HPLinks #13.
Not much to find this week, between the post-Halloween hangover and Cthulhu actually winning the U.S. Presidency for once (or so one might think, judging by many swivel-eyed reactions). But here it is.
* One of the NecronomiCon’s Armitage Symposium talks has popped up online as a CC-By preprint, “Eldritch Institutions: The Birth of American Asylums, the Founding of Butler Hospital, and a Confrontation with Lovecraft”. Freely available for download.
Standard practices and procedures at the time of Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s and Sarah Susan Lovecraft’s hospitalizations will be showcased. Speculations on the effects of their treatment and death will be presented as they relate to Lovecraft’s fear of doctors and his writings.
Elsewhere, the medical humanities blog-a-zine The Polyphony outlines the ways of “Narrating Anxiety through Lovecraftian Horror”. Freely available online.
* New online via Springer’s website, but paywalled, the new academic book The Sentient Tree in Speculative Fiction.
* A new two-part interview with Tolkien / Lovecraft scholar Dale Nelson part one and part two.
* S.T. Joshi has announced he plans to “devote much of 2025” to writing a Clark Ashton Smith biography. He also links to two recent in-depth interviews on his Lovecraft scholarship, freely available on YouTube.
* Now available in Spanish, a translation of Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard.
* On YouTube, a spin through the Robert E. Howard paperbacks published by Orbit in the UK in the 1970s. I recall I was most envious when I saw that a boyhood neighbour and local tough-lad had a row of these on his shelves.
* The Blasphemous Tome #13 is coming soon… “This new issue will contain a brand-new and gruesome Call of Cthulhu scenario from our own Matt Sanderson, as well as all the usual year-end features.” Available to their $5 Patreon patrons.
* Skulls in the Stars discusses what you might enjoy if you purchased the budget ten-story Book of Iod by Henry Kuttner, a young writer who was a late correspondent with Lovecraft.
* The journal Metal Music Studies ($ paywalled) is inviting… “short retrospectives on foundational and important publications, for the reviews section”. 1,000 to 1,500 words each. I imagine there must be some key ‘Lovecraft meets metal’ scholarship to note? Interested writers should contact either ross.hagen@uvu.edu or edwardbanchs@gmail.com for details.
* My quick survey of what might be entering the public domain in January 2025, drawn from items fitting the categories of ‘author died in 1954’ or ‘published in the U.S. in 1929’.
* Archive.org log-ins were back, last weekend, plus the very useful ability for scholars to ‘search inside’ their books and magazines. And today I see that uploading is once again available.
* During the writing of an article on discovering space images, I happened to have a look at the distant moon Europa (our best chance of finding alien life in the Solar System). I was impressed by the creative naming of the spot on the surface I randomly chose, which seems to simultaneously evoke both Lovecraft tales and the Dreamlands…
* And finally, here in the UK Wales Online bravely and rather hilariously ventures into the other famous Lovecraft, in “Life inside Wales’ last surviving adult shops”. Slightly more scary than “The Beast in The Cave”…
— End-quote —
“… humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible — the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. […] the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind”. — Lovecraft in the Transatlantic Circulator, 1921.