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.”