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.