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.