HPLinks #27.
* Hippocampus Press now has a page for A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long and the pre-order discount is active. This page is for the 500 limited-edition hardcover, said to be due in March 2025.
* New and free in open-access, the book Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond (2025). This touches on various topics of possible interest to Lovecraftians, such as Roman antiquity and its legacy in horror, hybrids in Ovid (again), and Mythos writers may also be interested in discovering new gobbets of true-grue in the chapter on ‘Recipes for Horror in Graeco-Roman Magic and Medicine’.
* The ultimate horror, having to read Lovecraft in Welsh. Now you can, as there’s a new book of translations titled Galwad Cthulhu a Straeon Arswyd Eraill (Feb 2025). Translated by…
acclaimed Welsh novelist and short-story writer Peredur Glyn, whose story collection Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi was shortlisted for Welsh Book of the Year in 2023.
* “Existentialism as Cosmic Indifference in Works of H.P. Lovecraft” (2020), an undergraduate dissertation. Currently under embargo, but I see it’s set to be available for public download on 17th June 2025.
* The forthcoming 2025 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – Providence has dates, 22nd to 24th August 2025.
* The organisers of the 2025 Howard Days have a new blog post, which notes that…
The Windy City Pulp & Paperback Convention is happening 4th-6th April 2025 in Lombard, Illinois, where they are kicking off the ‘100 Years of Bob Howard’ festivities! Windy City is one of the best Pulp Cons in the country, and will celebrate Ol’ Two-Gun with dealers, auctions and a REH panel.
* Edward Gorey at 100, from the Gorey Charitable Trust. A round-up of Gorey events for his centenary year.
* Medievalists.net on “Laughing at Evil: The Hidden Purpose of Gargoyles” in churches.
* Another ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale, discovered. Equoid (2013) by Charles Stross. A novella, at 109 pages and one that is seemingly now collectable in hardcover. But there’s also an affordable Kindle ebook. The cover illustration and blurb are spoilers. But suffice it to vaguely say that a British secret-agent is sent to probe strange doings in the Sussex countryside, and these events are then interwoven (in the first half) with H.P. Lovecraft’s confession of his youthful encounter with an ancient horror.
* A new AI 1970s Sci-Fi Book Covers generator, on Glif.app. Glif.app appears to be yet another of those ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ online AI generator sites at which you buy credits. But it has enough free-trial credits to try it out about ten times.
* New on Archive.org, the 1974 UK edition of New UFO Breakthrough. This is a real 1970s paperback and I had it when I was a lad. I would have read it alongside Lovecraft and R.E. Howard. Wow… looking at the book now I see I was sipping from a “big ol’ keg o’ hot moonshine”. Not just normal cloud-skimming UFOs here, but also orgone accumulators, serpent people from Atlantis, underwater UFOs, alchemists, and polar entrances to an ‘inner earth’. Great stuff for the imagination, though, and possibly also a sort of youthful ‘innoculation’ against pure moonshine.
* Talking of which, Erik Davis (author of the classic Techgnosis) has a new long review, of the 1990s The Invisibles DC comic-book series. One I missed encountering back then, as the comic-book scene largely crashed and burned. But according to Davis…
one of the great representative works of the 90s […] a sometimes brilliantly illustrated tale of a team of colorful mutant punks taking on Lovecraftian archons in a metaphysical postmodern blender […] the last gasp of high and mutant psychedelic subculture that stretches back through Hakim Bey, the Church of the Subgenius, Illuminatus!, the Merry Pranksters, and the Discordian Society
* And talking of boyhood influences equally as whacky, but rather more British, I see the BBC has newly turned their old Radiophonic Workshop core sound-bank into a purchasable archive for download. Doctor Who’s old sci-fi wooshes, splurts, blips and whizzles, yours to re-use… for $200. Or sci-fi/horror audio crafters could just pop over to the huge Freesound.org (which incidentally has recently been ingested into Stable Audio Open, the AI sound-FX generator) and get much the same for free.
* New on YouTube, the classic “The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold (1926, Weird Tales). With period audio FX and a dramatized reading, in 22 minutes. In 1936 Lovecraft thought it one of the few old Weird Tales stories worth reprinting. He wrote of… “certain obscure but desirable items which have anciently appeared in W.T. [Weird Tales] or elsewhere. It would have been simply barbarous [for lack of reprinting] to prevent the present generation from reading The Canal, The Night Wire, Bells of Oceana, The Floor Above, Beyond the Door, etc.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, 1936.
* ‘Call of Cthulhu Live’ in summer 2025. An official five-city tour of the UK for Chaosium’s flagship tabletop RPG game.
* The usual tidal-wave of Lovecraftian videogames thunders in each week and Tentaclii never has the time to comb the beach afterwards. But this week I noticed not one but three new one-man indie videogames, and liked the sound and look of all of them. Do No Harm: A Doctor Simulator with a Lovecraftian Twist; The Stamp; and HPL: Nyarlathotep Rising.
* And finally, a thought. President Trump has several times expressed a hankering for a huge new ‘Garden of National Heroes’. It sounds like a new National Park that would contain many thousands of statues and other forms of sculpture, most likely set along verdant long-distance walking trails. Far bigger than a sculpture park, but smaller than the regular-size National Park. It thus occurs to me that, once the bidding-war is over and the winning U.S. state begins to establish the new Garden-Park, it might offer a secure home to the currently-homeless Lovecraft statue? Perhaps the statues of the nation’s horror writers (possibly only the greats who had to struggle heroicly for their art — Poe, Lovecraft, Smith?) might be displayed inside a deep and dark natural rock-cleft? That would afford some protection from spray-can jockeys, while also offering suitable ambience and lighting. A cleft with the stars still visible above at night.
— End-quotes —
[I found myself in …] “a dank, foetid, reed-choak’d marsh under a grey autumn sky, with a rugged cliff of lichen-crusted stone rising to the north. […] I ascended a rift or cleft in this beetling precipice, noting as I did so the black mouths of many fearsome burrows extending from both walls into the depths of the stony plateau. At several points the passage was roof’d over by the choaking of the upper parts of the narrow fissure; these places being exceedingly dark, & forbidding the perception of such burrows as may have existed there. In one such dark space I felt conscious of a singular accession of fright, as if some subtile & bodiless emanation from the abyss were ingulphing my spirit; but the blackness was too great for me to perceive the source of my alarm. At length I emerg’d upon a table-land of moss-grown rock & scanty soil, lit up by a faint moonlight which had replac’d the expiring orb of day. Casting my eyes about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately quitted. […]” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, November 1927.
The poet enters a dark, sinister and ever-narrowing valley …
The walls contracted as I went
Still farther in my mad descent,
Till soon, of moon and stars bereft,
I crouch’d within a rocky cleft
So deep and ancient that the stone
Breath’d things primordial and unknown.
My hands, exploring, strove to trace
The features of the valley’s face,
When midst the gloom they seem’d to find
An outline frightful to my mind.
— Lovecraft, part of a poem he sent to Kleiner, 1918.
