HPLinks #43.

I’m pleased to say I’ve nearly completed my move to Windows 11 (‘superlite’, not the monstrosity that is the regular version). I only have a bit more work to do on the OS and on various bits of software, plus a few more niggles to fix. The move to a new OS was arduous, but worth it, and Windows 11 opens up access to newer software and local AI options. Thanks for your patience on this. HPLinks now returns to a fuller format…

* In the latest Taiwan Humanities Bulletin, “A Schopenhauerian Reading of Lovecraft’s Fiction: The Will, the Intellect, and Never-Ending Struggle of Life in Cosmic Horror” (2025). Freely available online, in English.

* Now freely available at the Stanford Repository, seemingly after a five-year embargo(?), “Lovecraft and the Question of an Uninhabitable Universe”. A final-year undergraduate dissertation from 2020, and likely a brave one given the fevered political climate of elite U.S. campuses in 2020. The author argued that…

… his work can be understood as a continual attempt to convince its reader that the universe is uninhabitable. My case rests on a belief that Lovecraft’s arguments for this provocative claim could not be made through philosophy alone — the structure of his thought closely resembles that of a theologian. I locate in his work a rich, albeit unwitting, correspondence with philosophers and theologians of history such as Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Lowith.

* New in Russian, a close examination of three Russian translations of “The Thing on the Doorstep”. Freely available online, and in HTML — which means auto-translation should be trivial.

* Newly published, a new issue of the open-access scholarly Journal of Gods and Monsters. A special issue on The Exorcist movie, and includes a review of Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed (2023).

* Five years in the making, and shipping this week, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters. Also includes surveys of modern “Monstrous Angels”, plus “Demons and Monsters of Mesopotamia”, and “Ghosts of Mesopotamia”, which means ancient Babylon and the Babylonian Empire.

* Librivox has just released a new unabridged reading of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Free and also Public Domain — which means you can freely re-use and re-mix. A little high and fast for me, but a good ‘full controls’ media player such as AIMP would sort that out.

* I found a good vintage picture, new to me, of the colonial-era Old State House, Providence, aka the ‘Rhode Island State House’ or ‘Colony House’ or ‘Independence Hall’. On Benefit Street, but not to be confused with the Old Court House also on Benefit Street. Lovecraft knew this College Hill landmark. For instance Lovecraft was one of the antiquarian guests present there when a lavish period-costume reconstruction was staged in 1936, part of the tercentenary celebrations. He had included the place, in passing, in his novel Dexter Ward.

“In 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist. […] Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick one — still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street — was built in 1761. […] He replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire…” — Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

* The Online Review of Rhode Island History has a new summer-time article on the “Exodus to the Shore: Resorts for Ordinary People”. The article offers some deep background context for Lovecraft’s own access to and enjoyment of the coastline.

* Talking of summer holidays, the Howard Days events in sizzling Texas have spurred a good deal of R.E. Howard activity, including online. I’ll hope to have a round-up of the Howard Days 2025 links in my next HPLinks. In the meanwhile, enjoy DMR’s new review of the biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* Pulpfest trails DocCon, the Doc Savage convention to be held in early August in Pittsburgh. Along the way, this long article usefully reveals that the… “We Are Doc Savage: A Documentary on Fandom — a feature-length documentary two years in production, that explores the history of Doc Savage fandom — [is] now available on DVD.”

* The 2025 conference poster “Resurrected Criminals, Time-Loops, and Faustian Bargains: The Speculative Edge of 1940s Film Noir” is freely available online, and finds that some of the approaches of 1940s noir… “draw from the narrative traditions of Weird Tales and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith”

* New on YouTube, a long tour of the Lovecraftian in Bethesda’s chart-topping post-apocalyptic Fallout videogames… “The Fallout franchise has long maintained a Lovecraftian subplot, which I often call ‘The Dunwich Mystery'”.

* New from the University of Alicante, Spain, the book Vt pictura poesis: Literatura y arte en Amarica Latina y Espana (2025). Includes the chapter “A traves del polvo de plata: Visiones de la ciudad imaginaria en Ruben Dario y H.P. Lovecraft”. (‘Through silver dust: Views of the imaginary city in Ruben Dario and H.P. Lovecraft’). The chunky 722-page book is freely available online as a PDF, via the University repository.

* The Austrian educational studies journal Medienimpulse reviews The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, in its translated form as Der letzte Tag des Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and finds the graphic novel could be used in the classroom. The review is freely available online.

* Officially free to download, the new book Approaching Xero: The SF Prehistory of Comics Fandom (2025). Donations are welcome, and will go into a long-running British fan-fund.

* And finally, what might be a second edition of the book How to Draw Cosmic Monsters: Create Scenes from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, which Amazon UK now has as set to be published 2nd September 2025. I spotted this some years ago. Either it was never published until now, or the September release will be a second edition / reprint.

— End-quotes —

“… we went out on the flat roof and saw the thing in all its unlimited and unglassed magnificence. It was something mightier than the dreams of old-world legend — a constellation of infernal majesty — a poem in Babylonian fire! Added to the weird lights are the weird sounds of the port, where the traffick of all the world comes to a focus. Fog-horns, ships’ bells, the creak of distant windlasses — visions of far shores of India, where bright-plumed birds are roused to song by the incense of strange garden-girt pagodas, and gaudy-robed camel-drivers barter before sandal-wood taverns with deep-voiced sailors having the sea’s mystery in their eyes. Silks and spices, curiously-wrought ornaments of Bengal gold, and gods and elephants strangely carven in jade and carnelian.” — Lovecraft sees New York City at dusk from across the river, standing on Hart Crane’s rooftop, in 1924.

“The older part of this necropolis is on a hill, and as we wander’d among the hoary slate head-stones we feasted our eyes on many a gigantick elm or incredibly antient house. […] 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 enjoys Amesbury in the company of the young boy Edgar Jacobs Davis, May 1923.

“Whether a renaissance of monarchy and beauty will restore our Western civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for even the fascist sentiment to check, none may yet say; but in the present moment of cynical world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead, we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty. And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given its due among groping mortals — the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious, the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art — the type of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry — the bland, grave, competent, and patrician cat.” — Lovecraft, part of his talk “Cats & Dogs”.

The latter seems to place the origin of the domesticated and venerable cat even further back than Egypt, being ultimately “Babylonian” in Lovecraft’s eyes. Possibly Lovecraft was thinking of the only mention of cats in the Bible, where the author notes with distain that cats are allowed to sit on the idols of Babylonia (Baruch 6:22) — from the context, these must have been semi-domesticated ‘temple cats’.