HPLinks #35.

* The HPLHS Store now has the new Alcestis book version in stock…

… not only had the pair of them written a new prologue for the piece, but also presented after that a version of the play itself that was substantially different from other known translations, so we consulted with a classics scholar. In the end, instead of the lovely but simple pamphlet containing Sonia and Lovecraft’s version of Alcestis, we originally intended to produce, we are creating a casebound volume containing an explication of all of the new discoveries about this piece in the form of a paper by Helios Editor/Publisher N.R. Jenzen-Jones and classics scholar Carman Romano; Sonia and Lovecraft’s edition of Alcestis, complete with their prologue, and newly commissioned illustrations by several of our favorite artists.

* “Music for a blind idiot god: towards a weird ecology of noise” (2024). On “the horror of noise” in Lovecraft and others. Freely available for download.

* In the latest issue of the open-access journal Diaphonia, “Uma interlocucao entre estado hobbesiano com “O mito de Cthulhu” na literatura de H.P. Lovecraft”. It’s an awkward title to translate but, with reference to the abstract, this would about cover it: ‘A discussion between the absolutist Hobbesian state and the totalitarian sovereignty of Cthulhu as described in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Freely available online.

* A new contribution on ‘The Weird’ from Graham Harman, a leading philosopher in the field, “Weird Fallibilism: Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Justified True Belief” (2024). Freely available for download. Drawing on Lovecraft, he suggests the description of ‘weird fallibilism’ for a situation in which… “1) truth never corresponds to reality, and (2) objects never correspond to their own qualities”.

* A review in the new edition of Mythlore of the academic book Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery (2025). The review is freely available online.

* The new academic book Deviant Landscapes: A Journey to Exotic and Imaginary Places and Spaces (2025). Intriguing title, but the only somewhat relevant chapter appears to be “Atmospheric Narrative Landscape, Stimmung and Place-Making in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence — A Fable””. Stimmung is German and means broadly ‘mood/atmosphere’.

* The recent visit by S.T. Joshi made me aware of the wider Weird Fiction Collections at Brown University. It’s not just the Lovecraft letters.

* Brown University Master of Fine Arts student Roman Johnson is reported to have been given the latest S.T. Joshi Fellowship by Brown University. No details yet about his research topic or aim.

* A Masters dissertation for Texas State University, “Our Eyes are Yet to Open: H.P. Lovecraft and Modernist Horror” (2023). Freely available online. The abstract shows a clear focus and the author examined the essays and letters as well as three tales…

examines Lovecraft’s essays and correspondence to highlight his concerns and philosophical perspectives with his modernist contemporaries. [A study of three tales shows that] Lovecraft’s fiction exhibits various themes and techniques associated with literary modernism more prominently than one might initially assume. [Integrating aspects of early modernism] allowed him to express his fears and philosophical viewpoints about modernist concerns through terrifying and cosmic imagery.

* Robert Silverberg on HPL’s “gloriously overwrought” Shadow Out Of Time, an article extracted to HTML from Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (December 2005).

* Now on Google Books with a preview, the new biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* In the field of vintage comics appreciation, Deep Cuts has a new long post. Finding that there was an Italian edition of the Heavy Metal magazine ‘Lovecraft special’. The images shown reveal that the cover used an enlarged and coloured version of that issue’s fine b&w Moebius drawing. The long post has exhaustive details of the different editions, and many interior page and details. Here’s a good cover image I snagged from eBay, where collectors will still find several copies of the Italian edition for sale.

* Newly listed on eBay UK, Lovecraft’s Selected Letters: 1929-1931 from a UK seller and at a sensible £20 price. Though sadly there’s no ‘Click & Collect’ on offer, or I’d have had it. Still, some Tentaclii reader (with a big and accessible letter-box, able to take chunky books) may want it at that price.

* And finally, also on eBay and new to me, the Necronomicon Pop-up Book (2017) by ‘Skinner’ and Rosston Meyer…

— End-quotes —

“144. Hideous book glimpsed in ancient shop — never seen again.” — from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story germs and ideas.

“To Whomsoever May Open This Book: This is set down as a Warning to you, Sir or Madam, that you are not to open this Book beyond the Place mark’d by a red Riband. It wou’d be better for you to throw the whole Book unopen’d into the fire; but being unable to do so myself, I cannot hope that you will. I do nevertheless adjure you to look nowhere in it beyond the Riband, lest you lose yourself to this World, Body and Soul; for truly, it is a Tomb for the Living.” — Lovecraft pens an original ‘book warning’, in his best circa-1780 style, in a letter to Morton of March 1937.

HPLinks #34.

* In the new April 2025 issue of the academic journal Horror Studies ($ paywall), the lead article is “Dark Epiphany: The Lovecraftian in twentieth-century existential literature”.

* A call for papers from the British Fantasy Society. Their BFS Journal plans a special issue on ‘War in Fantasy’. I’m guessing that an article on “Dagon” and “The Temple” as wartime stories might have a chance? Or perhaps Derleth’s elaboration of the Mythos as a cosmic battleground?

* Newly published, issue 25 of the scholarly journal The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural, and Fantastic literature. A special issue on the author Le Fanu, it includes an overlooked poem by him and “a recently rediscovered monograph of Le Fanu written by his publisher”. Also a topographical article on his associations with places in Dublin.

* HorrorBabble has a new free audiobook of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”. This is a new 2025 recording and also includes subtitles (presumably for those who like to ‘read along’, or perhaps who need to see words spelled as they are spoken?).

* New on YouTube, Ray visits “H.P. Lovecraft Locations in Providence, RI”. He offers a swift 13 minute tour, made with a more-or-less steady camera and deftly edited.

* S.T. Joshi has also been in Providence, and his latest blog post is “A Trip to Providence”. Joshi dived into the immense Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown, which he catalogued forty-five years ago, but which he can now survey with a more experienced eye. He found, among other items, more unpublished letters (now destined for the “forthcoming edition of Smith’s Miscellaneous Letters”), and nine unpublished juvenile stories.

* Joshi’s new blog post also notes that the Best Adventures of Solar Pons is appearing in two paperback volumes, with the first having already appeared. These are the Sherlock-alike stories penned by August Derleth. Looks very affordable and the tales are something I have wanted to read for a while now, but… at present Amazon UK is iffy about shipping to the UK and there’s no eBay listing.

* New this week. “From Beyond: Five DC Titles that Scratch that Cosmic Horror Itch”. It’s a glossy listicle, but one from DC Comics itself. As such it’s a useful survey of Lovecraftian themes in their titles, made even more useful by good page illustrations from the comics discussed (DC being notoriously touchy about others showing their interior artwork).

* Talking of comics, some readers may be interested in the newly published book Drawn to the Stacks: Essays on Libraries, Librarians and Archives in Comics and Graphic Novels (March 2025). Apparently the first such book on the topic. The contents list suggests it is heavily and predictably leftist, but also that it has a number of essays addressing specific weird and supernatural titles. Also of note are the new books Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and the Divine (2024), and Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (2025).

* The new ‘post-apocalypse in the English countryside’ videogame, Atomfall, apparently has a touch of Lovecraft. The indie British-made game is described by DigitalSpy as a blend of…

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – whose name is given to Wyndham village in the game – and [the 1970s British TV series] Survivors, with some Wicker Man thrown in, and a bit of eldritch flair akin to something from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space.

* A new free reading of a long ‘El Borak’ desert adventure tale by R.E. Howard. “Hawk of the Hills” runs just over two hours, and has a good narrator.

* Robert E. Howard Days 2025: Events Schedule for June 2025. This year’s theme is ‘100 Years of Robert E. Howard’.

* Also R.E. Howard related, I note a minor update for the Stable Diffusion LORA plug-in Stygia, now at version 1.2. Designed for generating background images suitable for Conan tales set in Stygia or similar. These early (and arguably the most ‘creative’) SD releases are now very well supplied with LORAs and the tide is ebbing. Thus from now on I shall probably only mention Lovecraft / R.E. Howard / 1930s-noir SD LORAs in HPLinks — rather than in their own post.

* Talking of AI, AI 2027 is a dedicated and new ‘future scenario’ website, which actually goes out to 2030. Gripping, detailed, very lengthy and fairly plausible stuff which arises from serious think-tanking and war-gaming. Possibly of interested to Lovecraftians, in terms of the competing visions of future-AI as a blind tentacular all-devouring Lovecraftian monster, or a benign super-shoggoth that will “advance civilization by decades in a year or two”.

* And finally, I see from a current eBay listing there was a 1974 Signet mass-market U.S. paperback reprint of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, although this was “abridged”(?) and the book padded by Derleth with several other tales by other authors. New to me…

— End-quotes —

“One long-destroyed tale [I wrote as a boy] was of twin brothers — one murders the other, but conceals the body, & tries to live the life of both — appearing in one place as himself, & elsewhere as his victim. (Resemblance had been remarkable). He meets sudden death (lightning) when posing as the dead man — is identified by a scar, & the secret finally revealed by his diary.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1916.

“[Dexter Ward] may get to 75 pages or so before its natural and logical conclusion appears. It centres around old Providence…” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“… of the tale now drawing toward its close [in its writing], and which I shall call either The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or The Madness out of Time. Like Midas of old, curs’d by the turning to gold of everything he touch’d, I am this year curs’d by the turning into a young novel of every story I begin. [… Ward ended up as 51,500 words, but… ] the typing of manuscripts of this length is utterly beyond the powers of a feeble old gentleman who loses interest in a tale the moment he completes it.” — Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, February 1927.