HPLinks #14.

* A long new post on Lovecraft’s wife Sonia as a historical researcher. This was her paid role with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, undertaken in 1933, and which temporarily brought Lovecraft and Sonia together again. This scholarly post draws on as-yet unpublished archives.

I found an eBay picture of the Museum’s staff entrance seen in 1950, at the same Brower Park site that Sonia would have known.

* Librivox have released a new ghost and horror collection of public domain audio. Includes free and re-usable readings of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” and “Polaris”, and from the Lovecraft Circle Arthur Leeds’s “The Return of the Undead” and Frank Belknap Long’s “Men Who Walk Upon the Air”. The latter appeared in Weird Tales for May 1925, alongside Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann”. Also available on on Archive.org.

* Now available for purchase and download, the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre full-cast audio adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Temple”.

* Fumito Logica reviews the new Italian graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life and death…

HPL’s anti-humanism was a desperate faith in the absurd, in a silent and indifferent cosmos, while he lived through an era that clung to habit and the superfluous. […] Yet his desperation gave him the ability to transcend his era, while remaining sitting in a cold room in Providence. He used the power of the word to cross the threshold of eternity, entering dimensions that seek to erase every residue of humanity. [The book] is an imaginative and intimate biography, material and evanescent. Taddei insinuates himself into HPL’s flesh, while Lacavalla paints his darkest nightmares without sparing himself.

Also, Italian paper Il Manifesto has an interview with the writer and artist (spoiler alert). Freely available online.

* Heavy Metal magazine’s blog surveys the Lovecraft Art of John Holmes, the British artist who painted the covers for the early 1970s Ballantine paperbacks.

* New on YouTube, Christian Matzke Interview: Creating H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and also with some chat about his Alien Absolution fan-film.

* Newly listed on Amazon UK, the forthcoming book Les Chats d’Ulthar (‘The Cats of Ulthar’) by Gou Tanabe, set for release on 23rd January 2025 in French. Three Lovecraft tales of the Dreamlands are adapted by the Japanese graphic-novel master, “The Other Gods”, “Celephais” and “The Cats of Ulthar”.

* Metaladdicts brings news that the band “The Great Old Ones Release New Single ‘In The Mouth Of Madness'”, this being… “a haunting precursor to their forthcoming [Dreamlands themed] album, Kadath”. The album is due at the end of January 2025.

* Now published, Chaosium’s latest edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight Investigators’ Guide: Mysteries and Frights in the Victorian Age. This is the 2024 edition, presumably expanded and aligned with the latest core RPG game. I see the first edition was published way back in 1986, and that by 2012 there had been three editions. The book is possibly also useful for Mythos writers unfamiliar with the details of the British Isles in this period.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, The Providence Pack for Lovecraft’s Providence, including a wall-map sized reprint of the College Hill plat map. Again, potentially useful for writers as well as RPG players.

* Paywalled in the new gothic studies book Graveyard Gothic (2024), the chapter “Weirding the Gothic graveyard”. This discusses… “how Lovecraft uses the graveyard in “The Tomb” (1922), “Herbert West – ​Reanimator” (1922) and others”. At the end the author sees the later “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) as “reshaping [the graveyard] through the prism of a very modernist artistic and scientific sensibility”.

* A forthcoming 1,100+ page hardcover claiming to be The Complete Fiction, Poetry, and Essays of H.P. Lovecraft. Set for publication in early December 2024 at nearly £50. The publisher is Revive Classics, which shovels public-domain classics into slick hardback covers at high prices… and gets disappointed one or two-star reviews. I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t complete. The legit Collected Essays set from Hippocampus runs to five volumes and some 1,500 pages in small type. The legit collected poetry is around 600 pages in a wide oversized book. There’s no way you could cram all that, plus all the fiction, into just over 1,100 9″ x 6″ pages. Buyer beware.

* New on Archive.org for download, Arthur Machen’s late novel The Green Round (1933).

This was a book read by Lovecraft, early in 1934. He found it meandering but was positive…

Have just read Machen’s new book — The Green Round — his first weird production in 17 years. It is really extremely interesting — with something of that persistent sense of unreal worlds impinging on the real world which many imaginative persons possess. In the casualness & unexplainedness of the phenomena represented, it recalls some of Machen’s queer prefaces to his earlier books”. — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, March 1934.

* And finally, science seemed to become more weirdly Lovecraftian this week. More so than usual, these days. An Oxford University expert speculated that the octopus species will in time take over the world, should humans somehow die off or leave for the stars. Plus our fledgling quantum computers can, it seems, be reliably powered by weird imaginary cats. A scenario that springs to mind, then: a post-human quantum computer powered by an octopus named Cthulhu, who is dreaming about imaginary cats (possibly from Ulthar). This octo-cat-powered computer is keeping ‘alive’ the AI-reconstructed personality of one HPL, while located in a crypt deep under an Earth that is being burned into its final cinder by the last stages of an expanding sun. Add a few time-travelling humans who suddenly arrive in the crypt, and must extract HPL from the tentacular embrace of Cthulhu before the planet burns. This may perhaps be a Lovecraftian RPG scenario of use to some readers. Or possibly just another crap episode of Doctor Who.

— End-quote —

In March 1934 Lovecraft gave tongue-in-cheek advice to his friend Morton, on the possibilities of writing a weird mystery tale for Morton’s mineralogist colleagues…

“… you could have a great mineralogical curator from Paterson [Morton’s museum in New Jersey] murdered by some spy of the American Museum – the latter institution being jealous of having its pebble section surpass’d. Later it could be discover’d that the assassin had left his photograph imprinted on some obscurely sensitive stone (if none exists, invent one!) that yields up its secrets only under a blend of inframauve light from a special fur-lined vacuum tube. Then, when the murderer has explain’d this away by saying he left the image on some other visit, in stalks Old King Brady the Petrological Pinkerton with a radio-active kind of feldspar or sparkill or solidified argon which restores the life-vibrations of the murder’d man. Up sits the great curator on his bier, and points his finger at the dastard from 79th street. “He done it!” “He done it!” But since the victim ain’t dead no more, the murderer is let off on probation — tho’ the American Museum is forced to transfer most of its treasures to the enlarged marble palace at Summer Street and Broadway [at Paterson]. […] For gawd’s sake don’t have puppet [pseudo-comic names] like Sir Stoneham Pyrites, Capt. Magnetite de Magistris, Prof. Boulder B. Traprock, etc., etc. cluttering up your pages! [As for the follow-on serial…] You could vary your locale and incidents magnificently; having unknown minerals found in crypts under aeon-old deserted cities in the African jungle, and all that. Then there are hellish stony secrets filtering down from the forgotten elder world — think of the Eye of Tsathoggua, hinted at in the Livre d’Eibon, and of the carved primal monstrosity in lavender pyro-jadeite caught up in a Kanaka fisherman’s net off the coast of Ponape! God! Suppose the world knew why Curator Konbifhashi Taximeto of the Wiggiwaga Museum in Kyoto committed hara-kiri after examining the fluorescent emanations of this unholy blasphemy through the differential spectroheliograph!”

In an earlier post at Tentaclii I discovered good evidence that Morton’s collection at Paterson excelled in collecting and exhibiting fluorescent — i.e. glow-in-the-dark — minerals. Hence Lovecraft’s emphasis here on the technology of special light + minerals. So far as I can tell, Lovecraft invented the word “inframauve”. Nice name for a swishy fanzine.