HPLinks #22.
* The Drayton Arms theatre in London has officially announced the London Lovecraft Festival, for 16th-17th February 2025. The Drayton also has Web pages for the stage shows, which are booking now.
* Newly for sale, Lovecraft’s seminal “Dagon” as published in The Vagrant, November 1919. Said to be in near-fine condition.
* L’antique Sentier introduces Newburyport, a real-world model for Innsmouth, to French readers.
* From the University of North Carolina, the Masters dissertation “Popular Purity: Change Over Time in the Racial Views of H.P Lovecraft, and the Spectrum of Racial Ideas as Promoted by Popular Culture: 1917-1936” (2023). Freely available for download.
* At Stanford, the B.A. final dissertation “Lovecraft and the Question of an Uninhabitable Universe”. Winner of the university’s DLCL Award (2020). Now freely available for download.
* At McQuarie University, Australia, the PhD thesis Out of time/Out of control: speculative modernism and the limits of thought (2024), on Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. Freely available for download.
* Forthcoming, an academic book collection on the topic of movie ‘creature features’. With a submission deadline of 10th March 2025, the editor is seeking…
… close readings of films led by creatures and monsters in the 21st century. Classic [older] films will be welcome if analyzed through new, contemporary theories to show how their purpose/meaning has changed over time.
* In Spanish, the YouTube recording of a 2023 Madrid conference on Geologia en la literatura fantastica y de terror (‘Geology in fantasy and horror literature’).
* Also in Spanish, MetalTrip reviews…
A new rock opera, ‘Legado De Una Tragedia: Lovecraft’, which brings together theatre and symphonic metal music. The result is a horror rock-opera full of the best heavy metal. Each song is based on one of Lovecraft’s most iconic stories.
* The Void reviews Kadath, the new Lovecraft-centred metal album by the Lovecraftian band The Great One Ones. Hardforce also has a review in French.
* On the south coast of the UK, Falmouth University will stage a three-day conference on Haunted Modernities, 16th-18th July 2025. Deadline for submissions: 17th March 2025. The conference seem to be casting the net wide, but will focus around…
… haunted modernities and spectral futures of all sorts. Looking back to the past as a haunted space and forward to the ‘spectres’ of the future, we want the ‘Haunted Modernities’ conference to be indicative of wide open spaces and fruitful intersections in scholarship and practice. Whether work is hyper-local, global, or interstellar we welcome imaginative, creative, ethical, and diverse discussions from all disciplines and subject areas. As well as traditional papers, creative practice work is also invited in whatever form — written, film, audio, performance, exhibitions etc.
* New on Librivox, a public-domain reading of the English translation of Hesse’s Steppenwolf. 1929, in first English translation, which I assume is the translation used here due to the 1929 U.S. copyright expiration date. So far as I know, Lovecraft never encountered the translation.
* A forthcoming book, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, will be a transcribed collection of interviews with science-fiction and fantasy authors, drawn from Richard Wolinsky’s Probabilities radio show. His half-hour interviewees included Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury and many more. The book is due from Tachyon in August 2025. No Amazon listing as yet.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of the 1990s Sheffield horror-punkzine Gibbering Madness #6. This has a fannish look at punk rockers in horror movies, with the article naming about 18 such movies. Also of note is the punkzine Scrawl #3 from Belfast, though only for a 7″-single review which mentions in passing that…
Rudimentary Peni are quite rightly recognised as pioneering and influential in the realm of anarcho punk and are possibly one of the most deranged bands ever. […] The late eighties saw [their album] Cacophony, which was a musically inventive yet immensely bizarre tribute to the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
* Blinks notes a new broadcast TV travel documentary which (though otherwise tiresome) gives… “a number of interesting scenes showing both the inside and outside of Dunsany Castle”, plus some snatches of discussion with the current Lord Dunsany.
* And finally, new on eBay at a sensible price, ‘Stereo View of the Head of the Providence River’, which appears to show the ‘Old Brick Row’ which Lovecraft tried to save.
— End-quote —
“Good old Providence — there is no other town quite like it! [Until 1929 and the loss of the Old Brick Row, it still had the coherent] ancient waterfront with slant-roofed brick warehouses and lanes of gambrel-roofed shops and pillared taverns […] Then, too, from most points’ along the [College] hill crest there is a breath-taking view of the outspread roofs and spires and domes of the westward-stretching lower town — a view reaching even to the dim violet hills of the country beyond the country whence many of my ancestors came. At sunset this vista is past description — the marble dome of the State House, the Gothic tower of St. Patrick’s, and the distant spires of Federal Hill against the flaming, mysterious west — and then the cryptic twilight, with the violet of the far hills creeping eastward to engulf the whole drowsy valley, and little specks of light leaping out one by one till the expanded sea of roofs is one titanic constellation […] And even more magical now that we have tall buildings to light up and suggest enchanted cliff cities of Dunsanian mystery.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffman Price, February 1933.