Welcome to HPLinks #3.

* New as a limited-edition hardcover book from Hippocampus, Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations): A Variorum Edition…

“this final collection includes all known revisions and collaborations undertaken by Lovecraft on behalf of his friends and clients. As with previous volumes in this series, the texts preserved herein scrupulously follow archival manuscripts, typescripts, or original publications, and constitute the definitive edition of these stories. For the first time, students and scholars of Lovecraft can see at a glance all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story—manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications. The result is an illuminating record of the textual history of the tales, in an edition that supersedes all those that preceded it.”

The Eddy collaboration tales, which I seem to recall are now out-of-copyright, are able to be included.

* The latest Lovecraft Annual scholarly journal also appears to be shipping from Hippocampus Press. Or at least, Amazon UK says it can whizz me a next-day copy if needed, and Joshi reports that he has had his editor’s copies in the mail.

I see that the 2024 contents list includes an essay by Joshi on “The Lovecraft Letters Project”, as well as an advance review of the forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

Note: If you can’t get to the Hippocampus Press website, change your DNS provider in your Web browser. Cloudflare in particular doesn’t seem to be able to access the site.

* A new book-chapter by philosopher Graham Harman “The Weird and the Absurd” ($ paywall, but with a free abstract). He contrasts the weird (H.P. Lovecraft) with the absurd (Dali), with a view to characterising the contours of knowledge itself.

* EuroSiberia has a new long essay on “Lovecraft and Multipolarity”.

* From Switzerland, a long article in French on “Le naturaliste danois qui avait ete ressuscite par Lovecraft” (‘The Danish naturalist who was resurrected by Lovecraft’). Which means Olaus Wormius (1588-1654), ‘Old Worm’.

* From the Ukraine’s Forum for Linguistic Studies, a new multi-author paper on “Proper Names as Presupposition Triggers in the Horror Story — Semantic and Functional Aspects”. Being a linguistic study of the names in Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear”. Freely available online, in English.

* The new short book, Ripples from Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes, and True Detective (July 2024) is now available as a 142-page paperback. The Amazon blurb is not especially illuminating. However, the back-cover blurb is much clearer and more enticing. This suggests a close and fan-friendly scholarly study of the sources for the first season of the U.S. True Detective TV series (2014, eight episodes). Of which… “first and foremost, there is H.P. Lovecraft…”. No reviews that I can find as yet, though I see that in 2023 S.T. Joshi perused an advance copy. He described it as… “a searching examination of the first season of True Detective and the influence of Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Chambers upon it.” (Note: buyers should not confuse it with the Chaosium RPG book of the same name).

* I don’t normally note the ongoing wealth of Lovecraftian anthologies, but since I enjoy Sherlock Holmes tales I’ll make an exception for the new Sherlock & Friends: Eldritch Investigations (June 2024). The book arises from a successful $3,000 crowd-funder, and offers “nine adventures” across some 80,000 words. Publisher Tule Fog Press has the contents list, and this also notes the protagonist(s) in each story, e.g. “The Adventure of the Cats of Ulthar” is a tale of “Miss Lois Cayley, a spirited young bicycling adventuress”. No reviews as yet, but one of the editors usefully added on his blog that the aim was for a collection of… “tales [which] ‘channel the spirits’ of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who graced the dime novels and pulp magazines”. Sounds fun. A free-sample and a £5 Kindle ebook makes it less of a gamble, should you be tempted.

* Also of note, but also an unknown quantity, the anthology Bound in Blood: Stories of Cursed Books, Damned Libraries and Unearthly Authors (Sept 2024).

* Also coming in September 2024, a Kindle ebook in Italian, Atlante delle terre del sogno di Lovecraft (‘Atlas of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands’). The blurb has it as… “compiled by Carlo Baja Guarienti, aided by the pencil of Alberto Ponticelli, with an afterword by S.T. Joshi and the map drawn by Francesca Baerald.” It’s to be an ebook equivalent to 155 pages, according to Amazon. Sounds to me like a gazetteer of places, with a single map, rather than an atlas with lots of map-plates.

* Hamburg, Germany, again. The city seems to have a thing for Lovecraft theatre. Indeed, they now actually have a Lovecraft theatre. In Hamburg… “the new Miskatonic Theater opens on September 6th with the play “The Call of Cthulhu” based on the tale by H.P. Lovecraft.”

The new theatre building, the only dedicated horror theatre in the world, here looking very suitable as a home for a ‘Miskatonic Theater’.

Sadly, after a great deal of hard work to open this new venue, the nearly fitted-out theatre was then gutted by burglars. Who appear to have stolen everything not nailed down. Apparently the police had no cameras in the area, since “unknown persons” is the only description of the crime that I can find. Anyway… no-one has recovered the stolen property and thus the Theatre now has a crowd-funder campaign to replace what was stolen. This campaign is currently only half-way to raising 15,000 euros and still needs support.

* A new movie from the acclaimed director Edgar Pera, billed as Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), imagines that letters flowed between the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft. But via the dreamlands, and… “with a dreamer’s logic [in which] Pessoa’s multiple personalities meet the nightmare creations of Lovecraft”. The film is currently appearing on the German film-festival circuit, with a mid September date in Oldenburg. I’ll try to link reviews in next week’s HPLinks #4.

* The Ephemeral New York blog investigates a topographic aspect of Lovecraft in New York City, and finds a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse, in… “the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways”. With photographs.

* A new 23-minute making-of video on YouTube, “Making a Lovecraft-inspired light-up water-well diorama”, as in the well and well-sweep from “The Colour Out of Space”.

* New to me, from France, the free open-access academic journal Imaginaires (2019—). Special issues since 2019 have included: ‘Gothic, Teen, and Pop Culture’ and ‘Ireland: Spectres and Chimeras’.

* At VoegelinView, “The Theology of Fantasy”, reviewing the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* And finally, one of the more pleasing bits of Yog-Sothery I cooked up with the AI image-generator Stable Diffusion, and which was then tickled with Photoshop. Feel free to colorise, use as a book cover or album cover, etc. I place this image under Creative Commons Attribution.