Monthly Archives: January 2026

Isle of the Ghost Panthers

31 Saturday Jan 2026

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A little late, a 120th Birthday post for the spirit of Robert E. Howard.

“Isle of the Ghost Panthers”.

The salt-stained air of Illmort was thick with a miasma that clung to sea-wracked stone and bone. Ragnar stood on that desolate strand, his great leathern boots sinking firmly down into the sands. He hefted the Axe of the Shining One above his tousled head, its haft worn smooth by generations of his warriors’ hands, its metal crafted of an unyielding steel that now drank in the meager moonlight. The relentless tide seemed a living thing, a monster with a thousand mouths that gurgled and hissed as it slithered up the beach, devouring all before it.

Ragnar recalled the incantation, learned from his grandfather while still a boy. Then the words flowed from him like poison from a fang, each syllable dripping with ancient authority. Slowly, coalescing from the air and sea-spray, the incantation’s ghost panthers took shape before him, phantoms woven from an ancient nightmare and despair, their bodies impossibly sleek and muscular, rippling with an otherworldly energy. Their eyes sprang as if into life, and burned as they turned their fearsome heads to fix on him.

Then, one by one, the panthers slowly lowered their eyes, and seemed to promise him absolute obedience. The beasts were his now, so the incantation said, extensions of his own will while it held. They would not fail him, for he was Ragnar of the Iron Hand and the Shattered Chains and his will was strong.

As the black tide surged in with terrifying speed, its roaring voice became a stark counterpoint to the sighing winds. His goal was ahead, across the water — the Tower of the Invisible Moon, a dark and sea-worn spike carved not from sea-basalt but from solidified nightmare. Perched atop it, sometimes lost in swirling fog and shadow, waited whatever eldritch thing that had called him to fulfill his ancestral destiny.

With a mingled roar of human and beasts that echoed across the sea-waste, Ragnar and his gliding ghost-beasts raced toward a narrow raised causeway of black rock. The tide was rapidly flooding it. The sinews in the phantom limbs strained with impossible speed, but Ragnar’s mighty limbs outpaced them. Through the flooding waves they surged into the dark, toward the promise that lay ahead — the pinnacle where his axe might finally meet its destined purpose.

HPLinks #71 – Ramsey Campbell evening, planning Arkham, REH’s 120th, Conan and Lovecraft, Lovecraft and Ponape, and more…

29 Thursday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #71.

* At the city of York Literature Festival in northern England, “An Evening with Ramsey Campbell” on 21st March 2026. Booking now.

* New on Substack, the long essay “The Planner’s Guide to Arkham: H.P. Lovecraft’s Fictional City Through the Lens of Urban Development”. “How Street Patterns, Zoning, and Colonial Architecture Shape Horror in Lovecraft’s New England”. Readers get a substantial free chunk, and then the $ paywall slams down.

* Dancing Light of Grace finds a certain irony in the aftermath of the amateur journalism interaction between H.P. Lovecraft and Walter John Held.

* Released back in last summer, and sounding like it’s worth a mention here, The Country Under Heaven is a serious novel billed as “Louis L’Amour meets H.P. Lovecraft”. A novel that’s a “thrilling western epic”, and thus not to be confused with a yuk-yuk spoof mashup. Despite the ‘cowboy meets tentacles’ cover.

* Quite a bit of R.E. Howard this week, for R.E. Howard’s 120th birthday. A number of posts have marked the occasion. Such as Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance remembering “The Last Days of Robert E. Howard”, and DMR offering “Robert E. Howard: In Praise of His Nativity”.

* In the latest Spanish journal Barataria, the article “Relectura de Conan el Barbaro desde las coordenadas de la era postheroica”. In Spanish, freely available in open-access and Creative Commons. Conan is discussed…

as a response to the cosmicism of H.P. Lovecraft and the trope of the contemporary antihero. Using hermeneutic-dialectics, we examine how Howard incorporates elements of cosmic horror, but offers an alternative in the figure of Conan, who faces chaos and cosmic forces with violence and pragmatism. While Lovecraftian characters succumb to the indifference of the universe, Conan acts with existential vitality, giving meaning to life through radical freedom and individual choice, even in a fictional universe lacking ultimate purpose. It is concluded that, although they share a pessimistic worldview, the narrative leitmotif differs radically: Lovecraft emphasizes ‘madness’ and human insignificance in the face of the primal cosmos, while Howard proposes a dark antiheroic trope with gray morality that offers resistance, resilience and brutality in the face of ineffable gods.

* A new English article in the French journal Transatlantica, “‘The Ultimate Barbarian’: Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and the Pulp Fantasy of Prehistory”. Focusses on the later iconic Frazetta paintings of Conan. Illustrated and freely available in open-access.

* Also from France, a new book of R.E. Howard’s poems. The blurb translated to English…

Always Comes Evening: The Poetic Art of Robert E. Howard, Creator of Conan the Barbarian. On 22nd January 2026, we released the first complete bilingual edition of the poems of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) […] his poems are translated by Francois Truchaud and Patrice Louinet. [The book has a] bold design, enhanced by the illustrations of Antoine Leisure.

* SpraguedeCampFan has part two of his review of Fred Blosser’s work on Robert E. Howard.

* PulpFest calls for contributions to the 2026 edition of the event’s Pulpster publication.

* The newly released Comics Research Bibliography 2025 & Addenda combined e-book edition (30th Anniversary Edition). Officially free on Archive.org.

* A newly discovered open journal on ‘marvelous tales’ such as fairy tales and fantastical adventures. The French scholarly journal Feeries: Etudes sur le conte merveilleux, XVIIe-XIXe siecle… “is dedicated to tales of the marvelous, mainly in French, from the 17th to the 19th century”. Freely available online in open-access, with issues back to 2004.

* Grognardia digs up “The Family Tree of the Gods”, being… “a transcript of part of a letter sent by CAS [C.A. Smith] to Robert H. Barlow”.

* Deep Cuts looks at the Universal horror movies Lovecraft saw and his comments on them.

* More Lovecraftian theatre. A search snippet alerted me to this Wisconsin event… “Two Crows Theatre explores the icy tundra in “Before the Mountains of Madness”, running through Feb. 1 at Slowpoke Lounge & Cabaret in Spring Green.” The Two Crows website has a few more details.

* And finally, The Armchair Traveller visits the very remote island archipelago of Nan Madol, which to Lovecraft was ‘Nan-Matal’ and ‘Ponape’. The Traveller mistakenly has it that the place was the inspiration for R’lyeh. Though the location was an early suggestion in the article “Expedition to R’lyeh” (1972). Also, A. Merritt’s seminal The Moon Pool (1918) is set on and around Ponape, and the door in that book has been noted as resembling the one in R’lyeh. We can be rather more sure that the island instead inspired the deep back-story for “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”…

“Obed Marsh in Polynesia discovers temple of evil knowledge & learns of undersea people & their ways. Gets jewellery from priests. Learns hideous price — forgotten history of Ponape.” — Lovecraft’s outline of the tale, from his ‘Notes to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”‘.

From a vintage Australian card-set.

— End-quotes —

“The vanished Pacific world symbolised by Ponape & Easter Island has always been of the greastest fascination to me” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“As for sunken continents — the one real probability is that a great deal of land once existed in the Pacific which exists no longer (whether a large continuous area or separate islands we can’t say), & that it supported a much more advanced culture (as witness the Easter Island images & the cyclopean masonry on Ponape & Nan-Matal) than any of the Polynesian groups now possess.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, March 1933.

“The Cyclopean ruins on Ponape & Nan-Matal, & the titanick eikons of Easter Island, are probably reliques of a culture which was archipelogick rather than continental, but which may have been instrumental in transmitting certain art forms & folkways from Indo-China to Central America in prehistorick times”. — Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933.

“I appreciate very strongly the force of the dramatic contrast formed by those occasional contacts of the classical & northern worlds which history records […] I think of [Ancient] Roman navigators in strange & distant parts [such as in] lost [i.e. sunken beneath naturally rising seas] Polynesian lands of which there remain today only the vine-grown megaliths of Ponape & the cryptic eidola of Easter Island” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., December 1936.

“[all over the world]… there are hellish stony secrets filtering down from the forgotten elder world — think of the Eye of Tsathoggua, hinted at in the Livre d’Eibon, & of the carved primal monstrosity in lavender pyrojadeite caught in a Kanaka fisherman’s net off the coast of Ponape!” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1934.

“Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic of an elder, forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the institution’s seclusion and quiet policy prevented it from becoming a popular sensation […] Theories of a bygone Pacific civilisation, of which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and Nan-Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students, and learned journals carried varied and often conflicting speculations on a possible former continent whose peaks survive as the myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. The diversity in dates assigned to the hypothetical vanished culture — or continent — was at once bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisingly relevant allusions were found in certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.” — Lovecraft ghostwriting for Hazel Heald, “Out of the Aeons” (1933).

HPLinks #70 – full PhD, reviews, Spectral Realms, CAS conference,

22 Thursday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #70.

* The PhD thesis Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025) is now available for full download. Previously there was only a long abstract.

* Hippocampus Press has newly listed Spectral Realms No. 24. Full of new poems, plus the new S.T. Joshi article “Clark Ashton Smith: Before The Star-Treader”.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post has his report on the recent Clark Ashton Smith conference…

All in all, the conference was a rousing success. The panels were videotaped, and I imagine they will be uploaded onto YouTube or some other such platform in due course of time. We hope to reprise the event — and make it span two days rather than just one — in two years’ time.

* The contents list of the new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida.

* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews the book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, and also usefully describes the appendices.

* SpraguedeCampFan reviews Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard, in part one of a series of posts.

* The Robert E. Howard Days organisers note “Only Five Months until Howard Days!”.

* More scans of the old fanzine Dagon have arrived on Archive.org. Mostly gaming and Mythos tales, but note that Dagon No. 15 (1986) has Robert M. Price on “Mythos Names and How to Say Them”.

* The Bayou Film Festival (Lafayette, USA) will premiere Dreams of a Dead God on 24th January 2026. The new 36-minute movie tells of the events in Louisiana after the events of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Part one-shack drama and part ‘found-footage’, it seems.

* The Humble Bundle website has a Chaosium RPG bundle, with proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund. Valid for the next two weeks. Talking of wildlife, note the the full bundle also includes the books Petersen’s Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors and Malleus Monstrorum Vol. 1 Monsters of the Mythos.

* An announcement for Lovecraftian Days 2026, set for the city of Prague from 9th-16th April 2026. This will be a…

week-long celebration dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror legacy and its influence on gaming. The festival will bring together dozens of publishers and developers worldwide for a week of new game announcements and releases, exclusive demos and early access opportunities, special discounts, developer interviews, and community events.

* And finally, “a bizarre [theme-park] attraction very much inspired by the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. It was located in a park called Mirapolis”. That was the first theme-park in France and it was based around attractions inspired by imaginative literature. Parts of the Lovecraft section’s mechanicals were later re-used in a U.S. dinosaur attraction in 1994. On YouTube, theme park historian Poseidon Entertainment goes in search of “The Lost Lovecraftian Horror Ride”.

— End-quotes —

“… he [Lovecraft] tried all the soporific stunts at Revere” [… we went] “to Revere Beach, where Mr. Lovecraft dropped eighty-five feet and was all over.” (Mrs. Miniter, recalling Lovecraft on a roller coaster / water-drop ride at the Boston Revere Beach, in Lovecraft Remembered, page 83).

“Lovecraft and Albert Sandusky did the eighty-five-foot-drop switchback three times in succession [at Revere] and complained bitterly of the tameness of it all […] Picture, if you will, the philosophical form of one Henry Padget-Lowe, Edward Softly, Theobald Jr., H.P.L. [i.e. Lovecraft and his psuedonyms], popping out and coming bouncing toward us. It was a screaming scream.” — George Houtain, recalling the same day at Revere Beach.

As well as riding all the rides, according to Randy Everts Lovecraft also had his palm read by a palmist and answered a ‘psychological questionnaire’ in the sideshows at Revere.

He also passed by Revere Beach on his way to Salem a little later, on a more sedate set of rails…

“I set out for my favourite antique Salem region. This time I went on the electrick coaches [electric tram-cars], twice having to change (at Revere Beach and at Lynn) before attaining Salem. ‘Tis a ride of extream attractiveness, and must have form’d a diversion of prime magnitude in the days when open cars ran direct from Boston to Salem. But all things decay, and nothing more so than the rural tramways of New-England.” — Lovecraft to Galpin and Long, 1st May 1923.

HPLinks #69 – Derleth at the Weird Tales offices, CAS conference report, Lovecraft’s personal museum, and more

14 Wednesday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #69.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog for 31st December 2025 has a long free extract from the newly-published August Derleth Sac Prairie Journal for 1939. A diary in which we get vivid glimpses of… “Derleth’s preparation of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others” and an account of a visit to the Weird Tales offices under Farnsworth Wright.

* The Catholic subscription-only podcast Reconquest (Episode 498) this week considers “Lovecraft’s Lore and Catholicity: A Stark Contrast”.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has it that there’s a Truth Seeker “podcast on Lovecraft and religion” on Vimeo. Yes, Vimeo still exists it seems. Sadly I couldn’t get past Vimeo’s blocker-bot, but perhaps you can.

* From Mexico in Spanish, in the latest edition of the open-access journal Revista de Filosofia, “Los cuentos del gusano. Verdad, evolucion y antinatalismo en la ficcion de lo extrano de H.P. Lovecraft y Thomas Ligotti” (‘Truth, evolution and antinatalism in the strange fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti’). Freely available online, and these days easily auto-translated from the PDF.

* There’s a new £140(!) academic book in the Palgrave Gothic series, Uncanny Doubles: Doppelgangers, Twins, Clones and the Gothic (2026). One of the chapters is “Lovecraftian Dualities and Nonhuman Bodies: The Case of the Whateley Twins in “The Dunwich Horror”.

* Kalimac’s Corner blog reports from the recent U.S. conference on Clark Ashton Smith.

* New on Archive.org, an early work-in-progress PDF of Clark Ashton Smith In Early Fiction Magazines, with covers where possible.

* Deep Cuts considers “Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner and “A Glimpse of H.P.L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana. The latter post also digs up the drawings by…

“Betty Wells Halladay from [Lovecraft’s shelf collection of] objects [, as later] owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library. Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945”

* The same drawings are also new on Archive.org, found in good scans of the booklet of memoirs Rhode Island On Lovecraft (1945) (first and second edition).

* The new documentary film Lovecraft in Florida (no relation to the new book, it seems) is to have its world premiere at the Pensacon convention (Pensacola, Florida) in February 2026.

* New Pulp Tales has a new interview with author Ramsey Campbell. The short text-only interview is… “the first in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month”.

* SFcrowsnest reviews the magazine Cryptology #4 (July 2025) and notes that…

“Writer Will Murray’s second part of his look at Charlton horror comics is a demonstration of creators being given freedom to do what they liked because the company couldn’t care less – as long as their printing presses could be kept running continually. It also allowed new talent to learn their craft before moving onto the more profitable companies.”

* TDT podcast blog has a quick review in Spanish of the new Spanish book Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft: La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1 (‘We will always have Lovecraft: The influence of his cosmic horror on popular culture. Vol. 1.’). I also found what looks like a video from the book’s author at a university repository, talking about the new book in Spanish.

* The major new biography The Buried Man: A Life of H. Rider Haggard (2025).

* Les Heliocrates podcast examines the broad themes of Lovecraft & R.E. Howard: a correspondence beyond its time. In French, but YouTube autodubs it into English. Skip to three minutes in, to get to the start of talking about the letters.

* A new print magazine, RevERBerate: A Magazine of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The third issue moves to the print format, and apparently includes a survey of… “the early African explorers whose feats influenced Burroughs’ writing”.

* E. Hoffmann Price’s “Satan’s Garden” is a new free public-domain audiobook on LibriVox. 158 minutes.

* From Poland, the undergraduate final dissertation, Arabowie oczami Ameryki. Jak ukazywano swiat arabski w amerykaaskich magazynach pulpowych dwudziestego wieku (2025) (‘Arabs through the eyes of America: How the arab world was portrayed in American pulp magazines of the twentieth century’). Not online, but there is a cogent English abstract. Looks like the author takes a balanced view as a historian, and I’m guessing that (if an editor asked) it might become a trimmed English translation in a pulp history ‘zine?

* Everything you need to know about Selling at PulpFest 2026.

* And finally, Francois Baranger is lining up further editions of his richly illustrated large-format Lovecraft books. His “The Haunter of the Dark” will be hovering over the bookshops in the late autumn of 2026 in French, while his “Shadow over Innsmouth” is apparently due in English later in 2026.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft was fond of small sculpture and bas-relief tiles, and at the end of his life the shelves of his small bedroom area was adorned with gifts of small figurative sculptures made by Robert Barlow, C.A. Smith, ancient artefacts given to him by Loveman, and curious items picked up on his travels.

“My generous host [Loveman, in New York City] presented me with two fine museum objects (don’t get envious, O Fellow-Curator! [i.e. Morton]) — to wit, a prehistorick stone eikon from Mexico, and an African flint implement, with primitively graven ivory handle” — Lovecraft to Morton in January 1933, Selected Letters IV.

“I saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s […] Loveman quite overwhelmed me by giving me several objects for my collection of antiquities — a real Egyptian ushabti (small funerary statuette) 5000 years old, a Mayan stone idol of almost equal antiquity, & a carved wooden monkey from the East Indian island of Bali.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, January 1934.

“As for my newly-acquired Bird of Space … he looks something like this — standing about a foot tall. He is carved out of a piece of horn — I don’t know of what animal, though the colour is black — & highly polished & lacquered on the exterior. Wings & feathers — as well as eyes — are suggested through some very delicate engraving. The posture of the bird — as if looking into the sky preparatory to a hop-off for unknown trans-galactic reaches — combined with its generally weird aspect to suggest the title Bird of Space. […] Loveman was amazingly generous to give me this object. I had admired it for years in his home, but never thought of hinting for it. On the last night of my visit we fell to talking about it, & as I left he pressed it into my hands as a final thunderbolt surprise. That’s just like him! I’ve put the Bird on the top of a new low bookcase in company with a Japanese idol & a Kim Ling vase. Some time I mean to take a photograph of this & other objects in my ‘museum’ — and when I do I’ll send you prints. I have an Egyptian ushabti, Mayan images, & other odd & curious things …” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.