Grognardia’s blog reports that he’s been so taken by Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales of late that he’s… “now devoting myself to the development of an Old School Essentials-derived Dreamlands RPG, Dream-Quest.” Not AI, I assume. I would love a well-made text-based Dreamlands adventure as a solo role-play that was run and managed by an AI. With the player untroubled by fussy-dusty stats and rules, which would nevertheless still be whirring away in the background. Nothing like that is currently available, so far as I know.
* And finally, Pickman’s Hidden Atelier is a new YouTube channel that will aim to review only Lovecraftian videogames. And fairly obscure ones, by the look of it — first up is a 1991 Sega Mega Drive title.
— 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. (Mooted in a letter as the basis for an unwritten Lovecraft story starting in Old London and ending in Roman horrors elsewhere).
“In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.” — Lovecraft, opening lines of “The Descendent” (fragment).
“The [post]card from antique Londinium [London] duly came, & filled me with envy at your opportunity to behold civilisation’s capital, if only for a single full day. If I were in Europe, I would devote not less than 2 or 3 weeks to London — & might not get outside of Britain at all. The British Museum card surely reveals one of my (or Klarkash-Ton’s or Sonny Belknap’s) extra-human monsters in disguise — indeed, I am positive that this entity reached Java as a relique of sunken Mu, or of the still more monstrous & fabulous R’lyeh! Thanks!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1932.
The most likely Java deity image in the current British Museum collection, which would also make for a postcard, would be this fine drawing of an elephant-god sculpture…
“Coming early to London, I saw as a Child many of the celebrated Men of King William’s Reign, including the lamented Mr. Dryden, who sat much at the Tables of Will’s Coffee-House. With Mr. Addison and Dr. Swift I later became very well acquainted, and was an even more familiar Friend to Mr. Pope, whom I knew and respected till the Day of his Death.” — Lovecraft uses his own childhood attic encounter with the 18th century wits, in his “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”.
“I share most emphatically your regret at the distance between 278 Grove & 598 Angell, & wish we both lived in Old London, within walking distance of Will’s & of each other’s homes.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, December 1918. “Will’s” coffee-house was a key London gathering place of 18th century wits and poets.