HPLinks #23.
* Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf has a long and detailed review of A Means to Freedom, the two-volume edition of the letters of Lovecraft and REH. With footnotes, even.
* The latest SFFaudio Podcast #823 is “The Loved Dead” by C.M. Eddy and H.P. Lovecraft. With discussion and a full reading by Jim Moon. The story is now public domain at last, due to the recent lapse of copyright.
* A November 2024 group interview in a literary magazine, with the Italian Lovecraftians, or at least those who congregate on the Lovecraft channel of the Telegram social-media service. Freely available, in Italian.
* In Italy in November 2024, a third conference / talk-series on “Geometries of Terror: The rhetorical space in the weird literature”. I see a 66-page publication from the event, freely available in Italian as a flipbook. Several Lovecraft items are seen on the contents page. This, however, turns out to be a free extract from the forthcoming 316-page printed book of the conference proceedings (all three of them?) which is set for February 2025.
* Also in Italy, what appears to be a Kindle edition of an Italian translation of the Rodionoff / Breccia graphic novel Lovecraft. Due February 2025.
* In French with an English abstract, “Esthetique de l’horreur et influence des motifs lovecraftiens dans le cinema de Stuart Gordon et Brian Yuzna: (2024). (‘The aesthetics of horror and the influence of Lovecraftian patterns in the cinema of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available for download.
* Here in the UK the London Lovecraft Festival website has now updated, and has the February 2025 details.
* Antihero magazine reviews the new “Monumental Journey Through Lovecraftian Horror and Black Metal Majesty”. This being the new album Kadath by the band The Great Old Ones. The review finds it…
an intricate and absorbing black metal masterpiece that honors Lovecraft’s vision while pushing their sound to new heights. This is not just an album; it’s an experience — a deep dive into a world of cosmic horror and surreal beauty.
* A new Lovecraftian picture series, “The Arkham Growths”. All are under Creative Commons Attribution, should you wish to re-use them.
a series of glass-plate pictures from the late 1920s. The weird plants were grown from seeds collected by an expedition from Miskatonic University into a blighted district located “west of Arkham” in the late 1920s. The plants were found to be bioluminescent, and these ten low-light images are now the only surviving relics of the Miskatonic investigation.
* Apparently set for publication in English in July 2025, the Tanabe manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. The English cover has been released…
* Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Comics Omnibus Vol. 6 is due to be published on 6th August 2025. It should weigh in at over 1,000 pages. Reprinting the Savage Sword of Conan magazine-format comic #73-87 from the early 1980s, plus a 1977 special.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of Forrest J. Ackerman’s The Frankenscience Monster, a book length collections of essays on and tributes to the early horror-movie star Boris Karloff.
* Isaac Asimov’s Invention & Discovery Cards… “all 1,477 entries from Asimov’s encyclopedia are now represented as illustrated cards” and these are presented in an interactive adjustable web display/timeline.
* New, the pixellated 1990’s Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Adventure Shadow of the Comet – “Remastered”…
Shadow of the Comet is a great game, but it’s also quite a broken one. So in this special edit I’ve addressed its most glaring issues to make it a more entertaining experience. It required thousands of edits and an entirely new custom subtitle track. […] The video [a three-hour playthrough of the fixed game, on YouTube] also includes the bonus ‘Lovecraft Museum’ at the end. The Museum features lots of cool cosmic horror relics including the Necronomicon.
* From the Public Domain Film Contest 2025, the short film “Road Trip”, which (among others) samples from “The Dunwich Horror” and the Lovecraft-fave philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
* Found, another picture of the location of ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop on Weybosset in Providence. See my contribution to The Lovecraft Annual 2023 for details of the man and his shop, well known to Lovecraft and many of the Lovecraft Circle.
* And finally, a new survey of “Pyramids on the Cover of Weird Tales“.
— End-quotes —
“It was not like any city of earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires, and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus; towers, spires and pyramids that no man could fashion, but that bloomed flower-like and delicate …” — May 1922, Lovecraft to Moe. On his first sight of the evening lights of New York City coming up, seen from across the river.
“I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — Lovecraft’s revised vision of New York City, in the short tale “He”.
He would also encounter evocative pyramid-shapes in graveyards…
After briefly greeting such of the family — mother and sister — as were present, I departed with Edgar for the ancient shades of Amesbury […] “We alighted at the ancient graveyard” [where we] “marvell’d in the sombre pines and willows, slabs and monuments. Edgar reveal’d an imagination of high quality, and upon one occasion call’d my attention to the inimitably Babylonian effect of a certain granite memorial of pyramidal outline, as glimps’d thro’ distant trees against the iridescent sunset.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 1st May 1923. On visiting the schoolboy Edgar Jacobs Davis in Merrimac.