HPLinks #89.
* New from Radio KPFA, The Bookwaves Interview: Pulp Magazine Author E. Hoffman Price (1898-1988)…
This interview was conducted at Price’s house in Redwood City, California, most likely in the spring of 1979. Accompanying Dick, Lawrence and myself were Dick’s wife Pat Lupoff and science fiction fanzine editor Jim Purviance. Over two hours were recorded on multiple tapes, and parts of the transcription can be found in the book ‘Space Ships Ray Guns Martian Octopods: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends’. [This March 2026 version of the full] interview was digitized and then remastered using AI technology first, and then edited for clarity and coherence. […] This interview was first heard in a very truncated version in 1979, and has not been heard until now.
Freely available for download.
* RetroFuturista has a new interview, “The Art of Cosmic Terror: John Coulthart on Magick, Occult Diagrams and Impossible Cities”.
* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews the recent book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Provides a useful overview of the contents and concludes…
Overall, this is an excellent work. Readers interested in learning more about Lovecraft as a person, the people he interacted with, and what he did in Florida will find this book of interest.
* Forthcoming from McFarland, H.P. Lovecraft and Modern Philosophy. McFarland has it as set for a 2026 release, although Barnes & Noble USA is less certain and pegs it at June 2027.
[his] aesthetics form his own distinctive phenomenology, one concerned not with orderly representation but with the experience of confronting the unknowable [… placing him] alongside modern philosophical phenomenology reveals unexpected parallels between Lovecraft’s work and thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.
* From Eastern Europe, a long abstract for a recent conference paper “Scarcity, Pseudobiblia, and the Literary Work of Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’ in “The Festival””…
By orchestrating paratexts (archaic language, institutional custody, spurious authorities) that suggest an archive larger than the tale affords while simultaneously keeping the actual grimoire offstage, Lovecraft produces what can be termed ‘bibliographic sublime’: an apprehension of textual vastness through carefully curated absence.
* There’s what appears to be a chunky new Lovecraft biography. H.P. Lovecraft: The Herald of Cthulhu (2026) runs to over 400 pages and appeared in April 2026. No reviews as yet, and no indication if the many post-2012 discoveries are integrated or not. The long blurb is both encouragingly serious-minded and yet it also mentions Stephen King in approving tones. So it’s a bit of an unknown quantity at present.
* A new interview transcription of a very long chat in Polish with the highly acclaimed Polish translator of Lovecraft…
Mateusz Kopacz: Let me start by asking you to answer the question we’ve been hearing ever since ‘The Dunwich Horror’ [and other tales] was released [in Polish translation]: ‘Mr. Maciej, when is the new Lovecraft translation?!’
Maciej Plaza: Publishing a book, especially a book of enormous size, is a team effort, I am only one of the links — but I assure you that work on The Doom That Came to Sarnath [and other tales] is at the finishing stages and unless something unforeseen happens, the book will be published in mid-June [2026].
* Lovecraft appears at first glance to have a chapter in a new German/Austrian book. The book title in translation is Fictional Homeland: Identities, Bodies and Environments, and the chapter title would translate as something like “Terrible Origins: On the Horror of Home in H.P. Lovecraft”. However, judging by the pages on Google Books — most of them can be seen — the focus is barely on Lovecraft and most of the chapter discusses other authors.
* A new book, A Zoobiography of the Ancient Sea Monster, forthcoming in early September 2026 from Bloomsbury. Seemingly a sound mix of history and biological science. Regrettably the £85 price is likely to limit it to university libraries only.
* A good deal of Robert E. Howard activity is emerging, immediately after the annual Howard Days event. A few of the early ‘just got home from Texas’ links…
– Robert E. Howard Foundation’s 10-part video log on YouTube.
– Robert E. Howard Days 2026 (Substack, but free).
– REH on YouTube Panel Live from Cross Plains.
– Howard Days 2026 Hot Topics Roundtable.
– Travel with me to Howard Days 2026 via YouTube.
– Old Gods Wins the Costigan Award. (Substack, but free).
* The small-but-select art show at NecronomiCon Providence 2026 is called Ars Necronomica 2026, and its curators are now calling of submissions. Deadline: 5th July 2026.
* A new art gallery opens in Paris, at the Enki Bilal Foundation. Many will recall the leading French comics artist Bilal, from his work in Heavy Metal magazine.
* Ted White (1938-2026) has passed away. A science-fiction writer, and also editor at both Amazing Stories and Fantastic during the ‘new wave’ of 1969-1979, Heavy Metal during its seminal years of 1979-1980, and Stardate magazine at the height of the post-Star Wars ‘movie SF’ wave, 1985-1986. In 2016 he was Guest of Honor at PulpFest, and they have a recording of his talk about his career in writing and editing.
* A fledgling new magazine, Small Planet: Speculative Fiction in Translation. Issue 1 is dated May 2026.
* Talking of translation, seven hours of Wilum Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley tales can be had in a Spanish translation audiobook Bohemios del valle de Bohemios del valle de Sesqua (2022).
* Also new to me, a solo gamebook for “The Lurking Fear” (2018). Sounds like something that might be converted to a modern ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ style videogame, but with real-time AI augmentation?
The Lurking Fear is a stand-alone solo-play roleplaying book written in the style of the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ series popular in the 1980s, and utilising Chaosium’s generic Basic Roleplaying system.
* An unusual item I’d not seen before, a “The Haunter of the Dark” reading on vinyl in 1977, via an old eBay listing. Apparently this was not only a full reading, but a reading with matching sound effects. Approved by Derleth, who was fine with approving small fannish projects and fanzine reprints of the tales.
* And finally, talking of 1977… just a note that 2027 will mark the 50th anniversary of a clutch of key early Lovecraft scholarship such as Barton Levi St. Armand’s seminal The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (1977), The Weird Tales Story (1977) (history of the magazine), and Greenwood’s H.P. Lovecraft Companion (1977). It will also be the 50th anniversary of the start of the oft-regretted ‘movie-fication’ of science-fiction, as 1977 saw the huge success of the first Star Wars movie and also of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
— End-quotes —
“I’m sure I don’t want anything more than non-existence when I round out a few decades more. I had it before I was born — through all the aeons prior to Aug. 20, 1890 — I don’t see why it will suit me any less after I die — through all the aeons subsequent to 1960 or 1970 or so. I’ve no complaint to enter about the way the cosmos treated me in the pre-1890 days when I didn’t exist, & the thought of other such days to come doesn’t disturb me in the least. On again, off again!” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, April 1930. Lovecraft at this point obviously thinks be might live to see 1970.
“Much of the new stuff [in music and culture] will be laughed at in 1980 as heartily as 1880 stuff is laughed at now” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, April 1930.
“When, as a youth of twenty, I laid in these ochraceous pads [of writing paper], did I ever think a grey-headed old has-been of almost forty-five would be scrawling on ’em in the virtually fabulous future year of 1935? 1935….. even today it has an unreal, far-ahead sound! Can I be living in a year whose numeral seems as fantastically remote as 2000 or 2500 or 5000?” — Lovecaft to Morton, April 1935.
“So far as future history is concerned, I’m damned if I know what lies ahead. […] Any one of a dozen possible courses may await mankind. Nobody knows what factors will pop up to prove the decisive ones. What will the next war bring — and leave? How much of existing knowledge and technology will survive — or leave recoverable keys — through the next dark age? How fatal will be the decadence or collapse toward which both western and eastern cultures seem to be moving? Will the modified behaviour-patterns created by the lapse of certain traditional beliefs produce unforeseen results?” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.
“There is absolutely no clue to the future, because its events are compounded of so many different chains of past events, each of which may be taking place all unknown to the spectators of any other. In our present, which is the future’s past, we can know of only one or two factors which will enter into any events of the future. There is no way of finding out the others, because we don’t know what to look for.” — Lovecraft to Nils H. Frome, February 1937.
