HPLinks #70.
* The PhD thesis Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025) is now available for full download. Previously there was only a long abstract.
* Hippocampus Press has newly listed Spectral Realms No. 24. Full of new poems, plus the new S.T. Joshi article “Clark Ashton Smith: Before The Star-Treader”.
* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post has his report on the recent Clark Ashton Smith conference…
All in all, the conference was a rousing success. The panels were videotaped, and I imagine they will be uploaded onto YouTube or some other such platform in due course of time. We hope to reprise the event — and make it span two days rather than just one — in two years’ time.
* The contents list of the new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida.
* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews the book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, and also usefully describes the appendices.
* SpraguedeCampFan reviews Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard, in part one of a series of posts.
* The Robert E. Howard Days organisers note “Only Five Months until Howard Days!”.
* More scans of the old fanzine Dagon have arrived on Archive.org. Mostly gaming and Mythos tales, but note that Dagon No. 15 (1986) has Robert M. Price on “Mythos Names and How to Say Them”.
* The Bayou Film Festival (Lafayette, USA) will premiere Dreams of a Dead God on 24th January 2026. The new 36-minute movie tells of the events in Louisiana after the events of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Part one-shack drama and part ‘found-footage’, it seems.
* The Humble Bundle website has a Chaosium RPG bundle, with proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund. Valid for the next two weeks. Talking of wildlife, note the the full bundle also includes the books Petersen’s Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors and Malleus Monstrorum Vol. 1 Monsters of the Mythos.
* An announcement for Lovecraftian Days 2026, set for the city of Prague from 9th-16th April 2026. This will be a…
week-long celebration dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror legacy and its influence on gaming. The festival will bring together dozens of publishers and developers worldwide for a week of new game announcements and releases, exclusive demos and early access opportunities, special discounts, developer interviews, and community events.
* And finally, “a bizarre [theme-park] attraction very much inspired by the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. It was located in a park called Mirapolis”. That was the first theme-park in France and it was based around attractions inspired by imaginative literature. Parts of the Lovecraft section’s mechanicals were later re-used in a U.S. dinosaur attraction in 1994. On YouTube, theme park historian Poseidon Entertainment goes in search of “The Lost Lovecraftian Horror Ride”.
— End-quotes —
“… he [Lovecraft] tried all the soporific stunts at Revere” [… we went] “to Revere Beach, where Mr. Lovecraft dropped eighty-five feet and was all over.” (Mrs. Miniter, recalling Lovecraft on a roller coaster / water-drop ride at the Boston Revere Beach, in Lovecraft Remembered, page 83).
“Lovecraft and Albert Sandusky did the eighty-five-foot-drop switchback three times in succession [at Revere] and complained bitterly of the tameness of it all […] Picture, if you will, the philosophical form of one Henry Padget-Lowe, Edward Softly, Theobald Jr., H.P.L. [i.e. Lovecraft and his psuedonyms], popping out and coming bouncing toward us. It was a screaming scream.” — George Houtain, recalling the same day at Revere Beach.
As well as riding all the rides, according to Randy Everts Lovecraft also had his palm read by a palmist and answered a ‘psychological questionnaire’ in the sideshows at Revere.
He also passed by Revere Beach on his way to Salem a little later, on a more sedate set of rails…
“I set out for my favourite antique Salem region. This time I went on the electrick coaches [electric tram-cars], twice having to change (at Revere Beach and at Lynn) before attaining Salem. ‘Tis a ride of extream attractiveness, and must have form’d a diversion of prime magnitude in the days when open cars ran direct from Boston to Salem. But all things decay, and nothing more so than the rural tramways of New-England.” — Lovecraft to Galpin and Long, 1st May 1923.