Monthly Archives: September 2025

HPLinks #57 – 16mm Lovecraft’s pals doc revived, graphic novel about Lovecraft’s cat, new article by Lovecraft’s uncle, and more…

30 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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HPLinks #57.

* Here in the UK, Edinburgh Napier University newly posts some details of what sounds like an important H.P. Lovecraft Documentary Project which is well underway and about to launch a crowdfunder…

Restoration of archival 16mm footage shot by Sean Martin in 1989/90 about writer H.P. Lovecraft, featuring unique footage of Lovecraft’s then surviving friends and colleagues. Work-in-progress cut was screened at the Lovecraft Centenary Conference at Brown University in 1990. Project received ENU research funding in 2024 to digitise footage. This has now been completed (90 mins of material digitised), and a crowdfunder is being launched in autumn 2025 to raise monies needed to digitise the remaining footage. Industry contacts are in place to assist with restoration and additional postproduction.

* Another ‘Lovecraft as character’ graphic novel, from Argentina, which Deep Cuts usefully reviews this week…

… a story about a boy [Lovecraft] and his cat. It is not a historical work that delves into the nuances of the cultural forces that went into such names, [but rather for those who] want a heartwarming fantasy about Lovecraft and his beloved pet, which has gained a kind of literary immortality.

I found a review from Harartia magazine in Argentina, which concluded the book was… “essential reading for both lovers of horror literature and for those who seek stories that, in their apparent simplicity, hide a moving depth.”

Sounds good. I certainly hadn’t spotted it here, and the news is very welcome. It was published in Argentinia by Jano Comics in 2023, and runs to 103 pages. There’s no sign of it on Amazon or eBay. The closest I can get to a possible store source is AleComics in Buenos Aires, which appears to be selling it locally by mail-order.

* Talking of cats, Grognardia this week considers “The Cats of Ulthar” and points out that… “in its conception of a higher, more mysterious order” of justice, it “stands in marked contrast to the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft’s later, more famous works”. In this sense it shares, I’d add, something with his “The Street”.

* I found a real-life ‘horror story’ from Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark (d. 1915), writing in 1876. Friend’s Review reprinted his survey article in the Sanitarian, on a horrible pig parasite which also infects and quickly kills humans. Eeek!

* The latest Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast tackles the two ‘most Lovecraftian’ tales of Borges, “There Are More Things” and “The Book of Sand”. It seems the podcast’s Patreons also get a bonus interview with Andrew Leman of the HPLHS.

* A new book chapter on “The Visual Realization of Fantastic Worlds in Book Cover Design”. Now free and open-access, as part of the book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (2024). This is No. 4 of a German publisher’s The Middle Ages and Popular Culture series, but the text is in English.

* Just published (according to Amazon’s date and reviews, though shipping seems uncertain), the popular culture history book Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries. This comprehensively surveys movies and TV series / specials… “positioned as documentaries, that began with Chariots of the Gods (1970) and ended with The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981)”.

* The Hippocampus Press website now has “December” as the shipping date for the forthcoming A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

* In the related world of R.E. Howard, another fine free audiobook reading from Gates of Imagination, Robert E. Howard’s substantial Solomon Kane tale “The Moon of Skulls”, first published in Weird Tales over two issues in summer 1930. A few years ago Jeffro’s Space Gaming blog was reading through Kane and found that with this tale Kane became… “even more heroic, more imposing, more inspiring, and more awesome than his preceding tales could indicate.” The new reading of “The Moon of Skulls” runs over two hours. There may be frequent ads if you just listen on YouTube, thus an .MP3 download will be far more enjoyable.

* Open Letters Review reviews a new graphic adaptation of “The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard. One of my favorite Conan tales, and here paired with art by Valentin Secher. Not really a graphic novel, by the looks of the samples. More of a sumptiously illustrated tale that might work well if paired with an English audiobook reading. At least, it would if you’re someone who doesn’t already have their own very clear visualisation of this classic ‘young Conan the thief’ tale.

The review states the 2022… “Bragelonne original was nearly 11-by-15 inches” and that the new small Titan printing in English is very inferior by comparison. Bragelonne has a page which reveals the French title was Conan illustre : La Tour de l’Elephant, and a title search reveals that Amazon FR and Amazon UK have the same two copies left in stock. Personally, the art really doesn’t fit how I’ve always visualised the tale (too brightly lit, too cliched) or Conan (too old, too steroid-pumped), so the book is not for me. But some collectors may want a big French copy of the book, before they sell out.

* I’m pleased to hear about the second issue of the revived Heavy Metal comics magazine, and the vibes coming from a few trusted HM connoisseurs feel good. My look at the contents-list reveals a new strip by HM veteran Enki Bilal, and even a revival of “The Bus” strip. A reasonable $30 gets you a one year digital subscription to the new quarterly, though sadly it’s a “subscription starts with the current issue” sub. Those only now discovering the HM revival may well want a “start me with issue one” sub, which doesn’t appear to be on offer.

* From Poland, a 2025 B.A. dissertation abstract for “Digital character sheets in RPGs, exemplified by the Call of Cthulhu system”. Not available in full-text. Examines…

… character sheets in role-playing games (RPGs). It also presents the design and implementation of the web application SheetKeep which serves as a virtual character sheet. […] Discusses the history and theory of such, and then] formulates the application’s design requirements. The outcome of this analysis is an application that enables users to create and manage character sheets for the Call of Cthulhu system within their own campaigns.

* And finally, a free HMS Challenger Botanic illustrations LoRA for use as a ‘style plugin’ with Illustrious. Based on scans of Ernst Haeckel’s book, presumably. Lovecraft’s uncle lyrically explains the historical context…

What beauties, what wonders, then, are found miles beneath the sea? The great steamship, the Challenger, sent out for a four years’ cruise by the English Government, has now returned. It has brought back with it the story so long concealed in these darksome and almost fathomless depths; the story of that great and strange and hitherto unknown country stretching for 140,000,000 square miles beneath the dark blue waves.” (Lovecraft’s uncle, Franklin Chase Clark, 1878).

Lovecraft knew and was strongly influenced by Haeckel’s anthropology and philosophy, but if he knew Haeckel as an artist of bizzare marine biology is unknown. The LoRA’s demo images are poor, but I was able to easily generate satisfactory ‘pages’ such as this…

— End-quotes —

“As for sea-food — it is simply intensely repulsive to me. […] From earliest infancy every sort of fish, mollusc, or crustacean has been like an emetic to me.” — Lovecraft on his disgust at the smell of fish out of water, to R.E. Howard, November 1932.

“Miami did not produce much of an impression [but I] sailed out over a neighbouring coral reef in a glass-bottomed boat which allowed one to see the picturesque tropical marine fauna & flora of the ocean floor.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, July 1931.

The Miami boat… “gave splendid views of the exotic tropical flora and fauna of the ocean floor — grasses, sponges, corals, fishes, sea-urchins, crinoids, etc. A diver went down and brought up a bucket full of sea-urchins for distribution among the passengers, but I restored mine to its native element because I had no means of preserving it.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1931.

“Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, written 1934-35.

“[… The madman said] “It is amphibious, you know — you saw the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm deep sea. It can’t stand up in there — too tall — has to sit or crouch.” […] The madman was bidding him hear the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door — and now, God help him, he did hear it! […] Phobic paralysis held him immobile and half-conscious, with wild images racing phantasmagorically through his helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There was a padding or shuffling, as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was approaching. …” — Lovecraft, “The Horror in the Museum” (written 1933).

HPLinks #56 – Lovecraft and plants, new translations, pulp and comics art, Bloch letter up for auction, and more…

24 Wednesday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #56.

* A new book in German, Tierwerden und Pflanzendenken in der Literatur: Okologische Entgrenzungen von Franz Kafka und H.P. Lovecraft bis heute (2025). (‘Animal and Plants in Literature: ecological delimitations in Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft’). Due for publication on 31st October 2025, and if you can read German the Kindle edition is currently free to preorder on Amazon. The table-of-contents shows the specific Lovecraft stories being discussed…

* Spanish readers now have the new book Barbarie y Primigenios, Tomo 3: La Correspondencia entre H.P. Lovecraft y Robert E. Howard (2025), being the final volume of the Lovecraft – R.E. Howard letters in Spanish translation.

* Italian website Nerdpool reviews the new Italian translation of the mammoth philosophical-political letter Lovecraft sent to Woodburn Harris. In Italian, but here’s a taste in English translation…

Before reading the book it is necessary to pay attention to the warning of the author, who invites the recipient not to read the [very long and dense] letter in one sitting […] 96 years later the author’s words are still sadly current. [The letter is followed by the] observations of the curator and translator, who offers us important biographical ideas to better understand the importance of the letter, [and he also suggests why it was] worthy of being translated and transformed into a book.

* Threads that Bind on “The Nihilistic Void of Lovecraft’s Cosmicism”, and possible personal solutions.

* Now posted for free at the author’s blog, the Phantasmagoria magazine issue 27 review of Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author… “an incredible book, utterly readable, insightful and impressively thorough, one of the best biographies of a writer I have ever read”.

* New in open-access in the journal Word & Image, the article “Coloring the Mind: fantasy, imagination, and stereotype in early twentieth-century pulp fiction illustration” (2025). Only shows front-covers as illustrations.

* New to me, the book The Visionary Art of Franco-Belgian Comics, 1930s to 1960s (2025). An academic chapter book from Leuven University Press, but one that’s apparently well-illustrated with interior panels — due to being able to draw on a fabulous lifetime collection. Good to hear that… “This book will be made open access within three years of publication”.

* Feuilleton discusses the Lovecraftian art of Jean-Michel Nicollet, which appeared mostly on the covers of French paperbacks (all new to me), but he also had a short comic-strip in the 1978 Heavy Metal Lovecraft issue. Feuilleton offers a selected gallery.

* In Greece, a new 2024 volume of Lovecraft… “translated by writer Thomas Mastakouris and illustrated by Ariadne Tzounakou”. Her ArtStation gallery has the cover without text, and also gives a good look at her style.

* New to me, a very slight appearance of ‘Lovecraft as a character’. In Subconscious Password (National Film Board of Canada, 2013), a short CG animation made with the 3D technology of the time. He briefly appears on a game-show, and attempts to explain how to pronounce Cthulhu, before being swallowed by a tentacle monster. Possibly the first CG animated Lovecraft?

* And finally, currently up for auction is one of Lovecraft’s letters to Robert Bloch (published), with envelope. Good pictures. It’s Christmas Day 1933…

On envelope: “The more I look at KADATH the more he fascinates me. I have him propped up besides the fireplace amongst my Yultide decorations.” (“KADATH” was a drawing by Bloch, sent to Lovecraft)

— End-quotes —

[The young Lovecraft makes a little ‘model garden’] “This was my aesthetic masterpiece, for besides a little village of painted huts erected by myself and Chester and Harold Munroe, there was a landscape garden, all of mine own handiwork. I chopped down certain trees and preserved others, laid out paths and gardens, and set at the proper points shrubbery and ornamental urns taken from the old home. My paths were of gravel, bordered with stones, and here and there a bit of stone wall or an impressive cairn of my own making added to the picture. Between two trees I made a rustic bench, later duplicating it betwixt two other trees. A large grassy space I levelled and transformed into a Georgian lawn, with a sundial in the centre. Other parts were uneven, and I sought to catch certain sylvan or bower-like effects. The whole was drained by a system of channels terminating in a cesspool of my own excavation. Such was the paradise of my adolescent years, and amidst such scenes were many of my early works written. Though by nature indolent, I was never too tired to labour about my estate, attending to the vegetation in summer, and shovelling neat paths in niveous winter.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, September 1920.

“Vrest Orton’s house is an early 19th century farmstead; white & rambling, & with the small-paned windows […] The grounds are ample & lovely; with great elms, numerous peach trees now in pink blossom, a rambling brook, a sunken garden, & a series of grape-arbours, flower-beds, & climbing rose vines which will give an even greater exquisiteness to the scene later in the season. Activities are of a sort congruous with the setting — yesterday we changed the course of a tributary to the brook, built two stone footbridges, pruned the fruit trees, & trained the vines on a new homemade trellis.” — Lovecraft stays with Vrest Orton and repays the hospitality with some unpaid heavy-labour in the garden. Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, April 1929.

Though there were very different gardens in his dreams…

“… alien & incredible scenes — crags & pinnacles lit by violet suns, fantastic piles of cyclopean masonry, vari-coloured fungous vegetation, half-shapeless forms lumbering across illimitable plains, bizarre tiers of waterfalls, topless stone cylinders scaled by rope ladders like ships’ ratlines, labyrinthine corridors & geometrically frescoed rooms, curious gardens with unrecognisable plants, robed amorphous beings speaking in non-vocal pipings …” — Lovecraft gives an impression of one of his recent dreams, in a letter to Barlow, May 1935.

HPLinks #55 – ‘atmospheric war’ and Lovecraft, Barlow’s Yoh-Vombis, Portland FilmFest programme, magic-lantern Cthulhu, and more…

17 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #55.

* An interesting new psychogeography Phd thesis, Atmospheric War and the Fantastic: Andre Breton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Richard S. Shaver (2025), from the University of California. Freely available online, and 165 pages. Examines how…

each writer conceives of the fantastic as an atmospheric phenomenon in culture. By characterizing the fantastic as an atmospheric phenomenon [the writers respond] to a broader process taking place in the twentieth century, whereby technological and scientific innovations increasingly made it possible to intervene into background conditions of life that were hitherto beyond the scope of human access or understanding [ By engaging with this ] process I call atmospheric war […] writers such as Lovecraft and Shaver carry forward Surrealism’s project to develop a collective myth that would make art the basis of a new, revolutionary life praxis.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of the new book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (2025). A bibliographic scholar and book sleuth assiduously traces how Barlow’s fabulous collection of the weird (kept in a special closet) was built, and then later dispersed and travelled across time…

The book has important implications regarding the dispersal of the books in Lovecraft’s library. A must for all Lovecraft and Barlow scholars and collectors!” (Joshi)

Available now as a Kindle ebook. Also as a paperback and one that’s surprisingly affordable, in these days of expensive ever-price-ratcheted print-on-demand paperbacks.

* Joshi also notes in his blog that… “David E. Schultz and I are also working on a volume of Derleth’s essays on weird, fantasy, and science fiction”. This will be a selection from Derleth’s huge output.

* Here in the UK for the past three years, The University of Oxford has been running a successful series of public talks by scholars on aspects of Tolkien’s work and life. Now they’re branching out, with “H.P. Lovecraft: The Madness and the Horror”, set for 16th October 2025. “Booking required” for this one, though, since I guess it’s one more likely to be disrupted by leftist students.

* Now online, the schedule for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Portland). To also include panel discussions on “Psychedelics and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and “Dreams, Madness, and Monsters: Translating Lovecraft to the Screen”.

* From France, the forthcoming book Pixels Hallucines: Lovecraft et les jeux videos (‘Hallucinating Pixels: Lovecraft and videogames’). Set for release on 6th November 2025, according to Amazon UK. The book appears to be a multi-author chapter collection.

* Grognardia, in the midst of making a Dreamlands RPG, has a new long thoughtful post on Lovecraft’s “The White Ship”.

* A stage performance of Lovecraft in London, H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” (20th and 21st October), followed at the same venue by a “magic lantern + live theremin” preformance of “The Call of Cthulhu” (27th – 28th October 2025)…

Fresh from a series of sold out Lovecraftian shadow-puppet shows, T.L. Wiswell turns her hand to the magic lantern, bringing “Call of Cthulhu” to life in a new and original format with Sam Enthoven’s live theremin [music] building the dread.

* For R.E. Howard readers and scholars, new on YouTube is a recording of “REH in 1935” from Howard Days 2025.

* Chaosium Con in Poland. This is the big one for Call of Cthulhu RPG gamers in the UK, Europe, Eastern Europe, Greece etc. 30th October – 2nd November 2025.

* A 1962 postcard of old Providence that Lovecraft would have been pleased to receive, had he lived to old age. Here seen in its wall-poster version…

* And finally, behold the genesis of… The Meowthos…

— End-quotes —

“[it became] a youthful mystery of my own […] You doubtless recall the closing passage of Poe’s “Premature Burial” — where, after an allusion to Carathis which baffled me till I had read Vathek, there occurs the tenebrous final simile: “but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.” Now that image of Afrasiab sailing down the mysterious Oxus (a cryptic stream whose imaginative associations always fascinated me) on an accursed vessel full of sleeping daemons — ineffable nighted things — held for me a macabre terror of peculiar intensity; a terror all the acuter because I could not trace the allusion to any source. I wove all sorts of hideously fanciful images about that voyage, and made obscure references to it in many of my juvenile tales. At first, the name of Carathis was woven into the mystery, but that faded when I found it in Vathek. Afrasiab and his daemons remained the tough nut, and for a while I thought they must be derived from some version of the Arabian Night more ample than any I had seen. Only after years did I find out somehow that Afrasiab came from Firdousj’s great Persian epic […] But I have not yet succeeded in finding any translation of the Shah-Namah, hence am still ignorant of Afrasiab’s frightful adventure with the daemons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffman Price, March 1933.

Lovecraft read Vathek (1786) in July 1921, learning of “the demonic songs sung by Vathek’s necrophilic mother Carathis”.

“In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales — “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss”.” — Lovecraft, “The Nameless City” (1922)

Fabled Samarcand of Silk Route fame was “on the Polytimetus, a branch of the Oxus”.

“Arabia …. Haroun al Raschid …. the Golden Road to Samarcand …. Vathek …. Palace of Eblis …. Sinbad …. the Roc …. the ghouls ….” — Lovecraft demonstrates his associative chain-of-imagination thinking to Morton, over several pages, January 1931.

Each distant mountain glows with faery grace,
    The flame-lit lakelet laps the level strand;
Lur’d by dim vistas beck’ning out of space,
    We take the Golden Road to Samarcand!

— Lovecraft, some lines of his poetry sent to Morton, November 1929.

“… that elusive, ecstatically mystical impression of exotick giganticism and Dunsanian strangeness and seethingly monstrous vitality which I picked up in 1922, before I knew [the city] too well […] Cyclopean phantom-pinnacles flowering in violet mist, surging vortices of alien life coursing from wonder-hidden springs in Samarcand and Carthage and Babylon and Aegyptus, breathless sunset vistas of weird architecture and unknown landscape glimpsed from bizarrely balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces” — Lovecraft recalling his first impressions of New York City, seen at sunset/dusk in 1922.

” [I nightly heard] … whining monotones on a strange bagpipe which made me dream ghoulish and incredible things of crypts under Bagdad and limitless corridors of Eblis beneath the moon-cursed ruins of Istakhar. I never saw this man, and my privilege to imagine him in any shape I chose lent glamour to his weird pneumatic cacophonies. […] In truth, I never saw with actual sight the majority of my fellow-lodgers [while living in Red Hook]. I only heard them loathesomely­ and sometimes glimpsed faces of sinister decadence in the hall. […] And what scraps of old papers with Arabic lettering did one find about the house! Some­ times, going out at sunset, I would vow to myself that gold minarets glistened against the flaming skyline where the church-towers were!” — Lovecraft, recalling his squalid rooming-house on the edge of Red Hook, New York City.

Lovecraft here as if taking the part of Afrasiab on his voyage down the Oxus, with his unseen fellow lodgers taking the part of the demons… “they must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.”

Weeird Tales

14 Sunday Sep 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraft as character

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In an alternative timeline, Lovecraft not only ‘got the cover’ of Weird Tales, he was the cover. As fantastic tales of his alter-ego Randolph Carter became as popular as those of Seabury Quinn did in our timeline…

SDXL + LoRAs inc. my new Lovecraft character LoRA. I find that SDXL can sometimes generate somewhat reasonable text if placed in inverted commas in the prompt and prompted for a vintage magazine or poster, e.g. “Weird Tales”. Who knew?

HPLinks #54 – Poet of the Abyss, Crypt unearthed, Angell Street, Coq translated, The Spark Devil and more…

12 Friday Sep 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #54.

* The latest The Vermilion reviews a new Italian book whose title translates as H.P Lovecraft: Poet of the abyss (2025). Not on Amazon UK, or even Amazon Italy.

The review is in English but seems to have been auto-translated from the Italian into English. Thus I’ve clarified it in this quote…

… an exhaustive manual [of Lovecraft], full of information of all kinds, suitable for readings of different intensity, and with a narrative that includes biographical details and curious anecdotes, together with an in-depth analysis of the entire work and exploring the literary, philosophical and esoteric connections of its production. The book does not neglect a critical and attentive look at the vast secondary literature …

* I seem to have missed noting a ‘zine release. Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu #115 was published back in summer 2023, and I see it can still be had as a digital ebook. Mostly fiction, but there’s also an interview with Richard A. Lupoff, and an essay comparing “At the Mountains of Madness” with the 1933 novel which was later made as the ‘finding Shangri-la in the mountains’ movie Lost Horizon.

* The HPLHS has announced their new edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street, being the 1961 book of Eddy memories of their knowing Lovecraft in the Providence of the 1920s. The new $65 edition is described as a… “substantially expanded and embellished edition … more than doubling its size” to 174 pages. I should note that some of these supposed memories have been criticized as “fabrications” (Joshi and Schultz, Lovecraft Encyclopedia), and one hopes these will be footnoted as such. But the book’s page has nothing on that point. Indeed, we’re not even told if buyers will actually get any new information about Lovecraft. Nor do we see a contents-page. The new expanded edition is set to ship in September 2025, and is currently pre-ordering.

* New in the Spanish open-access scholarly journal Alambique, two reviews of the recent book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book…. “seeks to fill [a] historiographical gap by exploring the Spanish roots of epic fantasy through a theoretical analysis and an anthology of representative texts.” Review 1 and review 2. Freely available online, and both reviews are in Spanish.

* I see that Maurice Sand’s Conan-like epic fantasy novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867) has been reprinted in paperback in France, by PRNG in 2024. The book…

… reads as one of the first heroic fantasy or even sword-and-sorcery works ever written in modern times. The ‘rooster’ of the title looks and acts in a similar way to Howard’s Conan. Its fictional world is also fully Howardian both for its themes and its style.” (from the journal article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe”).

The new paperback of Le Coq is in French, and scans of the original book are not on Hathi or Archive.org. However, there is now a free English translation PDF on Archive.org.

* The Sprague de Camp Fan blog has a new and lengthy survey of publications related to Robert E. Howard’s early schoolboy writings.

* VoegelinView reviews the new book John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism (2025) and asks why this English author is today “ignored by readers and academics alike?”. Well… he’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I did try to read his A Glastonbury Romance once, having managed to actually find a copy in those pre-Internet days. But I recall he was just so boring that I gave up after a chapter or two, and for £1 passed the then-scarce book on to a colleague who was seeking a copy. The new review does interest though, since it reveals something new to me, that… “his last novels are ‘fantasies’ that can read like a kind of futuristic science-fiction”. SF Encyclopedia notes the relevant titles and some details of contents, remarking that his final works are… “fabulations, some of them unhinged”.

* A new podcast “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett”, a long interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries. Possibly a useful backgrounder for Mythos writers and RPG makers?

* The latest Appendix N Book Club podcast discusses H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of From The Sorcerer’s Scroll a long-ago ‘zine which had the article “The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons” (1978). Last month Grognardia had a post on this same seminal article. It appears to have been one of the very earliest attempts to translate what was then the “Lovecraftian Mythos” into role-playing games (actually it was Lovecraft + Derleth, but few could tell the difference back then).

* Grognardia is also developing a new RPG for Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and now has a public comments and suggestions post on his blog, which welcomes ideas and suggestions.

* The HPLHS has a pre-order page for their The Spark Devil, this being a complete prop-heavy Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure set in Providence in 1935. It… “makes extensive use of real Providence history and locations to create the most authentic setting possible”. Set to ship in October 2025. Also includes audio-props, which play via this device-prop which is included in the boxed-set…

* I see another nice set for luxury tabletop gaming, seemingly this very week. New Call of Cthulhu collector editions… “for Pulp Cthulhu, The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic, and the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep [adventure, in two volumes]”.

* And finally, LongPage is a new dataset of 300 novels with applied… “multi-layered ‘planning traces’ including character archetypes, story arcs, world rules, and scene breakdowns.” It’s free, uses public-domain, and seems useful for training AIs to plot and plan (or even write) novels in a coherent manner. I guess RPG makers may also find a use for this.

— End-quotes —

— Lovecraft on Angell Street —

[On the death of his beloved grandfather in 1904, Lovecraft at age 13] … mother and I were forced to vacate the beautiful estate at 454 Angell Street [built by his grandfather in 1880–81, and then numbered 194] … My home had been my ideal of Paradise and my source of inspiration — but it was to be profaned and altered by other hands. Life from that day has held for me but one ambition — to regain the old place and re­establish its glory — a thing I fear I can never accomplish.”

“… my grandfather transferred all his interests to Providence (where his offices had always been) & erected one of the handsomest residences in the city — to me, the handsomest — my own beloved birthplace! [in Angell Street]. The spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees, & a delightful fountain. Back of the stable is the orchard, whose fruits have delighted so many of my sad (?) childish hours. The place is sold now, & many of the things I have described in the present tense, ought to be described in the past tense. The house has been sold to one purchaser; the stable & orchard to another; & an ugly garage now smells to high heaven where once the crystal waters of the fountain played! Such degeneracy! Why could not the purchaser have kept his car elsewhere, & suffered the ancient fount to sparkle as of yore?”

“I never liked any other colour combination so well as black-and-gold. To my naive and undeveloped aesthetick sense that represents about the apex of dignified beauty — perhaps because that was the scheme in the front hall of my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. […] Ebony and gold is the aesthetick mixture [I like] — although old gold and rose is a great scheme, as the front parlour of my birthplace amply proved. There was an almost Oriental richness in that room, as in the palace of a caliph — I used to read the Arabian Nights there with an especial zest.”

HPLinks #53 – Penumbra, Lovecraft Annual, Dreamlands RPG, del Toro collection for sale, Beowulf vs. Conan, Conan vs Cthulhu, and more…

03 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #53.

* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal has a new issue listed, Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism, No. 6 (Autumn 2025). Among others…

Mario Sanchez Gumiel contributes a profound analysis of the Spanish writer Pompeu Gener, whose work shows analogies with Lovecraft, Machen, and other leading weird writers. John C. Tibbetts supplies a broad overview of the weird work of English writer Saki (H.H. Munro)

* S.T. Joshi’s Blog also announces a new volume of his essays, Aspects of the Weird Tale (2025), featuring among others… “several new essays on Lovecraft [and] a long essay on the weird work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. Available now as a budget Amazon ebook, and on receiving the 10% free sample I also see an essay on the rural/city divide in Dunsany, and that the Lovecraft essays are on Lovecraft’s Egyptian mummies, poetry about Lovecraft, Arthur S. Koki on Lovecraft, “Mountains” (unknown focus), Lovecraft and Weird Art, and Lovecraft in Audio.

* Also on Amazon, the latest Lovecraft Annual No. 19 (2025) is now listed there and appears to be shipping. No sign of its fellow annual journal The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies since 2023, so far as I can find.

* New in English in a Turkish open-access journal, the substantial “Translating Violence and Horror in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos: A Comparative Study of English & Turkish Versions” (2025).

* From Charles University in Prague, a dissertation in English offering a “Literary Comparison of Beowulf and R.E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian” (2024). Freely available online.

* A stop-motion short advert, publicising a new Conan action-figure toy… “features the new Conan figure in battle with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu”. No link here, as Animation Magazine blocks all VPN users in an obnoxious manner.

* My Tolkien Gleanings newsletter is now available at a new URL. Tracking and linking news of Tolkien scholarship, though only occasionally noting items concerning The Silmarillion and the invented languages. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds etc.

* Free and available now, my distillation of Lovecraft for NovelForge AI, the $50 novel-writing software. The packages should work with the trial version of this Windows software, which so far as I know never expires.

* The Tolkien and Fantasy blog has a new post “Correcting the ‘Facts’ about A. Merritt’s Autobiographical Writings”. As you’ll recall, Merritt was admired by Lovecraft and idolized by the early readers of Weird Tales magazine.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the British edition of Astounding magazine. Looks like it’s 1943-1955, and perhaps not a complete run for those years.

* How high will it go? A copy of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters Vol. 1 (1911-1924) in fine condition, on eBay with six days to go.

* A new issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion.

* London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (2025).

* New to me, the forthcoming table-trembler The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026). Setting a new record in jaw-dropping academic book pricing, at £550 ($740), albeit for a brain-eating 1,900 pages. One hopes that the editor has read the recent essay in the Lovecraft Annual, which very persuasively demonstrates that Lovecraft created the modern zombie and states that the master’s standing as “the font of the modern zombie is unchallengeable” (Lovecraft Annual 2020). Lovecraft is, however, not mentioned in the book’s blurb.

* The risk of Californian wildfires, and concerns about his old age, are reportedly leading movie-maker Guillermo del Toro to auction off part of his magnificent collection. The auction is being held soon via Heritage Auctions, and one hopes there will be a fabulous free PDF catalogue. TheoFantastique has the details and links. I’m uncertain if del Toro’s life-size H.P. Lovecraft sculpture will be under the hammer. Possibly not, I would guess.

* And talking of large amounts of vintage pop culture, free at CivitAI is a new generator of Scooby-Doo backgrounds for use with SDXL image-generation models. Spooky old-school 1970s Scooby Doo-style animation backdrops galore, freely re-usable… just add your own prompts.

* Grognardia’s blog reports that he’s been so taken by Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales of late that he’s… “now devoting myself to the development of an Old School Essentials-derived Dreamlands RPG, Dream-Quest.” Not AI, I assume. I would love a well-made text-based Dreamlands adventure as a solo role-play that was run and managed by an AI. With the player untroubled by fussy-dusty stats and rules, which would nevertheless still be whirring away in the background. Nothing like that is currently available, so far as I know.

* And finally, Pickman’s Hidden Atelier is a new YouTube channel that will aim to review only Lovecraftian videogames. And fairly obscure ones, by the look of it — first up is a 1991 Sega Mega Drive title.

— End-quotes —

“I studied Old London intensively years ago, & could ramble guideless around it from Hampstead Heath to the Elephant & Castle!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933. (Mooted in a letter as the basis for an unwritten Lovecraft story starting in Old London and ending in Roman horrors elsewhere).

“In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.” — Lovecraft, opening lines of “The Descendent” (fragment).

“The [post]card from antique Londinium [London] duly came, & filled me with envy at your opportunity to behold civilisation’s capital, if only for a single full day. If I were in Europe, I would devote not less than 2 or 3 weeks to London — & might not get outside of Britain at all. The British Museum card surely reveals one of my (or Klarkash-Ton’s or Sonny Belknap’s) extra-human monsters in disguise — indeed, I am positive that this entity reached Java as a relique of sunken Mu, or of the still more monstrous & fabulous R’lyeh! Thanks!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1932.

The most likely Java deity image in the current British Museum collection, which would also make for a postcard, would be this fine drawing of an elephant-god sculpture…

“Coming early to London, I saw as a Child many of the celebrated Men of King William’s Reign, including the lamented Mr. Dryden, who sat much at the Tables of Will’s Coffee-House. With Mr. Addison and Dr. Swift I later became very well acquainted, and was an even more familiar Friend to Mr. Pope, whom I knew and respected till the Day of his Death.” — Lovecraft uses his own childhood attic encounter with the 18th century wits, in his “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”.

“I share most emphatically your regret at the distance between 278 Grove & 598 Angell, & wish we both lived in Old London, within walking distance of Will’s & of each other’s homes.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, December 1918. “Will’s” coffee-house was a key London gathering place of 18th century wits and poets.

Release: Lovecraft for NovelForge

01 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works, Unnamable

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As promised, I’ve released my free Lovecraft dictionary and assistant. This is a free add-on for installing into the creative-writing software NovelForge AI 3.x. The add-on enables the writer to be guided by words and examples from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, as they write.

The ‘made by one man’ software NovelForge can be had from Medichance, and is for Windows only. Last time I looked the free trial version does not expire and is only very lightly crippled, such as not allowing the creation of a new dictionary and assistant. I have the paid version of the software ($50, one-time purchase), so was able to use it to make these Lovecraft add-ons. Thus, if you’re on Windows then you can install the free trial and enjoy this free Lovecraft add-on in perpetuity.

NovelForge does support your local LLM AIs and also free cloud AIs, but this Lovecraft dictionary (thesaurus) and assistant are not AI. More of a unique ‘half-way house’ towards AI, guiding you toward the tone and style of Lovecraft… but not actually writing it for you.

The assistant add-on may also be useful for scholars, since it can instantly display all of Lovecraft’s sentences which use a word you just typed…

… though it won’t tell you which story they come from.

Download, unzip and then…

1) Place Lovecraft.ast and Lovecraft.jpg in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Documents\NovelForge\Assistants

2) Place Lovecraft.dic and Lovecraft.jpg in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Documents\NovelForge\Dictionaries

Then load NovelForge and use the user interface to load both add-ons.

Sadly NovelForge has no ‘dark mode’, which will be a deal-breaker for many writers. But Windowtop can force that. Not ideal, but it’ll do until NovelForge does ‘dark’ natively.

Lovecraft’s letters, poetry, essays, and ghost-writing have not been ingested. I may in time create dictionaries and assistants for those as well. For instance I have the Morton letters in .TXT format. Those were downloaded from Amazon as a .AZW3 local backup of a purchased Kindle ebook, before they stopped that. But I would first need to find an AI text processor that can identify and auto-remove all the footnotes, since that’s not something I’m going to do by hand.