Monthly Archives: February 2026

HPLinks #75 – ‘Terrible Old Man’ film, a new Lovecraft tarot pack, sanity as a game mechanic, and more…

27 Friday Feb 2026

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HPLinks #75.

* From Italy in English, the “Fragments from Elsewhere: the Weird as a Transmedia Genre” (2025). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available online.

* Pierre Deleage’s blog posts about his new book Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow and Burroughs, noting… “It is a revised, corrected and quite expanded version of my article ‘La transmigration de Robert H. Barlow'”.

* The new open-access book Crossing borders between countries, scholars, and genres: Commemorating the late Kathleen E. Dubs (2025) has two relevant chapters. “Crossing Genres, Crossing Media: The Cthulhu Mythos Through the Ages”, and “Liminal Aspects of the Hero’s Journey in the Major Works of Neil Gaiman” has the comparative sub-section titled ‘From Lovecraft to Gaiman’.

* The Italian Tolkien journal now has a book collection of the best articles, in English translation, as Arda Notebooks: the Best of I Quaderni di Arda. In the new book one can find the acclaimed German scholar Thomas Honegger in English on “Re-enchanting a Dis-enchanted World: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. The publisher Walking Tree has free abstracts for the book’s contents.

* Also from Italy, a film adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” as “Il vecchio terribile”. It premiered a few days ago in Rome, and is now reportedly destined for the film festivals circuit… “The short film The Terrible Old Man, a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous horror novel, premiered last night [24th February 2026] at the Cinema Caravaggio in Rome”.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of The Collected Poems and Letters of Hart Crane (1952)…

I have been greeted so far mostly by his [Lovecraft’s close friend Samuel Loveman] coat tails, so occupied has Sambo been with numerous friends of his here ever since arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her pipingvoiced husband, Howard Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there), kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him, and I think he is making the usual mistake of people visiting NY, of attempting too much, getting prematurely exhausted, and then railing against the place and wanting to get back home.

* Popping out shortly before Christmas 2025, which means I missed noting it here, the podcast The Atlantean Archive: Retro Books & Shows had A Chat with “The Lovecraft Geek”, Dr. Robert M. Price.

* Publishers Weekly reports that sales in U.S. comic-book shops hit a new high in 2025 at $2.2 billion. Said anecdotally to be largely due to the influx of a new paying audience in the form of Generation Z (now ages 14 to 27). I guess many are earning wages now — and thus many Z-ers can walk into their local comic-shop with far more than dad’s pocket-money in their wallets. A further guess would be that many will also have recovered from childhood manga overdoses, and are now discovering the joys of Proper Comics. Theoretically, such demographic and economic changes should also feed into Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related sales, especially as the U.S economy booms.

* In the academic Game Studies book Video Games and Mental Health (2025), the chapter “The Sanity Metre: Madness as a manageable resource”. Sanity as a finite resource… “renders madness operationalisable for a game’s code, has its historical roots in psychiatric discourse and its cultural roots in cosmic horror”. The editors kindly offer the book free, in its Kindle ebook version.

* Also in games, the forthcoming Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth has a free audio phone-app ‘trailer’ from Chaosium…

Our coming board-game Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth takes you on three adventures set in and around [Innsmouth. It is trailed by the new] Miskatonic Tales app (not required to play), which offers immersive audio recordings of the introductions and all paragraphs from the three scenarios. Simply select a scenario and a paragraph number, and the app will read the corresponding passage from the storybook. You can adjust the background music, volume, and playback speed.

* Talking of Innsmouth, Francois Baranger’s fully illustrated edition of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is now pre-ordering, for “release later this year”. If you know the tale well and just want the art, apparently the sumptious large-format artbook is already available in French.

* Up for auction, Gahan Wilson’s original sketch of a stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently… “the inspiration for the original statuette for the World Fantasy Awards”, rather than the other way around?

* The catalogue for the coming auction of The Peter Hansen Collection of Comics, seemingly the largest collection of vintage British comics yet to come to auction. With high resolution images of original artwork/layouts, unwatermarked, and available without registration. Effectively, a free online exhibition. Also includes some early fanzines, comic-related toys and trading-cards. A few British underground issues, in one lot. A few art-posters, such as the Barry Windsor-Smith poster seen below. No newspaper strips, that I noticed, other than a bound collection of U.S. one-page Sunday newspaper strips all from 1945. Here’s my pick…

* Now available, Blood N Thunder 2025 Special Edition magazine. Includes…

Pulp historian and novelist Will Murray tells the complete story behind “The Golden Vulture”, a Shadow novel originally written by Doc Savage scribe Lester Dent in 1932 but shelved for six years until being revised by Walter B. Gibson, chief chronicler of The Shadow’s exploits. [Plus] a comprehensive history of “The Bat, the legendary master criminal who first appeared in a 1920 play subsequently adapted several times to film and TV. Most importantly, The Bat was acknowledged by Bob Kane to have influenced the creation of a certain Caped Crusader still plying his trade in movies and comics.

* And finally, new to me is a Lovecraft Tarot pack from Spain. 78 cards, and to my experienced eye the artwork doesn’t appear to be AI generated. Might also be useful for writers, providing randomised starting-point ideas for a basic plot framework? Seemingly new, and not yet sold-out.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft on the value of pomposity-picking humour and “amusements of a lighter sort”. What he says seems to be relevant to cartooning and comics.

“There is art and sanity in psychological deflation …. One of the most contemptible ostentations of the human primate is a priggish dignity and particularly about non-essentials of form, custom, convention, regularity, and so on. It is this devastating pusillanimity which has created the repulsive beast called Babbitus Americanus, and which has paved the downward path toward standardisation, time-table helotry, and glorified mass-mediocrity. No saviour is more deserving of praise than one who can jolt and kick these cow-like conformers into something like a semblance of vitality, individuality, and well-proportioned perspective — who can air out their stuffy and meaningless primness and precision, and give them at least a pinch of that basic sense of humour, porportion, relativity, and cosmic irony which makes real men as distinguished from grotesque sawdust-stuffed homunculi. All hats off to the lusty deflater!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1930.

“One of the greatest obstacles to be combated during this unsettled era is the mistaken notion that amateur journalism is a non-essential and a luxury, unworthy of attention or support amidst the national stress. The prevalence of this opinion is difficult to account for, since its logic is so feeble. It is universally recognised that in times like these, some form of relaxation is absolutely indispensable if the poise and sanity of the people are to be preserved. Amusements of a lighter sort are patronised with increased frequency, and have risen to the dignity of essentials in the maintenance of the national morale. If, then, the flimsiest of pleasures be accorded the respect and favour of the public, what may we not say for amateur journalism, whose function is not only to entertain and relieve the mind, but to uplift and instruct as well?” — Lovecraft during wartime, in the United Amateur for May 1918.

“… comicality always depends wholly on the system of thought and values held by the perceiver; that, in short, ridiculousness is relative, and conditioned by the truth, inflexibility, or paramountcy of certain common ideas which are absolute to the multitude yet merely virtual to the closer inquirer. Intelligence and education, as they open new fields of risibility, close old ones; so that the laughing-stock of one stage of culture is often the gospel of the next, and vice versa. [Thus] we perceive the difficulty of laying down permanent laws of laughter in an age when all standards are plastic. […] is it not possible that some of the Philistine hyperticklishness at unaccustomed whimsies springs from a lack of that deeper and more pervasive humour which sees in all human life and effort an ironic comedy? Verily, laughter is an art for the discriminating.” — Lovecraft in The Conservative, July 1923.

HPLinks #74 – Lovecraft and Kafka, 1924 in NYC, voice-cloning, Lovecraft at the Miskatonic Library, and more…

22 Sunday Feb 2026

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HPLinks #74.

* The open-access book Tierwerden und Pflanzendenken in der Literatur: Okologische Entgrenzungen von Franz Kafka und H.P. Lovecraft bis heute (September 2025). Being a comparative study exploring the ecological thinking of Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft. In German, but under CC-BY and in .PDF, so auto-translation should be relatively straightforward.

Key chapter titles in translation…

– The Question of Comparability: Kafka and Lovecraft in their times and in relation to each other.
– “The Metamorphosis” and “The Rats in the Walls”: Visions of becoming animal.
– “A Report for an Academy” and “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn”: Becoming animal as becoming human.
– “The Burrow” and “Shadow over Innsmouth”: Rhizomatics and Hybrid Beings.
– “Investigations of a Dog” and “At the Mountains of Madness”.
– Varieties of Ecological Thinking in Kafka and Lovecraft.

* Deep Cuts looks at the letters sent to Weird Tales by Hazel Heald after Lovecraft’s death… “Lovecraft was a gift to the world who can never be replaced — Humanity’s Friend.” (Heald).

* From France, Lovecraft 1924: Love Before Cthulhu is a slick 24 minute film on Lovecraft’s pivotal year. It blends archival footage of NYC, Ken Burns-style slow zooms/pans on photographs, and occasional colorised images. YouTube auto-dubs it to English, for me.

* For sale on eBay, two issues of Barlow’s The Dragon-fly.

* The Grognardia blog considers “H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing”. (Part I) and (Part II).

* In Spanish, Krill magazine examines “La clonazione vocale: Iperrealismo sintetico tra utopia e fragilita del reale” (‘Voice cloning: Synthetic hyperrealism between utopia and the fragility of reality’), through the lens of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Freely available online.

* The Italians have just published a book whose title translates as ‘The Horror at Miskatonic University’. Turns out to be a 48-page comic-book. Not quite long enough to be a BD, but experimentally put into hardback and aimed at Italian bookshops and collectors rather than the flagging news-stands. It appears to offer a self-contained story set at Miskatonic University, but perhaps set in the 1970s or 80s (it opens with a Dr. Nimoy – ‘Spock’ – giving a lecture there), and the review finds that it’s neither an “intellectualistic rereading of Lovecraft […] nor a faithful, masterful adaptation” of Lovecraft. Just a fun romp by the sound of it, and with rather nice b&w artwork…

The story is by Giulio A. Gualtieri, with collaboration from Marco Nucci, two well-known names in Italian comics of the last few decades, with art by Matteo Buzzetti.

* British gamer Boring Dad Gaming has a six-part in-depth play-through review of The Dark Rites of Arkham, a point-and-click detective videogame set in Arkham in 1933. Part one and you can find the rest linked at his YouTube channel. Made in old-school Pixelvision…

The respected Rock Paper Shotgun calls it… “a well-made ode to Lovecraft’s Mythos which will appeal to anyone who loves Call of Cthulhu and ’90s adventure games.” It’s a $15 indie, available now on Steam and Itch.io.

* A new book which may interest British readers, Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995. Published a few days ago, it explores the nooks and crannies of weird and supernatural British TV in its glory-years.

* Marzaat reviews both volumes of A Means to Freedom, the letters of R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

* And finally, the HPLHS Raffle Ticket 2026. Prizes include, among others, both volumes of A Means to Freedom. The raffle prize-pick is on 15th March 2026.

— End-quotes —

“The original Arabic [of The Necronomicon] was lost before Olaus’ time, & the last known Greek copy perished in Salem in 1692. The work was printed in the I5th, 16th, & 17th centuries, but few copies are extant. Wherever existing, it is carefully guarded for the sake of the world’s welfare & sanity. Once a man read through the copy in the library of the Miskatonic University at Arkham — read it through & fled wild-eyed into the hills…” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1927.

“… Mulder’s infamous Ghorl Nigral. I even saw a copy of this once — though I never opened or glanced within it. It was many years ago in Arkham — at the library of the Miskatonic University. I was in a shadowy corner of the great reading-room, and noticed a huge volume in somebody’s hands across the table from me. The reader’s head was completely hidden by the massive tome, but on the book itself I could descry the words “Ghorl Nigral” in an archaic Gothic lettering. What I knew of it made me shudder — and I felt vaguely alarmed when others began glancing at the silent reader and quietly edging out of the room one by one. When I saw that I was wholly alone but for the unspeaking page-turner, my feeling of disquiet became almost overpowering — and I too edged toward the door …. keeping my eyes resolutely away from the reader for some unknown reason or other. Then I saw that the room was growing very dark, though the afternoon was by no means spent. I stumbled over a chair, and gave vent to a wholly involuntary cry — but heard no answering sound. At this point came a horrible glare of lightning and a deafening stroke of thunder, though those outside the building observed no sign of a storm. Attendants came running in, and someone brought a candle after the lights were found out of commission. The man who had been reading was dead, and his face was not pleasant to contemplate. He had a queerly foreign look, and his hair and beard seemed to adhere in unhealthy patches. The book, from which all eyes were sedulously averted, was tightly clasped in the brown, bony hands — and the attendants seemed slow in trying to dislodge it. When at length they did so, they encountered something very singular. For the hands, instead of releasing the book, came irregularly off at the wrists amid a cloud of red dust — whilst the body, pulled forward by the attempt, collapsed suddenly to a powder, leaving only a heap of greenishly mouldering clothes in the chair. Those clothes were later identified as belonging to a man buried 30 years before — whose tomb in Christchurch Cemetery was found to be empty. Never since that day has the Ghorl Nigral been taken from its locked vault in the library basement.” — Lovecraft to Willis Conover, August 1936.

“Candlemas is only five days off, and I am carefully rehearsing the formulae in the Book of Eibon — having borrowed the mediaeval Latin version of Philippus Faber from the library of Miskatonic University. A look of doubtful expectancy seems to have subtly gathered on the stony muzzle of the Eidolon [a carving sent to Lovecraft by Smith], and I am reminded hideously of an elliptical allusion in the original Dusseldorf edition of the Black Book. Everything, of course, depends upon the precise identity of It. Let us hope that the problem will not be solved in too hideous a way!” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, January 1932.

“The aspect of the Eidolon [Smith’s carving] as the mystic Solstice approaches is such as to breed a vague disquiet. There is too much of a suggestion of unaccountable anticipation and satisfaction lurking about Its muzzle, and one cannot be quite sure as to a half-opened eye. I am even now collating the ritual texts in Dee’s Neconomicon and in the Latin copy at Miskatonic University, in order to be safeguarded to the utmost on the Night.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1932.

HPLinks #73 – Long and Loathsome, Joshi annotates The King in Yellow, Winged Death, Reanimator to be filmed, and more…

13 Friday Feb 2026

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HPLinks #73.

* New on Librivox, Ben Tucker unleashes his latest set of audio readings “Unutterable Horrors and Loathsome Entities: Early Frank Belknap Long”. Nineteen good readings of the early tales, all kindly released into the public domain.

* Deep Cuts considers Mara Kirk Hart’s “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” (1993).

* A hardback edition of The King in Yellow, annotated by S.T. Joshi. Apparently pre-ordering now.

* The acclaimed new French translations of Lovecraft are now also available as Amazon Kindle e-books.

* New to me, an Italian website/journal devoted to Poe and news about Poe scholarship, Edgar Allan Poe: Rivista culturale aperiodica su Poe.

* The latest Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature journal is a ‘Mythlore At 50: A Celebration’ (2026) special issue, including a detailed history of this long-running journal of fantasy literature studies and book reviews. The journal mostly carries scholarly articles on Tolkien and his Inklings circle and various near-neighbours, but Lovecraftians will find occasional book reviews of interest — for instance a review of the Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature in 2025.

* The complete 2026 Lineup for this year’s London Lovecraft Festival. Also note the cover in a sidebar, which makes me wonder if there’s to be a print book of this year’s festival’s playscripts/transcripts?

* On YouTube, Horror Babble has a new audio reading of one of Lovecraft’s ghost-written tales, “Winged Death” by H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (1932). In the tale Lovecraft is obviously not taking Heald’s outline too seriously, and he adds an absurb ending, but the tale managed to land in Weird Tales in 1934. Still, if you don’t take it too seriously then it’s entertaining weird hokum, and it allows Lovecraft to imagine an African setting at length. Which shows that he could write about unvisited places if he had to. He had previously placed his “Fishers from Outside” horrors “far, far in the interior” of Africa, somewhere behind the hilltop trading outpost of Great Zimbabwe. In this tale we discover their location is actually 600 miles north of Zimbabwe, in British Uganda…

This jungle is a pestilential place — steaming with miasmal vapours. All the lakes look stagnant. In one spot we came upon a trace of Cyclopean ruins which made even the Gallas run past in a wide circle. They say these megaliths are older than man, and that they used to be a haunt or outpost of ‘The Fishers from Outside’ — whatever that means — and of the evil gods Tsadogwa and Clulu.

* The local Illinois newspaper The Telegraph reports the planned filming of a movie of Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Reanimator”, the serial-shocker he wrote for Home Brew.

This June, cousins Roger and Jeff Lewis will start filming “Herbert West: Reanimator” […] Jeff Lewis joins the Alton [Alton, Illinois] film scene with 30 years of experience in Hollywood, where his makeup work was nominated for six Primetime Emmy awards, and he spent nine years working on “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

* In the latest Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM, “From the pages to the gaming table: Designing a homebrew system to adapt a book series into a tabletop RPG”. Offers useful advice, based on playtesting, for those about to tackle the earliest stages of such a venture.

* And finally, the release of FPHam/Regency-Aghast-27b-GGUF, a free local AI LLM trained only on old texts and knowledge. The AI fancies that it is still in Regency era England (1811-1820). Lovecraft fancied himself… “an old British Colonial ever faithful to His Majesty, King George the Third!” (reigned 1760-1820). Sadly it’s a 27B model, and thus too huge in size for me to run on my PC, even as a GGUF.

— End-quotes —

“… the centuried houses [of Providence] with their fanlights and knockers and railed steps and small-paned windows had a strong and significant effect of some sort on me [as a young boy]. This world, I felt, was a different one from the (Victorian) world of French roofs and plate glass and concrete sidewalks and piazzas and open lawns that I was born into. It was a magic, secret world, and it had a realness beyond that of the home neighbourhood. It had, I knew, been there long before the home neighbourhood existed — and I felt it would still be there after the other had passed away. […] It was familiar —I had always known it — I had seen it before — it was part of me in a sense that no other scene ever was. …. and so I dreamed about it by night and visited it by day whenever I could. I used to have (as I still do) favourite vistas — looking up such and such a street and wondering what lay around the curve at the end. Could I walk into the time of Hogarth and the Revolution, if I followed one of those cryptic ways to its unknown end some evening when the twilight was purple and the yellow lamplight flickered up softly behind ancient fanlights and tiny window-panes? On rainy evenings, when the little old gas lamps (now gone) cast strange reflections on the glistening cobblestones and brick sidewalks, I could almost see the figures of yesterday plodding along …. cloaks, three-cornered hats, queues [white wigs] losing their powder in the rain ….. and I began to dream of myself in those scenes, witnessing tantalising fragments of 18th century daily life that faded too soon into wakefulness.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, 1931.

“Even now it is difficult for me to believe that Marblehead exists, save in some phantasticall dream. It is so contrary to everything usually observable in this age, and so exactly conformed to the habitual fabrick of my nocturnal visions, that my whole visit partook of the aethereal character scarce compatible with reality. […] That miracle is simply this: that at the present moment the Georgian Marblehead of 1770 stands intact and unchanged! I do not exaggerate. It is with calm assurance that I insist, that Gen. Washington could tomorrow ride horseback down the long street namd for him without the least sensation of strangeness. Wires are few and inconspicuous. Tramway rails look like deep ruts. Costumes are not marked in the twilight. And on every hand stretch the endless rows of houses built betwixt 1640 and 1780 — some even with overhanging gables — whilst both to north and south loom hills coverd with crazy streets and alleys that Hogarth might have known and portrayd, had he but crossed the ocean to discover them. It is a dream, a grotesque and unbelievable anachronism, an artists or antiquarians fancy stept out of his brain and fixt to earth for publick inspection. It is the 18th century. There are no modern shops or theatres, and no cinema show that I coud discover. The railway is so remote from the town-square, that its existence is forgotten. The shops have small windows, and the men are very old. Time passes softly and slowly there. I came to Marblehead in the twilight, and gazed long upon its hoary magick. I threaded the tortuous, precipitous streets, some of which an horse can scarce climb, and in which two waggons cannot pass. I talked with old men and revelld in old scenes, and climbd pantingly over the crusted cliffs of snow to the windswept height where cold winds blew over desolate roofs and evil birds hovered over a bleak, deserted, frozen tarn. And atop all was the peak; Old Burying Hill, where the dark headstones clawed up thro the virgin snow like the decayd fingernails of some gigantick corpse.” — from Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner.

“[In Philadelphia the] Georgian publick buildings [are] as any antiquary’s soul cou’d ask for. [Congress Hall etc…] To circumnavigate this splendid colonial array, viewing it from all angles and especially from the square to the south, whence many other colonial buildings may be seen, is to live again in that subtle atmosphere of the urban 18th century, of which so few perfect specimens now survive. The effect is marvellous — elsewhere one may find the spirit of the colonial village and small town, but only here may one grasp to the fullest extent the soul of the colonial city — mature and populous when the third George [III] sate upon our throne. [It is a] city of real American background — an integral and continuous outgrowth of a definite and aristocratick past. What a poise — what a mellowness — what a character! [… And elsewere, for those who seek them out, are] Those mazes of colonial brick alleys, that red and black brickwork, those projecting eaves and corniced gables, those slanting cellar-doors and lateral footscrapers, those iron sidewalk posts, those panell’d double doors and semicircular fanlights, those zigzag brick sidewalks, those ancient needle-like steeples, those “F.A.” house plates, those queer window reflectors — all these urban things, with the glamour of quiet squares and venerable churchyards where the ghost of Dr. Franklin wanders.” — Lovecraft to Morton, June 1926.

HPLinks #72 – Lovecraft festival at the Sorbonne, Barlow monograph, REH’s Haunted Seaports, Metal Hurlant, Lovecraft on ghosts, and more…

06 Friday Feb 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #72.

* H.P. Lovecraft is to be celebrated at the Sorbonne university in France, in March and April 2026. A large programme with a conference, interviews with translators, film screenings, and an exhibition at the Edgar Morin University Library. Also a related… “day in Boulogne with Lovecraft board games and role-playing”.

* The open-access journal Brumal (2025, Vol. 13) has the Spanish article ‘Cosmic horror and the fantastic narratives of H.P. Lovecraft in videogame mechanics’ (my translation). Also in Spanish, a book review of Across the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and Ontological Horror (my translation).

* Deep Cuts considers the memoir Memories of Lovecraft (1969) by Sonia H. Davis & Helen V. Sully.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post brings news of the new monograph Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow, Burroughs (2026). Available now as a budget-priced Kindle ebook or paperback. This…

slender but substantial monograph is one of the most penetrating studies of R.H. Barlow ever written, examining not only his weird fiction but also his anthropological work in Mexico to paint a much fuller portrait of Barlow than has been available elsewhere. Along the way, Deleage examines Barlow’s relations with both his mentor, H.P. Lovecraft, as well as William S. Burroughs, who briefly studied with him in Mexico.

* Death At The Flea Circus is writing a series of Fungi From Yuggoth -inspired sonnets… “S.T. Joshi has accepted my sonnet “Immortal Bird” for number 24 of Spectral Realms magazine.” Spectral Realms No. 24 appears to be shipping now.

* A new Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter, for members. Including the typescript of the letter “To H.P. Lovecraft, ca. August 1930”.

* SpraguedeCampFan has posted “Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard: Additional Books”. This is part three of the post series, and we reach the the more interesting books (from a Lovecraftian perspective). A Guide to REH’s Lovecraftian fiction, which includes the appendix “Horrors from the Deep: Howard’s Stories of Haunted Seaports”. Plus the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy.

* ICV2 report that a mammoth R.E. Howard Art Chronology book-set is planned for 2026…

Troll Lord Games revealed a four volume Robert E. Howard Art Chronology set […] 1,600 pages and 7,000 images chronicling Robert E. Howard’s publication history in the U.S. The book tells the narratives of the artists who adapted Howard’s characters …

* Talking of artwork, I hear that major comics publisher Titan has a new magazine, titled The Savage Sword of Conan: Reforged. It take the best tales from Marvel’s original Savage Sword of Conan b&w magazine and adds careful hand-painted colour. It’s appears that it’s not to be compared to the sort of hideous day-glo colouring we’ve seen in the past, on comics such as Moebius b&w classics. Two issues so far, and another due in February.

I also see that Titan are re-issuing the original The Savage Sword of Conan magazines as budget-priced Kindle editions. They seem to be on a release schedule of about one a week. #14 arrives next week. The lead tale has art by Neal Adams. ‘Nuff said. …

Titan also have a new reprint and ebook of the Shadows Over Innsmouth (1994) Lovecraftian anthology. Good to see that Neil Gaiman hasn’t been excluded from the contents-list. The reprint is set for March 2026.

* Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) No. 18 (new series), April 2026, will be another Lovecraft special.

In this issue, echoing the Lovecraft Special of 1978, you will find the nectar of Lovecraftian comics from the 1970s to the 1990s. Whether among the Americans or the Franco-Belgians, H.P. Lovecraft had a deep and sprawling impact on the creativity of fantasy authors, and Metal has selected for you the best. So dive with us into the universe of the Master of Providence alongside the legendary Moebius, Bilal, Caza, Claveloux, Chaland and all the others!

* From the world of Lovecraft theatre, the board-treaders of the Miskatonic Theatre write from Hamburg, Germany…

After the ‘world’s only horror theater’ was set on fire by unknown perpetrators in March 2025 and burned to the ground, the Miskatonic Theatre endured a turbulent season in exile at Sprechwerk and Haus73 on the north side of the Elbe. [But] it will now reopen its doors in Hamburg in autumn 2026, which with your support will be bigger and better.

* In Spanish, Hijos de Cthulhu blog usefully discovers a ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale tucked away in the English-language anthology War of The Worlds: Global Dispatches (1996, 2021). The book has stories of the Martian invasion encountered elsewhere in the world, as told by historical “celebrity eyewitnesses”. Don Webb’s “To Mars and Providence” tale was set in Providence, and he had the young telescope-peering Lovecraft encountering Martians. Wikipedia still keeps a copy of an old page for the story which summarised the plot, and which the WikiPolice later deleted from the main Wikipedia.

* Talking of anthologies, Dark Worlds Quarterly this week surveys Horror Anthologies of the 1920s…

We tend to take Horror anthologies for granted. […] Back in 1920, not so much. There were ghost story collections [and] 1913’s Ghosts & Goblins from the UK is a Pulp before Pulp collections. Pearson’s, the British publisher, did Uncanny Stories in 1916. […] The stage was set but what was missing was the Pulps.

* And finally, the Ghosts and Goblins (see the mention above) caused me a bit of trouble in its tracking down, but Heritage Auctions saved the day. Published by The World’s Work in London (not ‘The Lord’s Work’, as HA amusingly has it), and the book appears to have been a shilling-shocker issued and promoted by the sensationalist tabloid newspaper The News of the World. Not online.

Update: Not published in 1913. HA have the date wrong.

— End-quotes —

“Miss Fidlar’s remark that war horrors have exhausted the capacity of the world for receiving new horrors may be answered [by saying that] The physical horrors of war, no matter how extreme and unprecedented, hardly have a bearing on the entirely different realm of supernatural terror. Ghosts are still ghosts — the mind can get more thrills from unrealities than from realities.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, 1921.

“To my mind, the sense of the unknown is an authentic & virtually permanent — even though seldom dominant — part of human personality; an element too basic to be destroyed by the modern world’s knowledge that the supernatural does not exist. It is true that we no longer credit the existence of discarnate intelligence & super-physical forces around us, & that consequently the traditional ‘gothick tale’ of spectres and vampires has lost a large part of its power to move our emotions. But in spite of this disillusion there remain two factors largely unaffected — & in one case actually increased — by the change: first, a sense of impatient rebellion against the rigid & ineluctable tyranny of time, space, & natural law — a sense which drives our imaginations to devise all sorts of plausible hypothetical defeats of that tyranny — & second, a burning curiosity concerning the vast reaches of unplumbed and unplumbable cosmic space which press down tantalizingly on all sides of our pitifully tiny sphere of the known.” — Lovecraft to Harold S. Farnese, April 1932.

“the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome […] has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” — Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.