Monthly Archives: June 2026

HPLinks #91 – new reviews and papers, Lovecraft comics, film and animation, and more…

30 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, New books

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #91.

* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews Ken Faig Jr’s book More Lovecraftian People and Places (2025).

* From Brazil, a new item that translates as “The Rhetoric Of Doubt: Unreliability, Inner Focusing And The Construction Of The Weird In H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror Literature” (2026). Appears to be a final dissertation. Freely available online. Focuses on “The Whisperer in Darkness” and the second part… “analyzes the persona of the narrator Wilmarth, his limitations as a man of science, and the use of the epistolary genre as a resource for double unreliability”.

* New in the paywall journal American Gothic Studies, “Cosmic Horror and Acidic Apocalypse from the American Counterculture: The Psychedelic Gothic in Cinema and Beyond” (2026). This appears, judging by the partial free abstract, to focus on the feature film Eggshells (1969). But the title suggests the article then goes on to range more widely? Sadly, the paywall extends even to the full abstract.

* From Eastern Europe, a research repository has a new record and abstract for the 2026 journal article “Bibliographic Menace in Lovecraft’s ‘The Festival’: Terror by Quotation and Refusal”. Academic DOI links are useless half the time, and thus predictably the DOI link here gives an error. However, a little hand-searching gets me to the Ostrava Journal of English Philology issues-page and thus the full text of the article…

H.P. Lovecraft’s tale ‘The Festival’ (1925) makes the ‘Necronomicon’ frightening by scarcity: a supervised consultation of the grimoire at Miskatonic University and the translation of a single paragraph relocate horror from ‘contents’ to citation and refusal. ‘Bibliographic menace’ names the dread produced when an archive proves real and institutionally guarded, yet remains larger than any extract the narrative permits. Close reading traces the tale’s archaic cadence and pseudo-scholarly framing; brief comparison with other ‘Necronomicon’ tales clarifies its distinctive economy and later adaptability across media.

See also the related conference paper “Scarcity, Pseudobiblia, and the Literary Work of Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’ in “The Festival””, previously linked in my HPLinks #89.

* Talking of the Necronimicon, it seems remarkable that… “90% of surviving Renaissance Latin texts have never been translated”. So says Amsterdam’s new Source Library, which is doing something about it. With the aid of one of the world’s greatest collections, harnessed to the new capabilities of AI. The “first 6,000 translations” are now online, with facing originals so Latin-reading AI-sceptics can instantly glance across and check. The Source Library has an apparent initial focus on Renaissance philosophy, esoterica and occultism. All freely available and open. No fragments from the Necronimicon have surfaced, as yet.

* Taskerland reviews reviews The Occult Lovecraft…

The Occult Lovecraft is a beautifully-made [1975] zine by contemporary standards and the sheer quality and discernment on display only become more apparent when you realise that the entire thing pre-dates the existence of desktop publishing. […] A beautifully produced historical artefact from a strange and revealing moment in Lovecraft fandom, where rationalism, occult enthusiasm, and personal testimony collide.

* The latest edition of the German open-access journal Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven Mediavistischer Forschung (‘The Middle Ages: Perspectives In Mediaevalist Research’) is a special issue on ‘Medieval Patterns in Modern Fantasy’. Includes an article on examples of Merlin in analogue games, which may be of interest to some.

* Public-domain Spanish audio for “Presentacion del libro Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft. El horror cosmico en los comics, los videojuegos y el sexo. Volumen 2″ (‘Presentation on the book We Will Always Have Lovecraft: Cosmic horror in comics, video games and sex. Volume 2.’). June 2026, 40 minutes.

While the first volume analyzed the literary work of Lovecraft, this new book explores how the concept of cosmic horror and the adjective ‘Lovecraftian’ have been expanded and adapted to multiple media

The new book is available in Spanish via Diabolo Ediciones.

* New from Italy, a book of four comics adaptations of Lovecraft, plus an original Lovecraftian tale as a comic. Lovecraft: Cinque strade nella follia…

Under the expert guidance of screenwriter Marco Cannavo, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Temple, and The Rats In The Walls are transformed into comic stories by Francesco Biagini, Francesca Giulia Massaglia, Paolo Massagli and Corrado Roi. Michele Penco also transforms an original story by Cannavo.

* Also new in Italian comics, Vanello Sergio’s H.P. Lovecraft: Dagon e altri racconti brevi (2025) (‘Dagon & Other Tales’). Eight Lovecraft tales as comic-book… “reinterpretations enriched by a new visual dimension”. A 96 page album, some b&w strips, some colour. Sergio produced a similar ‘Erich Zann and Other Tales’ book in 2019.

* Dream Apex Pictures have filmed Lovecraft’s “Celephais”…

H.P. Lovecraft film adaptations have largely ignored his Dream-cycle, and we are thrilled to bring the Dreamlands to life. Producer Joe Lemieux and director Michael Neel are passionate Lovecraft fans, and we have made the kind of film that we would like to see. […] special effects, by Jeff O’Brien and Nicholas Flanagan (Shuttle, Drive-In Horrorshow, God of Vampires) are all practical, including latex gore, puppetry, and camera tricks. With the exception of compositing our effects using a computer, there is nothing in this film that couldn’t have been done one hundred years ago. We filmed at fourteen locations in New England, Lovecraft’s home and ours.

Now available free on YouTube, or as a Blu-ray via IndieGoGo.

* It appears there’s to be no Colin Wilson conference in the UK this year, and instead there’s a new 2026 collection of essays to mark the 70th anniversary of Wilson’s famous book The Outsider (1956).

* New to me, Around the Outsider: Essays Presented to Colin Wilson on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday (2011), now available as an ebook on Amazon. Includes an essay on The Mind Parasites, which was Wilson’s tribute-novel to Lovecraft. Incidentally it’s interesting to learn that, apparently, Wilson once worked as a visiting lecturer at Brown University in Providence. One wonders if his archived papers have unexamined Lovecraft-related photographs and writings from his time on College Hill?

* Newly spotted on eBay, a framed 1932 hand-drawn map of Providence.

* Witch House: Amateur Magazine of Cosmic Horror. A new PDF ‘zine, now calling for contributions for issue 6. Fiction and poetry wanted, no non-fiction, reviews or interviews. Deadline: 2nd August 2026.

* New on Archive.org, a run of Different Worlds Magazine 1979-1987. A substantial general early RPG magazine, but with an obvious interest in Cthulhu mythos and R.E. Howard games/scenarios.

* More videos are surfacing from this year’s Howard Days event in Cross Plains, Texas. Specifically the recordings for the one-day conference ‘Afterlives of World Building: The Legacy of Robert E. Howard’: the Keynote by Sara Frazetta, the First Panel and Second Panel.

* New on Archive.org, Profiles In History: Comic & Illustration Art Auction 87 July 30, 2016. Being a sumptuous auction catalogue which offers a feast of Frazetta (Bran Mak Morn), Barry Windsor-Smith (Conan + the BWS 1970s wall-posters), Berni Wrightson, and some Moebius.

* Remember all those the old ‘magazines about comics and comics-artists’ that were recently uploaded to Archive.org? They now have Kwakk, a dedicated keyword search-engine. Said to search across more than a million pages, and counting.

* More details about the forthcoming Lovecraftian animated feature film from a studio of animation professionals, Ages of Madness: The Howling of the Jinn. Starting production in late 2026, and set to be an anthology movie consisting of “nine shorts” set across “four settings”, with each short connecting to the history of the Necronomicon. Aimed at adult audiences, not kids.

* And finally, talking of dazzling animation… see two literary immortals locked in mortal combat! Yes, it’s J.R.R. Tolkien vs H.P. Lovecraft.

— End-quotes —

“Raindrops [are felt]… but the sky shews a light rim near the horizon which impels me to take a chance and stay … for a moment. No — too much sprinkling. Have moved down into the piny valley toward the east. Am on a great rock beneath thick evergreen shade. Now let it rain (up to a certain limit) and be damn’d. This section of the wood is really primeval. Indians and 17th century colonists have seen these giant firs. There are houses as old as 1670 and 1687 within a mile of here. Rain increases — but what the hell? … Started pouring — with thunder and lightning — and my pine shelter proved inadequate. … I’m quite a bit irrigated …” — Lovecraft tries to write an outdoor letter to Barlow, as a heavy storm eases in, end of May 1935.

[A September visit to Providence by Donald Wandrei] “… was spoilt by a torrential rainstorm — which transformed most of the city to a lake & broke all weather-bureau records.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1932.

[in Quebec] “I beheld several atmospherick spectacles of the highest interest […] a strangely burning flood of ruddy vespertine light upon roofs, spires, ramparts, & the trans-fluvial cliffs of Levis — coupled with a dense funnel of churning nimbus cloud extending from the zenith to the southeastern horizon. From this interloping mass jagged streaks of lightning darted frequently down to the distant country side beyond Levis, whilst low rumbles of thunder follow’d tardily after. Then, to crown all, a pallid arc of rainbow sprang into view above the verdant Isle d’Orleans, its upper end lost in the forbidding black cloud.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1933.

“… the skies exert the utmost fascination upon me; nor is the weaving of wild dreams about their unplumbed deeps & suns & worlds in the least hampered by the precise astronomical data which my scientific side demands. Indeed, there is nothing in the baldest truth about the sky which does not enhance rather than enfeeble one’s awe at its fathomless & indescribable immensities.” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, April 1927.

HPLinks #90 – Innsmouth Lit Fest, new Poe book, Cross Plain pictures, Beastarium book, and more…

23 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, REH

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #90.

* I have tweaked Tentaclii’s CSS so as to change quote italics to a normal style. This should be retroactively affecting all quotes in posts on this blog. Quotations are now a bit less fancified, but more instantly readable.

* Here in the UK, the Innsmouth Literary Festival is a gathering of Mythos writers and more. It will run again on 19th September 2026. Early-bird tickets and trader table information, now available.

* Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Eerie has appeared in Portuguese translation as O Estranho e o Sinistro (June 2026).

* A new academic book Poe Spaces: Within and Beyond the Spatial Turn, with 19 new essays on Poe’s life, works, and literary afterlife.

* The latest issue of the Spanish journal Revista Helice has “Necronomicones Espanoles: La influencia del grimorio Lovecraftiano en las letras Espanolas recientes” (‘Spanish Necronomicons: the influence of the Lovecraftian grimoire on recent Spanish literature’). Freely available online.

* A few more items arising from the Howard Days event. The Dark Man Journal posts an Interview with Rusty Burke on YouTube. And GeoLiminal ponders Robert E. Howard and Evolution with the aid of the letters and more. I’ll add my own contribution, a couple of evocative images of Cross Plains, restored and colorised. Possibly early 1920s, judging by the female fashions?

* Up for sale… “Archive of over 125 letters, 1966-1983, on poetry, music, Korea, Lovecraft, horror stories, science fiction, Arkham House”… “from James Wade (1930-83) to fellow poet and ghost-story author John Alfred Taylor … Wade’s work appeared in [many Lovecraftian] Mythos anthologies”.

* New to me, a Lovecraft-as-character book titled Theory of MultiDreams: A Cosmic-Dream Investigation by H.P. Lovecraft (2017). In French, it seems — despite the English title, cover and blurb.

by author and poet Jean-Philippe Cazier [and] loosely inspired by the contemporary astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau’s work on “Multiverses” and by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The book entwines astrophysics and fantasy literature through fiction, deconstructing the frameworks of narration, logic, identity, space and time. The story commences with the disappearance of one of its characters, developing a kaleidoscopic narrative in which identities proliferate, when dreams become the means for travel through space and time and in which Lovecraft himself seemingly becomes one of the characters.

* The Blogging Goth celebrates Trent Reznor vs H.P. Lovecraft: Quake at 30…

Thirty years ago, legendary game studio id Software released Quake – the successor project to possibly the most influential first-person shooter in the world, Doom. The setting this time was dominated by medieval, gothic imagery and the player had to contend with entities directly referencing H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, all set to a dark ambient soundtrack by none other than Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails.

* Feuilleton on his illustration of “The Father of Serpents”, together with a new portrait of Yig.

* Due in September 2026 in German, H.P. Lovecraft Bestiarium: Lovecrafts fantastische Wesen. Illustriert von Enrique Alcatena – Ubersetzt von Florian F. Marzin (‘H.P. Lovecraft Bestiary: Lovecraft’s fantastic creatures. Illustrated by Enrique Alcatena – Translated by Florian F. Marzin’). Appears to be a translation of Bestiario which was a 2008 Spanish edition.

* A large auction-scan of the original ink-and-whiteout header illustration for the 1925 Weird Tales appearance of “The Festival”.

* New on Archive.org, Fantastic Novels Magazine Reference Guide and Famous Fantastic Mysteries Reference Guide.

* And finally, also new on Archive.org, a 120-issue run of Fate Magazine: True Stories of the Strange and Unknown. Twaddle by the bucket-load, but also possible partial inspiration for Mythos fiction and RPGs?

— End-quotes —

[Lovecraft visits Wilbraham and Mrs Beebe and Mrs Miniter, and their household with] “… seven cats, two dogs, two horses, two kine, and one hired boy. Far to the west, across marshy meadows where at evening the fire-flies dance in incredibly fantastic profusion, the benign bulk of Wilbraham Mountain rises purple and mystical. The region, being very old and remote, is full of the most extraordinary folklore; some of which will certainly find lodgement in my future stories if I ever live to write any more.” — Lovecraft to Zelia Bishop, July 1928. The setting became that of “The Dunwich Horror”.

[Among my correspondents] “… I hear frequently from the old lady descended from Salem witches. She sent several moderately gruesome legends lately, but in general I find it more natural to invent cosmic horrors of my own rather than to utilize actual folklore incidents”. — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, October 1930. (The correspondent was likely to be Sarah Symonds, the correspondence now lost).

[my] “… artificial names of unearthly places and gods and persons and entities — there are different ways of coining them. To a large extent they are designed to suggest — either closely or remotely — certain names in actual history or folklore which have weird or sinister associations connected with them. Thus ‘Yuggoth’ has a sort of Arabic or Hebraic cast, to suggest certain words passed down from antiquity in the magical formulae contained in Moorish and Jewish manuscripts. Other synthetic names like ‘Nug’ and ‘Yeb’ suggest the dark mysterious tone of Tartar or Thibetan folklore.” — Lovecraft to Rimel, February 1934.

“I rather prefer purely original weird concepts as opposed to those derived from genuine folklore. Authentic folk-beliefs are likely to be insipid, ill-proportioned, freakish, and in general far less aesthetically effective than concepts formed by an author with a specific artistic purpose in mind.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, May 1935.

HPLinks #89 – newly-released Hoffman Price interview, Florida reviewed, forthcoming books, Howard Days, Ars Necronimica call, and more…

16 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

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.

HPLinks #88 – CAS biog, a new Commonplace Annotated, Lovecraft as tourist, Conservative in Italian, and more…

09 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, New books

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #88.

* Due soon from Hippocampus Press, as a limited hardcover, Joshi’s new biography The Star-Treader: A Life of Clark Ashton Smith.

* Also forthcoming from Hippocampus Press, the Schultz H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and Other Notes: An Annotated Edition, also as a limited edition hardcover.

This exhaustively annotated edition, based upon decades of study of both the text and sources of the commonplace book, illuminates the origins of many entries—from events in Lovecraft’s life, books or stories he read, and other sources—while also indicating their use in his fiction, even in cases where the use of the entries is by no means obvious. Other lists and notes relating to the commonplace book, including such works as “Weird Story Plots” and “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” are also presented, thoroughly annotated.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news that…

I have nearly finished my monograph on Poe and Lovecraft, tentatively titled ‘Solitary Victims of Fate: Lovecraft’s Interactions with Poe’. The work is only about 35,000 words and not likely to get much bigger; it will be issued by Hippocampus Press next year. I have had great fun writing it, and I think I have found some Poe influences on Lovecraft’s tales that have not been cited before.

* The new McFarland multi-author book Literary Floridas: Essays on a Wild Peninsula Imagined (2026) has the chapter “Horror in the Sunshine State: H.P. Lovecraft, Tourist”. Judging by the preview pages from Google Books, the chapter appears to be a well-researched but lively introduction to the topic.

* The Complete Acolyte: A Historic 1940s Fanzine Reprint, available now in print. A key and quality early Lovecraft fanzine, now in print. I believe it’s also available as good page-scans elsewhere, for free.

* Now available in Italian, the complete run of H.P. Lovecraft’s amateur magazine The Conservative (2026)…

For the first time ever in the Italian language, this volume collects The Conservative in its entirety.

* Also new in Italian, a translation of the Joshi & Schultz Lovecraft’s Library (2026). Translating the fifth English edition, 2024.

* Feuilleton surveys The Art of Helmut Wenske. Scroll right down to the bottom to see two Lovecraft covers, indiscriminately used by the publisher Moewig for other books.

* An online conference set for later in June, Afterlives of World Building: The World of Robert E. Howard. Booking now.

Saturday 20th June 2026. The event is sponsored by The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, and will include pre-recorded interviews, two scholarly panels, and a keynote address by Sara Frazetta. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link and password.

* Sculptorium of Madness has a range of 3D printable figures for sale as downloadable 3D files. You can then print them yourself, paint them up as you like. I imagine one might also put them into home-made dioramas…

* David Thrussell & Shinjuku Thief Present: The Call of Cthulhu on two vinyl LPs, a reading with soundscape and soundtrack. Due 19th June 2026.

* Dark Worlds Quarterly exclaims “What?! More Plant Monsters!”, as more vegetable variants sprout from the old pulp magazines.

* Locus magazine reports “Subterranean Press to Close” at the end of 2027. The catalogue currently features Thomas Ligotti, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, and they have also published the nine-volume Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg.

* The editor of a planned Pop Culture Fandoms survey-book, apparently set for publication by Bloomsbury Press in 2028, is calling for short contributions…

I’m wide open to other suggestions. I’m particularly interested in non-US/UK fandoms and historical fandoms.

Send 200-300 word abstracts of your topic(s) by 30th August 2026. The aim is obviously not to be comprehensive with the book, as there will only be “100 short (1,000-word)” entries, when there could easily be 500 or more. So, you should probably also say why the fandom you’ve chosen is important to include. More important than, say, Elvis or Tolkien.

* New on Archive.org, the illustrated catalogue for Comic & Illustration Art Auction 114, December 12, 2019. Including Jack Kirby Eternals original b&w artwork, Mike Ploog’s Conan/Kull, and some Berni Wrightson pencil concept-sketches for a long-ago possible movie of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”…

* Popping up on eBay, and of possible use as a RPG prop, a local magazine ad for the Moses Brown school in Providence. “In the autumn of 1918, and with a considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he [Charles Dexter Ward] had begun his junior year at the Moses Brown School” (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

* Those making RPG props and book designs may be interested in an excellent free Photoshop script to jitter the baseline for your text, thus making the lettering for a handwriting or calligraphic font more believable. Tested and working.

* And finally, Talkie: an LLM from 1930 (online test page) and talkie-1930-13b-it-GGUF (for local use in desktop software such as Jan.ai etc). Trained only on material from before 1931. The online version of the AI is censored, but the local GGUF is not. I can run the Q4_K_M variant GGUF on a 12Gb graphics card.

As you can see, of obvious use for 1920s Mythos writers and RPG makers. Seems best on topics related to the USA, though verifying its absolute accuracy could be a problem. It could not run much the same query re: detailing a Birmingham – Southampton rail route in the UK (the ill Tolkien being brought home from the Somme), seemingly having no knowledge of the westerly route and insisting on going aroundabout via London.

— End-quotes —

“I am glad you found my modification of your story interesting. I may use that plot — divested of any element connecting it with your tale — in supplying one of my amateur proteges with something to write about. It does not quite conform to the general idea of my own tales, so I shall not use it myself. I have lately — by the way — been collecting ideas & images for subsequent use in fiction. For the first time in my life, I am keeping a ‘commonplace-book’ — if that term can be applied to a repository of gruesome & fantastick thoughts.” — Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, January 1920.

“I was afraid those disjointed things bored you, but since they seem not to have done so, I will give you a few more, as I have recorded them for future fictional development in my commonplace-book. Remember, gents, that these crude sketches are the mere dreams themselves, not the stories. I relate only exactly what I dreamed, not what I am going to build up around the dreams.   I was walking or rather wading through a seemingly interminable and treeless marsh, under a leaden sky. My companion was an old man — a man so old that he frightened me…” — Lovecraft, ‘To the Gallomo’, April 1920.

“I think I have two kinds of moods in writing weird tales — one when I feel the need of scientific realism, & try to achieve a convincing air of objective sobriety against which the marvel itself stands out by contrast, (Colour Out of Space, Cthulhu, Whisperer, &c.) & the other when I feel myself half involved in the nebulous uncertainty of the pictured dream, & try to convey a hint of the febrile doubt & apprehension inherent in an imperfectly glimpsed vista, (Randolph Carter, Erich Zann, &c.). Of late the objective side has been uppermost, but that is because I have recently been writing from actual visual impressions gained in the New England countryside. When I get to a period of more fecund composition, & begin developing some of the odd items & subjective mood-jottings in my commonplace-book, I fancy the Erich Zann method will be called upon now & then.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“Glad you found the commonplace-book and cuttings of interest. […] Cosmic phantasy of some sort is as assured of possible permanence (its status subject to caprices of fashion) [however, in the future] its later & less irresponsible forms will doubtless differ vastly from most of the weird literature we have had so far. Like the lighter forms of dream-phantasy & Yog-Sothothery, it will require a delicate & precise technique; so that a crude old-timer like myself would never be likely to excel in it. Nevertheless, if I live much longer, I may try my hand at something of the sort — for it is really closer to my serious psychology than anything else on or off the earth. [… In thus] using up the ideas in my commonplace-book, I shall doubtless perpetrate a great deal more childish hokum, (gratifying to me only through personal association with the past) yet the time may come when I shall at least try something approximately serious.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1927. Long had been sent the commonplace-book as it then stood, for perusal and return.

HPLinks #87 – playful monsters, Moore esoterica, new journals, Colour from Germany, Martian loungers and more…

01 Monday Jun 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #87.

* The Morris Everett Collection Part Two, free on Archive.org as a 391-page PDF catalogue.

* A call-for-papers for The Playful Monster. Set for September 2026 on the south coast of England. Deadline: 31st July 2026.

The Playful Monster is a conference hosted by Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. It looks at how monsters are made playful, and how the monstrous appears in playful ways across games, media, and everyday culture.

* A call-for-papers for Esotericism in the Comics of Alan Moore. Deadline: 1st July 2026…

This proposed collection of essays will seek to deepen the awareness and importance of esotericism in the work of Alan Moore. It is time for a volume on the topic

* A journal from the University of Oviedo, Spain, plans a special issue themed around ‘Lands of Fear: Gothic and Horror in Literature, Art, and Culture’. The Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research now has a call for papers, and proposals for interviews, artworks and book reviews are also welcomed. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* Wormwoodiana announces a new print journal in English, A Weird Occasional.

* A new Spanish journal invites papers for the forthcoming Legendaria: Revista de estudios sobre el mito y lo fantastico (‘Legendaria: the journal of studies on myth and the fantastic’). The publisher Legendaria Ediciones is a notable publisher of Tolkien scholarship in Spanish, but their new double-blind peer-reviewed journal will evidently range beyond Tolkien. The first issue is planned for later in 2026.

* In 2024 I see that the Mexican journal Historias had a profile of Robert Barlow… “Perhaps this is one of the first profiles of the literary executor of H.P. Lovecraft and editor of Tlalocan magazine.”

* SFcrowsnest reviews The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson.

* Dread Central reappraises a Lovecraft screen adaptation, 25 Years Later: Revisiting the Lovecraftian The Resurrected…

The Resurrected is a completely mistreated and underseen gem. The film is an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft novella “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, and is an electric combination of slow-burn noir and supernatural horror. The film is also incredibly silly, and paired with the enthralling mystery, goopy gore, and southern gothic imagery, it truly feels like a singular creative piece.

* Up and Down These Mean Streets has Rediscovered: Ex Libris Virgil Finlay, with an image of a finely penned Finlay signature.

* An unusual item in Italian, the book Il Mistero di Lovecraft & Lovering (2026)….

In the early 1930s stories appeared in Amazing Stories magazine signed as P.H. Lovering, and with the note that it was the same author as The Color Out of Space. Journal error or deliberate choice? And if it were true, is P.H. Lovering actually one of H.P. Lovecraft’s pseudonyms? This essay, part of the Arkham Myths series, explores in depth this mystery […] through rigorous and exciting research, providing essential reading keys for scholars and enthusiasts of the “Providence Dreamer”. With the texts of the two stories for the first time in Italian in a single book.

Lovering was dialogue-heavy 1930s pulp with a love interest, so it seems unlikely. Also Lovecraft appears to have denied it to Hoffman Price in 1933…

Belknap slipped up un one thing — for he was absolutely and unqualifiedly wrong in believing that I have published non-weird fiction under a pseudonym. I not only have never done so, but have certainly never said anything from which such a mistaken inference could legitimately be made. That’s the kid’s one trouble — his imagination flies off on a tangent, and now and then goes beyond the plain facts.

* Now crowdfunded, a French…

edition of the official complete Cycle of Swords — all the short stories, all the novels by Fritz Leiber, in chronological order of the adventures, enriched with Adept’s Gambit with the notes of H. P. Lovecraft presented by S.T. Joshi — in a prestige edition.

* The latest History Today magazine has the article “H.P. Lovecraft: Haunted by History”…

Portrait of the Author as a Historian. H.P. Lovecraft asked us to imagine a much deeper past than modern comforts and science allow us to perceive — and the monsters that might dwell there.

* New on eBay, a pleasing sketch of the John Hay Reading Room at Brown University, in 1923…

* Advance notice that 16th July 2027 will be the 100th anniversary of the ‘escape from Innsmouth’…

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode.

* Germany’s theatrical/audio-visual show Die Farbe aus dem All now has an online version…

* And finally, ArchiScene profiles Summer on Mars, a long profile/interview featuring the professional designers who recently created a ‘Martian interior’ for a big Milan expo…

The exhibition was presented during Milan Design Week. […] Especially for the exhibition, I designed the Lovecraft chaise lounge – an organic form that looked almost as if it was walking across the surface of the red planet. For me, it was also a playful experiment with form and convention. It is technically a piece of furniture, but at the same time it feels slightly alive, as if it wanted to escape or came from another dimension. [… it] came from my fascination with the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and the atmosphere of cosmic horror. There was also a sense of humor behind it, this idea that on Mars, even objects designed for rest might look as if they want to escape from us. I wanted the piece to feel slightly inaccessible, almost like an alien organism or a futuristic algae form. You can still recognize soft surfaces and shapes that invite the body to sit or recline, but at the same time there is something unfamiliar and unsettling about it. That contrast was intentional. I was interested in creating a kind of grotesque tension between comfort and discomfort, familiarity and otherness.

— End-quotes —

[pulp SF readers…] “want their conventional best-seller values and motives kept paramount throughout the abysses of apocalyptic vision and extra-Einsteinian chaos, and would not deem an “interplanetary” tale in the least interesting if it did not have its Martian (or Jovian or Venerian or Saturnian) heroine fall in love with the young voyager from Earth, and thereby incur the jealousy of the inevitable Prince Kongros (or Zeelar or Hoshgosh or Norkog) who at once proceeds to usurp the throne etc.; [and add] something disagreeable and Semitic for the villain. Now I couldn’t grind out that sort of junk if my life depended on it. If I were writing an ‘interplanetary’ tale it would deal with beings organised very differently from mundane mammalia, and obeying motives wholly alien to anything we know upon Earth — the exact degree of alienage depending, of course, on the scene of the tale; whether laid in the solar system, the visible galactic universe outside the solar system, or the utterly un plumbed gulfs still farther out — the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting” — Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, July 1927.

[When depicting] “events on the alien planet [one’s fiction] must be in strict accord with the known or assumed nature of the orb in question — surface gravity, axial inclination, length of day and year, aspect of sky, etc. — and the atmosphere must be built up with significant details conducing to verisimilitude and realism. Hoary stock devices connected with the reception of the voyagers by the planet’s inhabitants ought to be ruled rigidly out. Thus we should have no overfacile language-learning; no telepathic communication; no worship of the travellers as deities; no participation in the affairs of pseudo-human kingdoms, or in conventional wars between factions of inhabitants; no weddings with beautiful anthropomorphic princesses; no stereotyped Armageddons with ray-guns and space-ships; no court intrigues and jealous magicians; no peril from hairy ape-men of the polar caps; and so on, and so on. […] What must always be present in superlative degree is a deep, pervasive sense of strangeness — the utter, incomprehensible strangeness of a world holding nothing in common with ours.” — Lovecraft, “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction”.

“If a story’s weirdness be due to scientific imagination voyages to other planets by mechanical means, creation of metal men, &c. instead of downright supernaturalism, it has at least a half-chance with the “scientifiction” magazines — Amazing, Astounding, & Wonder Stories. Clark Ashton Smith is now ‘going over big’ with Wonder Stories, & has been asked to write a whole series of tales (interplanetary voyaging in an atomic-energy spaceship) for it. If anyone has a knack at this kind of thing, there is really an excellent & increasing market open to him. I fear I’m not much in this line myself, but nevertheless believe I’ll try a few specimens & see how they are regarded by editors.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, October 1930.