HPLinks #76.
* From Spain, a new illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest, though here titled as En Busca de la Ciudad del Sol Poniente (trans: ‘In Search of The Sunset City’).
published by Alianza Editorial in its Singular Books Collection (LS). Translation by Francisco Torres Oliver, and illustrations by Gonzalo Gruber. A hardcover with 216 pages.
Finding the publisher’s page for the book also reveals it’s available from them in paperback and ePub. Turns out it’s even on on Amazon UK right now as a £13 Kindle ebook with free sample. The publisher’s website also has details of the artist…
Gonzalo Gruber, graduate in fine arts, forest firefighter, and tireless draftsman. Always immersed in impossible projects that combine his passion for art and nature. Like “Ear Ashes”, his elusive graphic novel/essay which now has more than 300 illustrations and is always in progress. In 2026 he immersed himself in the unique dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft, illustrating Dream-Quest for Alianza Editorial.
* The Pulp Super-Fan has a useful and informative review of H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend (2024).
* The Independent Horror Society offers a short review of the recent London Lovecraft Festival.
* The Portland 30th H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, now successfully Kickstarted and set for mid September 2026.
* ‘Technologies of the Fantastic’, an online conference set for 13th-15th May 2026. The title seems somewhat misleading, since the organisers say they intend to focus on “the technologies of fantasy” in particular. Such as… “carefully constructed runes and magical glyphs that operate as locks and keys; in the textile metaphors of spell weaving; in the taxonomy of the naming [of natural elemental forces]”. Registration is not yet open, but it will be via Eventbrite.
* Guest Posts at Wormwoodiana, for “The Centenary of Amazing Stories” pulp magazine, part one and part two.
* Deep Cuts considers the Lovecraft recollections of his friend Mrs Miniter, which were preserved in various amateur journalism publications of the 1920s. In giving a talk to the amateurs, she wrote that Lovecraft delivered with a voice having a… “staccato utterance and an air of temporarily abandoning Greek for this time only”.
* New to me, the historical survey book The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (2008), from Yale University Press. No mention of Lovecraft, it seems, but the early chapters have plenty of cultural context, re: Lovecraft’s times and NYC.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog post notes that his Mythos fiction survey book The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos has appeared in Russian translation.
* New on Archive.org, a run of the 1970s Cartoonist PROfiles magazine. Cartoonist PROfiles #30 (1976) has a previously unpublished Dunsany comic-book adaptation introduced thus…
Back in 1966, Russ Jones, an advocate of more sophisticated and more ambitious comic book continuity formats, put together a Pyramid paperback entitled Christopher Lee’s Treasury of Terror. Classic stories by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Bram Stoker were robustly аnd intelligently illustrated by veteran comic-book artists, two or three panels to a page, sideways. Jones’ initial “great picture stories of supernatural horror” compendium should have merited a second edition: Jones planned a follow-up, and though adaptations and finished illustrations were assigned and produced, they never saw the black of the press.
The unpublished Dunsany here was from the planned second book. Turns out the ‘Lovecraft’ item in the first book was “Wentworth’s Day [1957] by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth”, hardly a “classic”.
And in Cartoonist PROfiles #24 (1974), an illustrated Tom Sutton interview with a fabulous 1974 Charlton cover in b&w. The cover as published was rather badly coloured.
* At Substack, The Obelisk reviews Bloch’s Strange Eons…
Strange Eons is nowhere near Bloch’s best work. In fact, one has to have a strong fondness for cheese to merely enjoy this paean to Lovecraft’s universe. Pretty much every twist in the narrative is followed by digressions on the greatness of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. That’s all well and good, but I can understand the criticisms of Strange Eons, especially in regard to its adolescent-esque prose. Bloch almost seems to be writing for a teenage audience here [and there are a vast] number of Easter eggs buried throughout. […] Ultimately, Strange Eons is best enjoyed as a kind of love letter to an old friend.
No free audiobook, it seems.
* William Emmons Books has the book review “Elak! Out From The Shadow Of Conan!”. This being a review of Henry Kuttner’s novelette Thunder in the Dawn, published in two issues of Weird Tales, 1938. The long review has plot spoilers. Thunder was written for a pulp audience used to a fast-paced story, yet as the review observes…
this novella starts to cross the bridge from sword and sorcery toward epic fantasy [and the hero’s quest] is at least creeping towards epic fantasy.
I see there’s a free and well-read audiobook of it on YouTube, running to 140 minutes. Long, but the latest version of the YoutubeDownloader freeware can handle it.
* Talking of freeware, those seeking to restore old fandom tape-recordings (interviews, convention panel discussions etc) may like to know of the new LavaSR v2. State-of-the-art superfast automatic audio-restoration, via a locally-installed AI model. Free, as is all local desktop AI (if you have the graphics-card to run it, entry-level being an Nvidia 3060 12Gb card).
* And finally, U.S. Library of Congress archivists have discovered a lost 19th century film by Melies in some rusting old film cans. They realised…
we were looking at ‘Gugusse and the Automaton’ a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George Melies […] made around 1897, [which] was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century.
— End-quotes —
“I once owned an Edison machine of the primitive type, with recorder and blanks; and I made many vocal records in imitation of the renowned vocalists of the wax cylinder. My colleagues would smile to hear some of the plaintive tenor solos which I perpetrated in the days of my youth!! But sad to say, I gave the old machine away about a year ago to a deserving and not too musical youth who occasionally performs useful labour about the place. I wish now that I had retained it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917.
“Something over a decade ago I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results — mothers are not always unbiased critics — but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive, ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack [famous Irish principal tenor]. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1918.
“It took the bizarre & nondescript tonal & rhythmical hashes of post-war jazz to get me disgusted with popular ballads — & even now I relish the old-time [pre-jazz] inanities when they are revived on the radio …. though this may be merely because they recall the lost illusions & optimisms of the youthful period when I first knew & ululated them. […] with a gang of fellows whistling or howling the tin pan ditties of the period with overt & genuine gusto, as Grandpa must confess to having done in the lost golden days of ’06 & thereabouts!” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, February 1934.