Monthly Archives: April 2026

HPLinks #82 – review of the Smith letters, Derleth re-written, German Lovecraft comics, Lovecraft’s birds, and more…

24 Friday Apr 2026

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HPLinks #82.

* Sprague de Camp Fan reviews the two-volume Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

* The latest Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature is now freely available online. Mostly Tolkien and his circle/era, but note also the book reviews for…

   – William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark.
   – Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature.
   – Raven and Crow: The Mythology, Art and Science of Our Favorite Black Birds.

* In Space: A Student Journal for Public Audiences (University of Alabama), “On Lovecraft and The End”. The idea of cosmic indifference, it is suggested…

frees us to define our own values of what is important and what is not. It examines suffering, not as some divine trial, but as a shared human experience that connects us.

* New on Amazon, Tales of the Derleth Mythos (April 2026), seemingly an anthology newly collected by Robert M. Price. A collection of writers responding to, and in two cases freely re-writing, Derleth’s post-Lovecraft Mythos tales…

Two stories presume to improve on a pair of Derleth’s own tales. “The Round Tower” is both a compliment on and a criticism of “The Lurker at the Threshold”. The trouble is that the third part of Lurker ‘jumps the tracks’ laid down by the preceding two. “The Round Tower” attempt to set things right with a new substitute part three. “Footsteps Far Below” reproduces most of Derleth’s “The Return of Hastur”, but incorporates revisions which were suggested by Clark Ashton Smith but ignored by Derleth.

* Dark Worlds digs up “More Early Plant Monsters” from Victorian and Edwardian fiction.

* New at LibriVox, a public domain reading of “Marooned in Andromeda” by Clark Ashton Smith.

* Due in September 2026, a third edition of Wiley’s table-trembling survey volume American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft.

* The new Eurocomics BD Die Katzen von Ulthar und weitere Geschichten offers four Lovecraft tales, adapted for comics by Giuseppe Congendo and Antonio Montano.

The tales adapted are “The Terrible Old Man”, “The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Hound” and “The Outsider”. The cover appeals, but the German review at Warp Core (here translated) is not encouraging…

It becomes clear from the very beginning that this book is anything but easy to read and digest. The artwork, is anything but standard and indeed the illustrations are extreme. Extremely minimalist, extremely stylized, and extremely abstract. The drawings are limited to two colours per page, with speech bubbles adding a third. At times, it’s hard to know what to make of what you’re looking at. The narratives themselves are advanced almost exclusively through dialogue.

* New on Archive.org, the fanzine Infinity #2 (1973). A Berni Wrightson special-issue, but it also has a Frazetta interview.

* Also new on Archive.org, Xero #10 (1963). Has a useful long survey of Sax Rhomer’s output, followed by a Rhomer bibliography to circa 1962.

* The latest Journal of Inklings Studies has a book review of Phantastes: A Graphic Novel Adapted from George MacDonald’s Classic. The issue’s reviews are freely available online.

* Talking of comics, the UK’s 2000 A.D. comics magazine has a new comic-book take on Lovecraft’s pigeons (you’ll recall his Yuggoth sonnet on “The Pigeon-Flyers” of Hell’s Kitchen, NYC)… Lovecraftian pigeon monster.

* The quality of book covers matter to half of your potential Generation Z readers, it appears. A new UK survey from the reputable YouGov survey agency, using a somewhat reliable methodology which surveyed 2,097 UK book-buying adults, in March 2026. They… “found that 49% of 18-24 year-olds consider a book’s cover an important factor when buying, compared to just 27% of over-55s.” At a time when many people’s disposable income is being very significantly reduced, I’d suggest that having a quality cover may tip the balance towards success. There are many options for the self-publisher: a young designer/typographer who wants to burnish their portfolio; a small commission via DeviantArt; public domain images; and even AI generation if one knows what one’s doing with it and can combine it with Photoshop skills.

* Possibly of use for writers, the unique free offline utility Paragraph Tripler / Paragraph Expander. Paste in your text, and get all paragraphs tripled. So you can potentially see three somewhat different versions at a time, and then pick the best. Or keep track of first / second / final draft, at the paragraph level.

* And finally, an amusing guide to installing H.P. Lovecraft Air Conditioning. One of the nicest combinations of AI writing and niche marketing I’ve yet come across…

Color Palette: Deep blues, charcoal grays, and muted emeralds mirror the night ocean and shadowed chapters of Lovecraft’s fiction. Neutral walls allow accents to pop and prevent the space from feeling oppressive.

Textural Layers: Stone veneer, weathered wood, and aged metals resemble ancient structures like the fictional R’lyeh or the forgotten libraries described by Lovecraft. Textures influence perceived room temperature and comfort.

Ambient Lighting: Low-intensity LEDs, programmable strips, and candles with flicker can mimic the eerie glow of otherworldly luminance. Lighting should be controllable to maintain comfort while preserving mood.

Scent And Sound: Subtle sea-air aromas or resinous scents and a curated soundscape of distant surf, creaking timbers, and whispered chorales enhance immersion without overwhelming the senses.

Furnishings And Symbolism: Classic leather seating, vintage shelving, and arcane-looking artifacts evoke Lovecraft’s era while keeping seating comfort and airflow top priorities.

— End-quotes —

“I recall how he [Everett McNeil] shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination — Baudelairian Satanism and cosmic terror-twisted, fantastic Nordic faces leering and grimacing beside night-lapping beacon-fires set to signal unholy planets — death brooding and gibbering in crypts and oozing out of the windows and cracks of unending bulging brick walls — sinister pigeon-breeders on filth-choked roofs sending birds of space out into black unknown gulfs with unrepeatable messages to the obscene, amorphous serpent-gods thereof.” — Lovecraft to Morton, December 1929, recalling visiting Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. Unlike Red Hook, the roofs in Hell’s Kitchen were accessible and thus used as youth-gang headquarters, where pigeon breeding in rooftop coops was rife. The birds aided in gambling, crime communications, and stealing.

“Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafeningly above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which human priests do not often give. […] Then [he] turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to house the archaic father of all the rumoured shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the curious. […] the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it being indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of shantaks in the king’s dome is fed in the dark).” — Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

“I saw the ruinous, deserted old Randolph Beebe house where the whippoorwills cluster abnormally, and learned that these birds are feared by the rustics as evil psychopomps. It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves. If the soul eludes them, they disperse in quiet disappointment; but sometimes they set up a chorused clamour of excited, triumphant chattering which makes the watchers turn pale and mutter — with that air of hushed, awestruck portentousness which only a backwoods Yankee can assume — “They got ’im!” […] I saw the haunted pasture bars in the spectral dusk, and one evening was thrilled and amazed by a monstrous saraband of fireflies over marsh and meadow. It was as if some strange, sinister constellation had taken on an uncanny life and descended to hang low above the lush grasses. And one day Mrs. Miniter shewed me a deep, mute ravine beyond the Randolph Beebe house, along whose far-off wooded floor an unseen stream trickles in eternal shadow. Here, I am told, the whippoorwills gather on certain nights for no good purpose.” — Lovecraft visits Wilbraham, scene of “The Dunwich Horror”, July 1928.

“Whippoorwills? I’ll say we have ’em down here! Exotic ones too with a liquid rolling note apparently more complex than that their northern kinsfolk … I first heard them in the mystical dawn outside my window, and half imagined that they were voices calling across the ultimate void from Beyond.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, from Dunedin, Florida, June 1931.

HPLinks #81 – Lovecraft and the posthuman, Lovecraft and geology, a century of Cthulhu, letter from Red Hook, and more…

17 Friday Apr 2026

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HPLinks #81.

* A new £150 academic book from Brill / Walter de Gruyter, H.P. Lovecraft and Posthumanism (2026). No sign of it yet on Amazon UK, but the ebook version is apparently published. Here are the contents…

* This week a geodynamics scientist looks closely at the geology in “At The Mountains of Madness”. Lovecraft’s…

geology is not decoration — it is the engine of the plot. The story advances through stratigraphy, fossils, field observations, and the slow realization that rocks are not simply background scenery, but records of worlds vastly older than humanity. In that sense, the horror is profoundly geological: it emerges from time, burial, preservation, and the idea that the Earth has existed far longer than we would like. From a geological perspective, one of Lovecraft’s sharpest intuitions was to present Antarctica as (geo)dynamic rather than static […] Lovecraft understood, instinctively, that the rock record is unsettling. A cliff is never just a cliff; it is a stack of vanished environments. A fossil is never just a shape in stone; it is evidence that the world used to be structured differently.

* HorrorBabble has a free six-hour audio reading of The Complete Hyperborean Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith: Audiovisual Edition on YouTube.

* The REH Foundation Press has issued a special fundraiser book for the Howard house repairs, First Passage: Early Drafts of Beloved Yarns (2026).

* Now officially free and online, the four-volume Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes (2017).

* Forthcoming from the University of Wales Press, Coasts and the Gothic (2027), including a chapter on “Weird Tales of the China Coast”…

The weird tales of the treaty ports and coastal waters of China, written in the early years of the twentieth century, provide an evocative and understudied examination of life in the harbours and coasting vessels of […] urban port cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yangtai.

* S.T. Joshi has issued a new edited collection of lesser-known vintage horror tales, One of Cleopatra’s Nights: Tales and Poems of Egyptian Horror (2026). Available as a budget ebook, and it also includes some modern horror poems on the topic of Ancient Egypt.

* New from Italy, an Italian-language book Il secolo di Cthulhu: Omaggio misterioso a Lovecraft (‘The Century of Cthulhu: Writings in Honor of the Centennial’).

Apparently it opens with essays on the history of the famous tale, followed by stories. The lead essay… “reconstructs the birth of The Call of Cthulhu as a web of influences — from Margaret Murray to Lord Dunsany to Arthur Machen”. The fiction authors appear to have been asked to take as their departure point the real-life mysterious disappearance of an iconic early Italian fan-painting… “Karel Thole’s original painting for the cover of Monsters on the Street Corner“.

* Up for auction, The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy. A two-part auction, in May and then December 2026. Including an August 1925 Lovecraft letter sent from Red Hook to Clark Ashton Smith…

* In a new interview, the manga creator Junji Ito talks Lovecraft, Osamu Dazai, and his latest vinyl-exclusive audio drama. The latter being his audio tale of…

an old melody on an unmarked vinyl record becomes an inexplicable source of terror, [and which] is now a vinyl-exclusive audio drama named In Old Records.

* An interesting Python-based attempt to make local software that automatically generates an OldTimeRadio show, which may interest some. Feed it real weird-science news, and from this it auto-writes a script, adds narration and voice-acting, then adds music and SFX. Sadly the narrator’s voice is generated via the Kokoro AI model, so… good luck getting it working on Windows. I must have tried to install/run a dozen different packages that claimed to offer Kokoro, and all failed or were stymied (each in a different way). The only working Kokoro TTS I have is included in the NovelForge 4.0 novel-writing software, which is straightforward Windows software with a no-hassle install.

* Talking of audio production tools which may interest Lovecraftian creatives, there’s now a 6Gb ‘fine-tune’ of the worthy Stable Audio sound-effects generator, called Stable Audio X and it works in ComfyUI. Stable Audio was trained on the vast Freesound.org archive of free sound-effect recordings. Apparently the X fine-tune of Stable Audio can not only do prompt-to-SFX-audio, but can also auto-create an accompanying foley soundtrack for a video (if you feed it a video).

* Talking of AI tools, yes… we can now re-style images so they more-or-less evoke Providence at night in Lovecraft’s time. Here’s ‘Lovecraft returns home up College Street at night, in the late 1920s’. Made with two Nano Banana day-to-night re-styles of a vintage public-domain image, plus my Photoshop-addition of HPL and the black bag he often carried.

Three short extracts from “Aletheia Phrikodes” (1916) by H.P. Lovecraft, seem to fit the picture…

Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes
From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air
That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees
[…]
I was afraid when through the vaulted space
Of the old tow’r, the clock-ticks died away
Into a silence so profound and chill
That my teeth chatter’d — giving yet no sound.
[…]
Methought a fire-mist drap’d with lucent fold
The well-remember’d features of the grove,
Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams
The hot, unfinish’d stuff of nascent worlds

— End-quotes —

“By 1901 or thereabouts I had a fair knowledge of the principles of chemistry […] Then my fickle fancy turned away to the intensive study of geography, geology” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

[As a boy] “Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived & studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments & stratifications get crystallised & upheaved into granite peaks? […] I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn’t know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere.” — Lovecraft to Vernon Shea, February 1934.

“an old-fashioned but not seriously misleading introduction to geology still unsurpassed for beginners is Geikie’s old Geology Primer. Another peculiarly congenial veteran is Winchell’s Walks and Talks in the Geological Field” — Lovecraft’s ghost-written Suggestions for a Reading Guide, probably indicating the key geology books he knew as a boy.

“I am not insensible of the importance of mineralogy in science; being well aware that the history of the planet and the details of many of its most vivid catastrophes lye hid in the chemical constitution and physical environment of its various sorts of rock. The science of geology, that primary branch of learning of which mineralogy is a division, is indeed something in which I might with ease become interested under the proper set of chance conditions; insomuch as it is directly concern’d with that main stream of cosmick pageantry which begins in blank aether and free electrons and ends in the perfection of Nordick man and Georgian architecture. Where mineralogy fails to get a grip on me is in the fact that it is a secondary science; an affair mainly of classification, with relatively slight direct linkage to the dramatick stream of pageantry of elemental conflict and mutation which appeals to the cosmic curiosity or interest-sense of the incurable layman.” — Lovecraft to his mineralogist friend Morton, October 1930.

“There is material for ineffable phantasy in the rocks & inner abysses of Mother Earth.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, March 1933, in a letter headed as written at the “Hour of the Opening of the Under Burrows”.

HPLinks #80 – Golems, REH news, book reviews, comic adaptations, new Burleson book, librarians and more…

09 Thursday Apr 2026

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HPLinks #80.

* An English abstract for a new conference paper from the city in Brno in the Czech Republic, “The Discipline of the Eye: Lovecraft’s Visual Epistemology, Atmospheric Proof, and the Horror of Display” (2026). Through “refusal and display”, Lovecraft…

disciplines the eye to treat atmosphere as evidence […] outline, surface, hue, and scene operate as atmospheric proof—signals of an alien order […] Indeterminacy, shared by narrator and reader, forces imaginative substitution, making the reader complicit in producing what cannot be stably seen.

* The latest (37.1) members-only Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts has a review of David Goudsward’s book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Not online.

* From Russia in Russian and open-access, an essay that translates as ‘The Fantastic Chronotope and the Image of the City in the works of G. Meyrink and H.P. Lovecraft’…

Meyrink’s Prague (The Golem and The Angel of the Western Window) and H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”) each offer a fantastic space with distinctive features [… I also suggest] that certain details of the descriptions of the fictional city of Innsmouth were most likely borrowed by H.P. Lovecraft from The Golem.

However, one can note that “Innsmouth” was written at the end of 1931 and yet Lovecraft didn’t finally read The Golem until several years later when Barlow was able to send him a copy… “I had seen the cinema version, and thought it was faithful to the original — but when I came to read the book only a year ago [i.e. April 1935]” …. Holy Yuggoth! The film had nothing of the novel save the mere title and the Prague ghetto setting — indeed, in the book the Golem-monster never appeared at all, but merely lurked in the background as a shadowy symbol.” (Lovecraft, in Selected Letters V, p.138). If there was any inspiration, it would have been from the movie. But Lovecraft was personally well acquainted with decrepit seafronts of all sorts.

* Also from Russia and in open-access, a new journal article which translates as “‘Lovecraftian Magic’ as a Form of Fictional Religion” (2026). In Russian, but easily auto-translated.

* A new philosophy article on the Medium platform on “H.P. Lovecraft’s Takedown of Islam” (a short free sample, then $ paywall).

* DMR notes the passing of “Lee Breakiron: A Gentleman and a (Howardian) Scholar”…

While Lee was all-around a gifted scholar of [R.E.] Howardiana, he was the undisputed king — by his own hand — when it came to scholarship regarding the history of Howardian fandom and literary criticism. He’d read and collected all of it during the decades before he strode into the REH scholarship arena.

* A review of Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* The REH Foundation podcast has a new chat surveying and discussing Robert E. Howard’s Pirate Stories.

* A new review of the Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith.

* On Kickstarter… Deep Space Lovecraft: 2 Cthulhu Mythos Horror Adaptations. Being… two “Mythos tales reimagined & visualized as hard science fiction” and done as comics. It’s heavily over-funded already. “The Haunter of the Dark” is imagined as a visit to a giant cathedral-like space station, and “The Hound” seemingly as a visit to another space station / museum? Despite the obviously AI-generated images, which by the looks of them were probably generated some years ago with now-primitive AI and then partly overpainted, the images have been carefully cohered into appealing pages. The pages are offered on the Kickstarter page as free samples. Looks to me like the Inverse Press / Flatline Comics could be a way to publish your AI generated comic in paper, without having to encounter the anti-AI hysteria currently being whipped up elsewhere.

* AI has moved on since then, and if you want a taster of that then have a look at this curious weird experiment. Simply feed the entire text of the seminal science-fiction novel The Time Machine into an AI, and have it make an apparently un-aided script and then generate a 17 minute movie version by itself… “this is the raw unrefined result with a single take, no cherry picking” says the experimenter.

* The new French Metal Hurlant 18 (Lovecraft special, 2026) magazine is now available.

* Amazon UK is listing Donald R. Burleson’s new book Seed of the Gods: Lovecraft-Inspired Tales and Others as published in April 2026… “his first collection of short stories in more than a decade, [in which] Burleson gathers tales written over the past fifteen years”.

* A new free ebook, “Overworked, Undernourished, and Weak in the Eyes”: The Portrayal of Librarians in Comics. An assiduous annotated and seemingly completist survey in 365 pages, offered by the author. Freely available to download as a PDF. It’s under Creative Commons Non-Commercial, so one could have an AI extract all the references which refer in some way to supernatural/horror librarians and thus make a more compact themed survey.

* Taskerland has a short essay “On “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft”. He finds this collaboration is…

not a great story, but it is an instructive one. In its mixture of cosmic suggestion and theatrical excess, it shows how readily Lovecraft’s ideas can be broken apart and made to function elsewhere. What emerges is not simply a change in tone, but a loosening of ownership, the same anxieties set loose from their original form and already beginning to move beyond the control of their author. This process is usually dated to Lovecraft’s afterlife, to obscurity, Derlethian appropriation, copyright murkiness, and the long slide into cultural ubiquity, but its beginnings may be earlier.

* Dark Worlds surveys “The Arkham Sampler Fiction”. Scans of Derleth’s Sampler issues can now be found at the Internet Archive.

* Up for auction at Heritage Auctions, a complete run of Arkham House books.

* Browsing eBay for scans, I’d not seen this one before. A pleasing and unwatermarked map of the highway system in Rhode Island, 1925. Could be upscaled to become a good RPG game prop?

* And finally, a rare street-level view of the Market Square, Providence, as Lovecraft would have encountered it. Many other postcard views are elevated or bridge-views. The view here is north towards the State House dome. The city’s market was held around the railings on the left of the picture. One can almost imagine the fellow alighting from the tram car, holding a black bag, to be the young Lovecraft.

— End-quotes —

“My aunt is well acquainted with Mr. Champlin Burrage, an Oxford man, who is librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown. (I hope to meet him very soon.)” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917. Brown University in Providence.

“Like you I am absolutely devoid of actual friends outside of correspondence. Those whom I knew in youth are all active and successful now, […] one a librarian of the R.I. Historical Society” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, circa 1918.

“My other guest [in Providence], Carl Ferdinand Strauch — poet and Asst. Librarian of Muhlenberg University (a friend of Brobst’s) — was also highly interesting, and very appreciative of the local antiquities and and-wheres.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1932.

“Only the other day a correspondent of mine — a librarian who sees all the magazines — was remarking what a fixture of the small & select publications you [i.e. Derleth] are getting to be!” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1933.

“… some timid reader has torn out the pages [from the Necronomicon] where the Episode of the Vault under the Mosque comes to a climax — the deletion being curiously uniform in the copies at Harvard & at Miskatonic University. When I wrote to the University of Paris for information about the missing text, a polite sub-librarian, M. Lean de Vercheres, wrote me that be would make me a photostatic copy as soon as he could comply with the formalities attendant upon access to the dreaded volume. Unfortunately it was not long afterward that I learned of M. de Vercheres’ sudden insanity & incarceration, & of his attempt to burn the hideous book which he had just secured & consulted. Thereafter my requests met with scant notice.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.