29 Friday Aug 2025
Posted in Housekeeping, Scholarly works
My Tolkien Gleanings newsletter is now at a new URL, having moved from a free WordPress blog, to my hosted WordPress webspace. Please update your bookmarks and links, many thanks. The new RSS feed for Gleanings is https://jurn.link/spyders/category/tolkien-gleanings/feed
27 Wednesday Aug 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #52.
* The latest issue of the Brazilian open-access fantastic fiction journal Abusoes is a special on ‘histories and theories of fantasy in the 21st century’. A number of their back issues are also fantasy or science-fiction specials, and there’s also large special issue dedicated to Lovecraft. Mostly in Portuguese.
* The Science Fiction Foundation has a call for contributions to a forthcoming “100 Years of Wonder” special issue of its journal, with a submission deadline of 5th April 2026…
2026 marks the centenary of Hugo Gernsback’s [magazine] Amazing Stories. To commemorate and critically explore what many regard as the birth of genre science fiction, the Autumn 2026 issue of ‘Foundation’ (No. 153) will present a series of articles that investigate and re-evaluate the history of the science fiction pulps.
* The journal Messengers from the Stars plans a 2026 special issue on cityscapes in fantasy & science fiction. Deadline: 1st September 2025.
* A preprint paper on PsyArXiv, “The Lovecraft Protocol: A Clinical Guide for First Contact with Functionally Plural Systems”. Now withdrawn, but archived at Reddit. Appears to have been an HPL Birthday spoof of psychology ‘personality assessment’ papers, that made it into Google Scholar.
* In the new $155 academic-theory book Theorizing Stephen King (2025), I see there’s a chapter titled “A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King”.
* New in the open-access megajournal Humanities, “Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery”. Traces the influence of the fin-de-siecle Decadents through Machen to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series and beyond.
* Deep Cuts look at the Clara Hess letters held at Brown University, in “The Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess”, and transcribes letters she sent to August Derleth. As I understand it Derleth also interviewed her about her memories of Lovecraft, probably in late 1948.
* New articles at Grognardia on “Lovecraft the Blogger” and “Lovecraft the Fantasist”…
Like [R.E.] Howard, Lovecraft peopled the Dreamlands with decadent civilizations, perilous sorceries, and monstrous foes. Like Tolkien, he gives us a secondary world with its own geography, history, and laws. The difference is perhaps one of emphasis. Howard’s heroes carve their fates with the sword, Tolkien’s with the burden of virtue, and Lovecraft’s with the dreamer’s restless desire to glimpse what lies just beyond the horizon.
* For Lovecraft’s birthday, DMR had the article “Lovecraft at 135: Yeah, He Won”. If one pinpoints 1925 as the beginning of Lovecraft’s strong influence on other creatives, then he’s now endured for a century…
By this time in August of 1925, HPL had turned the heads of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and many, many others. ‘Others’ like C.L. Moore and Manly Wade Wellman. ‘Others’ like Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury. [… and now 100 years later] The ‘lens’ of most horror fiction is filtered through the paradigm Lovecraft refined and perfected [and he also lives] rent-free even in the minds of even his most ardent haters.
* This week Wormwoodiana surveys “Those Thick Omnibuses from the Thirties”, and recommends some core 1930s books which collected the best ‘weird’ stories between hardcovers.
* A new audiobook The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, being a quality seven-hour reading of the classic Professor Challenger novel. From the same reader, there’s also “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith. Both free on YouTube. Avoid the YouTube ads by downloading with desktop freeware such as Mediahuman’s YouTube To MP3 software.
* I’m pleased to see that Fred Blosser has just published a new R.E. Howard reader’s guide, The Solomon Kane Companion: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Dark Avenger. Billed as the “first-ever comprehensive guide” and available now.
Includes a “Kane chronology and a glossary of people and places” in the tales.
* Perhaps useful for some involved in fantasy illustration and RPG-making, a proper ‘savage wolf’ LoRA for SDXL-based image generator models. The free A Better Wolf… “fixes a lot of the wolf related issues in SDXL”.
* Bandcamp Daily has a new long article and survey “Exploring the Mystical Realms of Fantasy Synth”, which is shorthand for ‘synthesizer-based electronic music’…
Think of a fantasy setting or a specific corner of mythology, and there’s almost certainly a one-person synth project out there taking its lore and turning it into music.
* Robert Bloch’s short Mythos novel Strange Eons (1978) was re-issued by Valancourt Books in early August 2025. Now shipping. Bloch makes frequent use of Lovecraft-the-man via letters etc, to prop up the rather dialogue-heavy tale. There’s no audiobook, it seems.
* New on Archive.org, a good scan of Weird Tales for January 1946, including an indication that The Necronomicon had been dropped into the swirl of bookseller’s lists as early as 1945…
Also new on Archive.org, a Sprague de Camp snippet in Future Science Fiction, August 1954. His regular column lets drop a few details on his then-recent visit to Providence — giving the colours of Lovecraft’s homes and calling 10 Barnes a “monstrous” building.
* From Poland in Polish, the undergraduate dissertation “Shades of Cosmic Horror: An analysis of the cinematic expressions applied in adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space””. The author considered “all seven film adaptations” of “Colour”, and discussed the methods used to visually and scientifically convey the idea of a fictional colour. Not yet online.
* And finally, Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” adapted as a 1992 Japanese TV Movie (who knew?). Now subtitled in English and newly and freely available on Archive.org.
— End-quotes —
[In 1904, as a thirteen year-old] “… Latin now captivated my fancy, and I became a haughty Roman with scant use for the barbaric darkness of the modern world. The impress of this phase is still upon me, and I still thrill at the Roman name and the fasces and the figure of the Wolf of the Capitol.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.
“… nocturnal howling has an element of fearfulness for me. I always associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night’s small hours. Wolves and other animals are of course the ultimate basis of the hereditary folk-fear on which my impression is founded.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, January 1928.
“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very in-frequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.” — Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”.
“[I] fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk — a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney” — Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”.
23 Saturday Aug 2025
Posted in AI
A first proper experiment with ‘modern, 2025’ AI writing, using Msty for Windows (not Msty Studio) as the desktop host. The Drummer’s new local Cydonia-24B-v4 Q2-K model proved the best and it also has very reasonable speed in its lightweight Q2 GGUF form, running on a basic entry-level 3060 12Gb graphics card.
I requested a story about a frog, a rocketship and a library, written in the style of Nabokov. A tough test, I thought.
Here’s the 30% re-written and slightly expanded result, blended with a few little ‘nice touches’ spotted in results had from the lesser models Gemma 3 12b and Mistral Instruct 7B.
An Encounter With The Unnatural:
Walking briskly through his high and labyrinthine aisles, the Unnatural History librarian wore his usual frown. He felt it was depressing to see so many dust motes dancing lazily, down the long light shafts that fell across his gloomy paths. Dust smacked of decay. Suddenly he adjusted his round spectacles and gasped. In all his time in this section he had passed many strange items left by the borrowers — potted fungi from the outer Solar System with some very peculiar growth patterns; student watercolor renderings of imaginary animals yet to be created by genetic engineering, a silvery packet of black seeds with a label that would send them plunging into the clouds of Venus — but nothing quite like what he now found where the aisles of ‘Classical Natural History’ shaded over into ‘Antique Philosophy’.
It was a tiny specimen of what appeared to be the Common Frog of Old Earth, Rana temporaria, its emerald hide standing out quite remarkably even in the dim light, and perched upon the silvery cone of a strangely detailed miniature rocketship. The frog made no damp and sudden movement that might show curiosity about its discovery. Its eyes blinked not at the observer’s presence. It was unaware that it had, for a moment, brilliantly excelled all the library’s surrealist poems. Not by words, but by such an unlikely proximity and stillness.
The librarian was an elderly man of Old Mars and thus a grandchild of colonists averse to the poetic. Yet he felt it his duty to wonder about the temporal history of this curious conjunction. Perhaps the creature had arrived with its tiny ship or perhaps — his prosy mind rejected this thought as absurd yet delightful — the tiny frog was itself the pilot. Some astronaut from a water planet, come to seek knowledge beyond his own amphibian ponds? Certainly the rocketship seemed to pulse faintly beneath the clinging frog, like a heart beating and as if newly arrived from destinations and light-years undreamed.
Deciding the matter to be far too curious and detailed to be some student prank, the librarian gently lifted both clinging frog and rocketship, walked some distance and placed them on a table exactly equidistant between ‘Old Earth Science Fiction’ and ‘Classical Natural Philosophy’. Then, with a swirl of his cloak, he continuing on his vigilant way. The frog, oblivious to its own absurdity, merely flicked out its tongue, tasting a few dust motes from the library’s honeyed light shafts. A few young library patrons passed it occasionally, without noticing.
Kind of reminds me of a strange 12-page standalone comic-strip that one might have once encountered in the pages of some old 1980s Heavy Metal magazine, illustrated by Caza.
20 Wednesday Aug 2025
Posted in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #51.
* Eusebeia – a mystical Lovecraftian short film… 3DVF has it that… “the film evokes a universe worthy of Lovecraft”. Freely available on YouTube.
* Dates have been announced for the NecronomiCon Providence 2026, 13th-16th August 2026. No further details or trailer-poster, as yet.
* My Lovecraft LoRA for SDXL and ComfyUI, now freely available in time for Lovecraft’s Birthday. My next HPLinks will hopefully have more links to birthday goodies from others.
* The 2025 birthday has been used as a means of re-promoting the Italian essay collection Yog-Sothothery (October 2024), and the new promo usefully has a few details of what’s inside.
Seven essays in Italian in total, including…
– a survey of places in New York City frequented by Lovecraft
– an examination of the scientific details in “At The Mountains of Madness”
– a study of mass-media ‘adaptations’ of Lovecraft and their distortion by leftist politics
Also announced is a spin-off from the book…
The Yog-Sothothery project is a multimedia project inspired by Lovecraft’s imagination, evoking the profound symbiosis between Providence author and and his dark myths. It will be articulated through events, audiovisual productions and interactive content that will be presented in the coming months in Rome and L’Aquila, on the occasion of two symbolic anniversaries. 100 years of “The Call of Cthulhu” (set in 1925), and 50 years of the publisher Chaosium. Among the promoters and supporters of the project include L’Aquila Reborn, Rome Creative Hub, People and Territories, Lightson, Mokona’s, Studio Comunico, Rome Film Academy.
* Live on YouTube later today, the R.E. Howard Foundation on “Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft: Opinionated Pen Pals”.
* Newly released, the book Lovecraft’s Calculator: Physics, Paradox, and a Scientific Guide to Cosmic Horror…
This book doesn’t describe cosmic horror. It proves it. Using real equations, peer-reviewed papers, and a narrator who has clearly been awake too long reading arXiv at 3 a.m., Lovecraft’s Calculator drags you down the spiral staircase of reality, one unsettling scientific fact at a time. You’ll explore vacuum decay, black holes, dark energy, Boltzmann brains, and the nauseating possibility that the universe itself is a malfunctioning simulation with no tech support.
There’s an affordable Kindle ebook edition. How much it actually references Lovecraft’s work and his 1900s-1930s scientific context is unknown.
* In the latest edition of the journal Zeitschrift fur Katalanistik, the Catalan article which translates as “Ofelia Dracs and the reception of H.P. Lovecraft in Catalan literature”. Freely available online.
* From Poland in English, and published in the latest issue of a Malaysian open-access journal, “Which hollow is Witches’ Hollow? : an empirical study on translating toponyms”…
It was decided that the proper name for the study should be Witches’ Hollow — a toponym from a short story that was first published in a collection of weird fiction tales, “The Watchers Out of Time”, by August Derleth. […] it takes place in the cult world of Cthulhu Mythos, inspired by Lovecraft’s works and notes he left, and stylized as Lovecraftian, but not authored by Lovecraft.
* On DeviantArt, Red-Vanguard has new illustrations for The Horror at Martin’s Beach, The Black Bratt of Dunwich, and The Dunwich Horror, in the sort of artistic style one imagines Lovecraft might have had is he had been published on the covers of the ‘slicks’ rather than inside the ‘pulps’. Red-Vanguard also has earlier works for “The Lurking Fear” and others.
* Grognardia blogs on Lovecraft’s awe…
What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense — sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious.
* Another new blog essay from Grognardia is “Of Periwigs and Pallid Masks”, which co-incides nicely with my now completed and very enjoyable re-reading of Dexter Ward…
[What fascinated the Anglophile Lovecraft was that time when] Boston remained loyal to the [British] Crown, when the [American] frontier still loomed dark and unknown, and when superstition and science existed in uneasy proximity. […] To the best of my knowledge, Chaosium has never released a full supplement set in 17th- or 18th-century British North America. […] The early 18th century was a period when science, superstition, and theology all vied for dominance in the human mind. A figure like Emanuel Swedenborg, for example, could be taken seriously not only as a scientist and engineer but also as a visionary who conversed with spirits. That intellectual ambiguity suits the Mythos perfectly.
* And finally, ‘Oh noes, we iz expozed… burn th periwigs, guyz!’ New on YouTube, the documentary Inside America’s Insane Lovecraft-Obsessed Fraternity.
— End-quotes —
“I’ve never attempted long hair [i.e. in the decadent manner] because I always think of myself in a periwig rather than following the post-1775 fashion of wearing my own hair. The common thing in periwig days was to clip or even shave the head — so I worry along with close haircuts and imagine my wig hanging on a wig-block or the bedpost.” — Lovecraft to Virgil Finlay, October 1936.
[My] “dream-self has come to represent me so perfectly that in waking hours I sometimes feel odd for lack of my three-cornered hat, powdered periwig, satin small-clothes, silver sword, and buckled shoes.” — Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, January 1933.
“… one June day in 1917 I was walking through Swan Point Cemetery with my aunt and saw a crumbling tombstone with a skull and crossbones dimly traced upon its slaty surface; the date, 1711, still plainly visible. It set me thinking. Here was a link with my favourite aera of periwigs — the body of a man who had worn a full-bottom’d wig and had perhaps read the original sheets of The Spectator. Here lay a man who had lived in Mr. Addison’s day, and who might easily have seen Mr. Dryden had he been in the right part of London at the right time! Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me? I looked long at that grave, and the night after I returned home I began my first story [of my adult life]” — Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920.
[Lovecraft recalls being a boy who had discovered Alden’s] THE READER [… This old book] was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence [for it] reflected in all its completeness the Georgian rhetorical tradition of Addison, Pope, and Johnson, which had survived unimpaired in America even after the Romantic Movement had begun to modify it in England. This, I felt by instinct, was the key to the speech and manners and mental world of that old periwigged, knee-breeched Providence whose ancient lanes still climbed the hill […] Little by little I hammered every rule and precept and example into my receptive system, till in a month or so I was beginning to write coherent verse in the ancient style” […] “At the same time I was reading the 17th and 18th century poetical translations of the classics and the old Queen Anne essayists as fast as I could, so that periwigged Georgianism was absorbing me as utterly as if I had been actually born in its midst.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.
20 Wednesday Aug 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft! My present this year is a ‘Lovecraft’s likeness’ add-on for guiding AI image generation. Specifically, my Lovecraft SDXL character LoRA. Included is a workflow that also does automatic facefix at a higher resolution, useful for when he’s in the middle-distance of an image. As you can see below, a middle-distance Lovecraft (that looks at bit more like William Burroughs) becomes more Lovecraft-like and especially so around the eyes. Not perfect, but better.
The middle-distance fix-up is achieved by an ‘automatic facefix’, which re-renders the face at a higher resolution then seamlessly patches it in. My supplied workflow gives you the auto-facefix plus a Controlnet which can process using either MistoLine (extract lineart as a guide to the image generation) or OpenPose (extract a posed figure as a guide). Above you see an old Sherlock Holmes film-still guiding the image via a MistoLine Controlnet, along with the Lovecraft LoRA. The head is angled, to show that angles are possible. Emotions can also be prompted for.
Note that making the workflow functional will require the host software ComfyUI, plus several ‘custom nodes’ and models. The ComfyUI workflow has the details of these. Of course one also requires a good NVIDIA graphics card in the PC, with a 3060 12Gb being generally regarded as the base entry-level.
Change the image-generation prompt to do things like having 18th century clothes and settings…
Include hpl in the prompt to trigger the LoRA into action.
Enjoy!
17 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Films & trailers, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #50.
* A new PhD thesis, sadly under embargo, Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025). There is, however, a lengthy abstract.
* A new Masters dissertation, “Fear, Cosmic Horror and the Sublime in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction” (2025). Freely available online. Examines Lovecraft’s personal and societal… “fears and how they had an impact on his writing, how said fears created the genre of cosmic horror” and the relation to ‘the sublime’.
* A recent Masters dissertation, “H.P. Lovecraft: Prophet of the Elder Gods: Investigating his Influence over the 20th and 21st Century Occult and Religious Worlds” (2024). Not freely online, but it appears to provide a survey of the various… “researchers, occultists, and occult organizations that seek to venerate or utilize Lovecraftian entities in occult practice and worship.”
* An official announcement from the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, the HPLFF Returns to Providence 22nd-24th August 2025. More than 30 films, plus Q&As and talks.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he writes…
I am in receipt of an extraordinary project, The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, compiled by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. In addition to a two-volume edition of Lovecraft’s complete fiction (which uses my corrected texts), there is a supplementary volume, A Reader’s Guide to Selected Works by H. P. Lovecraft — a most appealing and heavily illustrated work containing much information on […] key works. Every devotee of Lovecraft will want to secure this major undertaking.
GameSpot’s review of the same also spots among the collectables… “a diploma from Miskatonic University [and the University’s] Undergraduate Course Book, presented as a small booklet”.
* There’s an update on the New England Folklore Bestiary. They report expanding entries at a healthy rate, and a suitable illustrator has now joined the project.
* Feuilleton surveys Akihiro Yamada’s Lovecraftiana.
* In France, “Lovecraft honoured at the 7th Cinematographic Meeting of Charolais Brionnais”. This appears to be a local newspaper puff for a cinema sub-event at the Lovecraft event featured in my last HPLinks.
* In Hamburg, Germany, tickets are now on sale for a series of stage performances of “Dreams in the Witch House”.
* New on Archive.org, a 1987 small magazine translation of Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” into Romanian.
* New on Archive.org, Sam Moskowitz on “The Prophetic Edgar Allan Poe”, from the Christmas 1958 edition of Satellite magazine…
… his greatest contribution to the advancement of the genre was the precept that every departure from norm must be logically explained scientifically. This made it easy for the reader to attain a willing suspension-of-disbelief and accept the unusual. The greatest names in the history of the field owe a profound debt to his method: “that everything must be scientifically logical”
* Also new on Archive.org, “Lovecraft meets Lovelock”. A thoughtful five-page section in the book Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)…
Mixing the horror of Lovecraft with the romantic rationalism of Lovelock produces a volatile concoction.
* Free RPG Day (who knew?) this year gave away Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure, a scenario for the Arkham Horror Roleplaying Game. Having bagged his freebie, Rlyeh Reviews offers an experienced gamer’s in-depth review.
* Kay Talks Games celebrates “The Fantastic Narration of Wayne June”, though appreciating June’s voice-work on the Darkest Dungeon games rather than the Lovecraft tales.
* Have you spotted any stolen Steve Ditko original comic-art boards? There’s now a chunky $20,000 reward.
* And finally, “J.J. Abrams films Ghostwriter in Providence, RI”. Ghostwriter is apparently set to be a blockbuster “retro” (i.e. set in the 1980s) sci-fi/mystery movie… “about an author who finds that the mythical world he imagined is real”. Sounds familiar, and the filming locations on Benefit Street, Wickenden Street and Hope Street all strongly suggest a possible Lovecraft-the-man wrinkle in the movie.
— End-quotes —
“What depths of mental poverty and aesthetic paralysis yawn in the simple fact that hordes of people, each supposedly endowed with individual perceptive faculties and a responsive imagination, vary not a whit in their stolid, incurious reactions to the world’s wonders, and glimpse not a vision beyond the bare, material, geometrical outlines of the scene before them. One patient herd; one conglomerate mind; one universal coma! [… yet with free expression, such as that enabled by amateur journalism, we may taste a little of the … ] golden antiquity of freedom, beauty, intensity, and individuality. From one grey world the artist escapes to a colourful cosmos of hundreds of brilliant worlds — for does not an awakened imagination shatter all barriers and empower the mind to shape the impressions it receives?” — Lovecraft’s Presidential message to fellow amateur journalists, in the National Amateur of July 1923.
“I’m not the only one to see a really serious problem ahead for the sensitive aesthete who would keep alive amidst the ruins of the traditional civilisation. In fact, an attitude of alarm, pain, disgust, retreat, and defensive strategy is so general among virtually all modern men of creative interests, that I’m sometimes tempted to keep quiet for fear my personal feeling may be mistaken for affected imitativeness!” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.
“I’ve learned from experience that this kind of negligence [in correspondence] is extremely common [such as Cook’s case, in 1930]. He was so utterly shot to pieces that he left Athol and all his responsibilities behind, giving no address and allowing his mail to pile up […] I’ve noticed that other nervous people — including some of the finest characters alive — react the same way under stress. When crowded and harassed to the limit […] they save their equilibrium through a temporary gesture of complete repudiation […] Then, when things calm down a bit, they belatedly drop notes and try to pick up the threads again. While this is irritating (& sometimes disastrous) enough to those who write them, one can’t afford to confuse such cases of desperation with pure callousness or malevolence.” — Lovecraft to Hyman Bradofsky, November 1936.
07 Thursday Aug 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #49.
* Hippocampus Press has details of the forthcoming Lovecraft Annual 2025. Among others, the journal will have articles on…
– Lovecraft’s Boyhood Cat.
– “Iä, Iä!”: Its Origin and Significance.
– Lovecraft and Wales.
– Lovecraft in the Netherlands.
– Lovecraft in Mexico.
Looks good. Set for release in August 2025. Not yet listed on Amazon UK.
* The French journal Epistemocritique also produces a line of free ebooks. One of their latest books is Ecrire avec les cartes (2024). Along with chapters on maps and the fiction of Kipling, Stevenson and H.G. Wells, this book includes “Cartographies d’outre-tombe: la posterite cartographique de la Nouvelle-Angleterre imaginaire de Lovecraft” (‘Cartographies from beyond the grave: the cartographic posterity of the New England imaginary of Lovecraft’), which is well illustrated with maps. Freely available online.
I propose to examine how these [popular, post-Lovecraft] maps relate to Lovecraft’s [original] fiction, with particular reference to “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. I suggest that these maps can be grouped into three categories, according to the function they perform and their graphic style. This abundant popular cartographic production affects both our reading of Lovecraft, and our perception of real spaces.
Available in PDF, and easily auto-translated. Historians of science-fiction may also want note Epistemocritique’s first such free ebook, on Jules Verne and the popularisation of science.
* From the Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century (2022), “Fantastic Letters: Writing in a Fictional World”. Letter-forms devised for fantastic worlds. Freely available online.
* In the French journal Belphegor, “Le bestiaire medievaliste comme produit derive” (2024, ‘The medievalist bestiary as a [modern] derivative product’), in French. Freely available online, but easily auto-translated. This examines modern gaming ‘monster manuals’ — most familiar to Lovecraftians via Sandy Petersen’s Field Guide to the Lovecraftian Horrors, Creatures of the Dreamlands etc — but does so with a medievalist’s eye to the mediaeval prehistory of the form.
* Also in gaming, the HPLHS Store has what appears to be a new series of “Audio Props”, each tuned to a specific variety of Lovecraftian game.
* Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” adapted as a 2024 puppetry film. With finely-crafted puppets, complex sets and FX. Free on YouTube.
* S.T. Joshi latest blog post mentions a film version of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, from Wales. He links to a trailer and a Kickstarter. Joshi seems to be right that many liberties have been taken with the tale. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the Kickstarter from nearly reaching its goal with a week to go.
* A review of a stage production of “The Call of Cthulhu”, in Hamburg, Germany. The show has just closed its run, but if you’re in the city then you can catch the same troupe’s “Dreams in the Witch House”, on stage “in mid-August”.
* A UK meetup for Mythos writers and also traders, the Innsmouth Literary Festival 25 is set for Saturday 27th September 2025, in the English town of Bedford. Located conveniently midway between Birmingham and London, and between Oxford and Cambridge, and with not one but two railway stations. Booking now.
* In the world of R.E. Howard, this week we have free on YouTube Editing Robert E. Howard’s Conan: A Conversation with Dr. Patrice Louinet. Also new and free on YouTube is a good reading of “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance” by Robert E. Howard. An excellent pirate adventure featuring an Irishman seeking his vengeance in the Caribbean. With a few tweaks, it could have been a ‘Conan the pirate’ tale.
* Tellers of Weird Tales feels the effects of Strange Rays & Weird Waves in Weird Tales of the mid 1920s.
* New on Archive.org, a run of the Deep Magic Ezine, 2002-2006. Includes short interviews with fantasy writers and artists.
* A pleasing and new-to-me view of a spot on the Brown University campus that Lovecraft likely visited, given his interest in Ancient Rome. An exact replica of an ancient statue of Caesar Augustus in Rome, installed on the Brown campus in 1906 and there until the early 1950s. Indeed, we can be fairly sure Lovecraft visited, in the company of his visiting geologist friend Morton. Since, after 1915 the adjacent Hall housed the Geology Department on the ground floor and in the basement. Morton would surely have prompted Lovecraft to visit the Dept. when visiting Providence.
* Talking of Brown University, the modern-day Providence campus and its library (home of most of the Lovecraft letters) are set to become a little safer to visit, after Brown reaches a $50m settlement over its campus antisemitism. Brown must now take… “significant, proactive, effective steps to combat antisemitism” including “proactive measures to protect Jewish students”, and it appears that progress is to be closely monitored.
* And finally, Lovecraft’s birthday is on the 20th of this month. ‘Presents’ have been a feature of past birthdays. As my present, I plan to release my recently-made “Lovecraft’s face/head” LoRA. This is intended as an add-on for use with SDXL models re: image-generating AI. Here’s a preview of ‘without and with’, when the generated figure is in the middle-distance and a facefix is automatically applied. Close-ups give a far better likeness (no facefix needed for close-ups), but this demo shows the LoRA can also work at a distance — which will be important for comic-books. It will also work with the head at an angle, and a prompt can change the expression (here seen in neutral)…
— End-quotes —
“My own nervous state in childhood once produced a tendency inclining toward chorea, although not quite attaining that level. My face was full of unconscious & involuntary motions now & then — & the more I was urged to stop them, the more frequent they became.” — Lovecraft to Richard F. Searight, March 1935.
“After 1904 [i.e. age 14] I had a long succession of 22-calibre rifles, and became a fair shot till my eyes played hell with my accuracy.” (Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, November 1933) / In Lovecraft’s “Polaris”… “my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts”.
“I used to have to wear them [spectacles] all the time, and they kept my nose and ears in a state of perpetual irritation. Now I wear them only for steady middle-distance vision — as at the theatre, or at illustrated lectures.” — Lovecraft to Bloch, June 1933.
“It’s all as plain as the nose on your face …. or even that on my face, which is something else again.” — Lovecraft on his large nose, to Talman, February 1931.
“I do not claim to be 100% Teuton. My dark hair and eyes forbid me that honour. […] I am content to survey my ample height and pallid complexion […] your old Grandpa is pretty well satisfied to be a Nordick, chalk white from the Hercynian wood and the Polar mists” — Lovecraft joshing with Frank Belknap Long, December 1923.