HPLinks #15.
* In the latest Journal of The Fantastic in the Arts (35.1, 2024), “Beyond Worlds: Music, Literature, and the Fantastical in H.P. Lovecraft and E.T.A Hoffmann” ($ paywall). “Zann” is here compared…
with Hoffmann’s [story] “Ritter Gluck: Eine Erinnerung aus dem Jahre 1809” [ with discussion…] especially concerning the influence of German Romantic notions of music […] In Lovecraft’s tale, the unheimlich (‘uncanny’) is invoked through and by the romantic notions of music that the author utilizes to wrestle with language’s limitations in expressing the abstract, thus showcasing the importance of a musical approach to the fantastical.
* “Vascones, Pompelo and Calagurris in the three Versions of ‘The Very Old Folk’, by H.P. Lovecraft” a new book chapter, archived on Academia.org. In Portuguese. Relates to the previous 2019 article on the same topic, freely online in English, by the same author.
* A new issue of the open-access Journal of Gods and Monsters (Winter 2024).
* LovecraftR 1.2 on GitHub. Being Lovecraft’s stories pre-packaged for computational text-analysis using the R coding language. Regrettably the sources of the texts are not given. Thus, it’s uncertain if these are the gold-standard Joshi-corrected texts or not.
* Now free in open-access (was previously $ paywalled), the broad survey article “‘Awed listening’: H.P. Lovecraft in classic and contemporary audio horror” (2022).
* A new £135 academic philosophy book from Routledge, Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age, due in early spring 2025. If one looks past the book’s alarmist, tendentious and unscientific title (perhaps foisted on the German author by the publisher) then the book sounds interesting. The core of the blurb states…
the book traces Lovecraft’s gothic and decadent influences, examines materiality and its transcendence in weird fiction, and considers the posthuman and postsecular dimensions of his narratives. Through this, the study highlights Lovecraft’s role in navigating the challenges of a secular, disenchanted world, offering a ‘dark enchantment’ that echoes current philosophical concerns.
* Psychogeographic Review reviews the forthcoming book Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia (2025) which begins with Charles Dickens and then apparently… “closely consider[s] the works of other writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Alan Moore” in relation to nostalgia.
* Futuramen blog brings news that there’s now a hardback for Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations). According to the post, the first three volumes were hardback but this fourth book had only been in paperback until now.
* Miskatonic Books still has copies of Arcana Viridia: An Occult Herbarium (2013) which sounds like a very unusual book of interest to some readers of Tentaclii. Apparently the handsomely-presented and illustrated book is the result of some 25 years of active field and desk research. A possible Christmas present?
* Deep Cuts blog looks at “Her Letters to Clark Ashton Smith: Annie E.P. Gamwell”. This being Lovecraft’s aunt.
* The Pulp Superfan surveys the Lovecraft-Eddy tales and memoir books currently in print from Fenham.
* Wormwoodania blog looks at the new Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937-1973: A Pictorial History & Guide for Collectors.
* It seems the HPLHS will visit Australia in 2025, having been picked as International Guests of Honour for Chaosium Con Australia 2025. I assume they will receive travel tickets, a hotel room, and their own personal shoggoth… rather than it being just a virtual visit over the InterWebz.
* The latest issue #49 (November 2024) of The Paperback Fanatic has an article on the “UK Panther editions of Lovecraft” and also a “Guide to Conan Pastiches”. Available now, in paper only.
* A new Robert E. Howard Letter Dated to August 1932 has been discovered. The letter was sent to E. Hoffmann Price. Among other matters, REH discussed a sketch-portrait of Lovecraft.
* A new public-domain one-hour audio reading of “Red Shadows” by Robert E. Howard, at Librivox.
* Another text interview with the creators of the new HPL graphic-novel partial-biography of Lovecraft. In Italian.
* New to me, I find that acclaimed comics artist P. Craig Russell adapted Lovecraft, first published in badly-printed form circa 2003 and then pristine in Murder Mysteries and Other Stories: Gallery Edition (Titan, 2015). Apparently the story was “From Beyond”, though I can’t find any sample pages from the adaptation. The sumptuous 2015 oversized edition is now well out-of-print and is (from the sound of it) highly collectable.
* The new volume Dripping with Fear – Ditko Archives Volume 5 collects Ditko’s mystery-horror comic-book shorts, from 1958 onwards.
* A review of a new videogame at GameSpew. “Blood on the Thames is amateur theatre meets H.P. Lovecraft”, and the game is found by the reviewer to be a “wobbly but oddly appealing adventure”.
* And finally, Spectre Miniatures, the British maker of 1.1″ RPG miniatures, has released a new ‘machine-gun Mythos’ set along with some game rules…
The Mythos range is Spectre’s first release for ‘Supernatural Horror In Miniature’. Inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Mythos takes Spectre Operations players back to the weird world of Lovecraft’s 1930s America.
— End-quote —
“My favourite toys were very small ones, which would permit of their arrangement in widely extensive scenes. My mode of play was to devote an entire table-top to a scene, which I would proceed to develop as a broad landscape […] Toy trees — of which I had an infinite number — were used with varying effect to form parts of the landscape […] even forests (or the suggested edges of forests). Certain kinds of blocks made walls & hedges, & I also used blocks in constructing large public buildings. […] My people were mainly of the lead-soldier type [sometimes adapted and re-painted …] My mode of play was to construct some scene as fancy — incited by some story or picture — dictated, & then to act out its life for long periods — sometimes a fortnight — making up events of a highly melodramatic cast as I went. These events would sometimes cover only a brief span — a war or plague or merely a spirited pageant of travel & commerce & incident leading nowhere — but would sometimes involve long aeons, with visible changes in the landscape & buildings. Cities would fall & be forgotten, & new cities would spring up. Forests would fall or be cut down, & rivers (I had some fine bridges) would change their beds. […] Horror-plots were frequent […] There was a kind of intoxication in being lord of a visible world (albeit a miniature one) & determining the flow of its events.” — Lovecraft recalling his time circa 1900 as a boy pioneer of the ‘tabletop RPG’, in a letter of November 1933.