HPLinks #92.
* Deep Cuts asks “Who is Clara in Lovecraft’s Letters?” and ably uncovers a new Lovecraft acquaintance in Providence. I’d add that the Westport Historical Society has a Clara Buffum page, with additional details of her summer home in Westport and her cataloguing work at the Providence Athenaeum. The Providence Athenaeum Bulletin reveals she also worked on the Delivery Desk in 1897, around the same time as the cataloguing work. Later the Providence Handicraft Club has her giving a talk on bookbinding to the Club in 1923, and her correspondence and mail-order sales address in 1926 was “42 College St., Providence, R.I.” which is that of the Club. Later the American Art Annual 1932 lists her as a member of the Club. Both the cataloguing work and the Club would tie Clara to Lovecraft’s aunts.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Profiles In History: Autograph Catalog 41 Winter 2006. Offers a 1930 Lovecraft letter to C.A. Smith, with transcript…
Calsbad = the famous Carlsbad caverns. 20 years ago one could have had this for what today would be deemed a bargain price.
* From Indiana University, the Phd thesis The Edge of Cognition: Enchantment in Weird Fiction (2026). Freely available online.
* New in the 2026 of the French open-access annual journal Res Futurae, “Lovecraft sans Cthulhu. Epistemologie et esthetique de la bestialite dans l’oeuvre lovecraftienne” (‘Lovecraft without Cthulhu: Epistemology and the aesthetics of bestiality in Lovecraftian work’).
This article reconstructs the author’s intellectual landscape to better understand the interfaces between the pattern of bestiality and racialist zoo-anthropology. The study of the stories ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and ‘The Dunwich Horror’ allows us to articulate bestiality with an aestheticized evolutionary imagination.
* From the University of Marburg in Germany, a new open-access journal titled Fandom | Cultures | Research. Dedicated to fandom and fan-cultures research and research methodology. So far, four issues have been produced. Mostly English items.
* On YouTube, Archiving Horror! The S.T. Joshi Interview. A new Joshi interview.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Arkham House Catalog and Stock List With Addendum, 1986-1987.
* A new book Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination (2025), which may interest some.
* Murray Ewing has a new blog post on “Lovecraftian Labatut”, musing on the curious similarities between the “strange and disturbing new insights” of the physicists and mathematicians, and the entities and cosmic vistas their workings can appear to glimpse.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog announces…
the Friends of August Derleth is a going concern, and we are actively soliciting members. As can be seen from our website at friendsofaugustderleth.org, which is still in a somewhat rudimentary stage, a membership is remarkably inexpensive, and at a later time members will be allowed special privileges (such as access to books published by the Friends) not available to non-members.
* Among other items, Joshi also notes his participation in a…
conference on Lovecraft’s philosophy put on by Steven K. Stakland and others and taking place in Japan on [29th June – 1st July. Other speakers] included papers by such veterans as Robert M. Price and Steven J. Mariconda. [The papers] will not be available online, but it appears that a book of all the papers is likely to be published by Routledge.
* DMR considers “R.E. Howard’s “The Garden of Fear”: Flowers of Evil and a Tower of Dread” and “”The Valley of the Worm”: Forging the Myth Behind the Myths”.
* On YouTube, “…when I last see him” The de Camp Interviews on Robert E. Howard…
Michael K. Vaughan discusses a rare, limited-edition book containing unedited interviews by L. Sprague de Camp regarding Robert E. Howard. These primary source transcripts offer fans and scholars a transparent look at the original accounts from those who knew the author
* Adventures Fantastic has A Brief Report from Robert E. Howard Days 2026.
* From veteran audiobook reader Horror Babble, what appears to be a new full reading of “The Shadow out of Time” (July 2026). I’ve not listened to it yet, but I assume it’s a more polished re-read of the earlier version HB released to YouTube some years ago. There’s also another fine unabridged reading free on Archive.org.
* The Obelisk has “Atom Age Lovecraft: A Review of Frank Belknap Long’s Journey Into Darkness”.
* New to me, an early item in Lovecraft scholarship Out for Blood (1984). A chunky A5 booklet, apparently aimed to “…prove that Lovecraftian analysis is not ‘worked out’ as many believe. [Gives] evidence to support my conviction that Lovecraft’s fictional concepts were developed with consistent logic and form a unified body of work”. However, the contents-list on the back suggests an essay selection with some intriguing topics.
* Comics publisher Dark Horse has announced a cover and a firm 2027 release date for the Gou Tanabe graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark in English translation. To be paired with “Dagon”.
* “Crowdfunded $10K film ‘It Calls'”…
a psychological cosmic horror film inspired by the mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft […] Filming began in mid-May and is taking place throughout Roseburg, Bandon and other locations across Southern Oregon, with production expected to wrap on the 1st of August [2026]. Produced on a $10,000 budget raised entirely through crowdfunding, the studio said It Calls represents its most ambitious production to date.
* Germany’s Miskatonic Horror Theatre will be staging their biggest show yet, “The Call of Cthulhu” in Hamburg from 21st-23rd August 2026. Taking to the stage at the big open-air stage in Hamburg’s city park. Booking now.
* RobbieTheRobot has a current page of the choice selections he’s making from the itch.io mini-games and interactive fiction which have Lovecraft as the theme.
* A long English abstract for the Polish undergraduate final dissertation “Horror in Pixels: How Ugly Games Generate Fear” (2025).
When coupled with a cosmic or Lovecraftian narrative, even modest graphics can transform a game into a masterpiece.
* A slick new Cthulhu Mythos – H.P. Lovecraft Concordance for 14 stories, as a new website.
* And finally, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has added the word “Lovecraftian” in their latest update, tracing the first use of the word to 1936 and Robert Bloch in a letter to Weird Tales.
— End-quotes —
“… drifting down a stagnant river betwixt high basalt cliffs, & wondering why I drifted; since the water had no motion, & there was no breath of wind in the awful SILENCE.” (Lovecraft to Kleiner, May 1920). “… conscious of drifting down some hideous stagnant river in a rotting boat, between terrible overhanging cliffs of basalt. There was no wind, and I wondered why I moved down so still a stream. The insects were of strange form, and made me shudder as their numbers increased and they began to light all over me” (Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920). — Lovecraft recalls a dream, to two correspondents, in 1920.
“About the most daemoniac place I ever saw was a valley in New Jersey — in the foothills of the Ramapos — where the sides were covered with the outcroppings of a black crystalline basaltic formation, & the floor was strewn with curiously angular fragments. I only saw it once, but its image has lingered with me.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.
“Primal Basalt Bridge over the black & oily River Gnar. Time of the Bulbous Shape’s passage up-stream” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1933.
“Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it — and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me. Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, just one example of various uses of basalt at key moments in Lovecraft’s tales and poetry.