HPLinks #94.
* The graphic novel Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft is back in print, as an affordable paperback.
* The Comics Journal reviews the recent graphic novel The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft. Freely available online.
* From France, the book Lovecraft par lui-meme: ou Lovecraft maitre de vie (‘Lovecraft himself: or Lovecraft a master of life’)…
This work, composed from translations of unpublished or little-known texts in French and Lovecraft’s private correspondence, draws a portrait of character as rich as those found in the great novels, and of a man even greater than his work.
* A repository open-access preprint from the forthcoming British Fantasy Society Journal 28, “Under the Spell of Fantasy: The Sword and Sorcery Production Cycle in British Popular Cinema of the Early 1980s”. Freely available online under Creative Commons.
* On now and running until November 2026, “Here Be Dragons: Anglo-Saxon Influence on Fantasy” is an exhibition at Jarrow Hall (‘Anglo-Saxon Farm and Village and Bede Museum’) in Northumbria, England.
* Black Gate considers David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard (Howard’s pirates, Bran Mak Morn) and Part Two (Red Sonja). Part Three is still to come.
* Southwest Historical Quarterly reviews Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author ($ paywall, but a substantial chunk of the review is free).
* RevERBerate, the Edgar Rice Burroughs journal, has now reached issue 4.
* Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion (Volume 4, Issue 1) has a Mark Valentine essay on “The Other Country: Numinous Landscape in English Supernatural Fiction”.
* A call for papers for an online one-day conference from the Ukraine’s Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, themed around the “Mysteries of Night in Fantasy Worlds”. Deadline: 31st October 2026.
* From Italy in Italian, the journal-zines Zothique 22 and Zothique 23.
* S.T. Joshi’s weird poetry annual Spectral Realms No. 25 (Summer 2026) is now available. The poems are accompanied by…
Steven Withrow’s interview with Ann K. Schwader — part of a volume of interviews of contemporary weird poets that Withrow has now completed.
* Taskerland’s blog considers Lovecraft’s “The Thing On The Doorstep”.
* Benjamin Cain’s Substack blog considers “Lovecraft and monotheism”…
… to the extent that Lovecraft’s weird tales satirically targeted monotheism, it’s no accident that any of the three Abrahamic religions might seem Lovecraftian when interpreted from [the] updated, naturalistic standpoint [arising from scientific knowledge].
* A fragment of evidence for the 1900s-1930s history of Providence bookshops and libraries. On eBay, a 1934 matchbook for “The Book Shop” at 5 Grosvenor Building, Providence. With a mini-map showing its new home in relation to its old one across the Market Square. Sadly it’s very blurred, but can just about be comprehended.
Not as quaint and olde worlde a book shop as the image suggests, perhaps. At least in its new location. It was up in a 10 story modern building at 10 Weybosset Street, which Mythos writers might like to note Lovecraft said had buried an old lane with the evocative name of Dunwell’s Gangway. This skyscraper had also housed Lovecraft’s neer-do-well uncle and his refrigeration company at one time, and in an even more distant time housed the office of Lovecraft’s grandfather. Lovecraft wrote…
One of our principal skyscrapers — where my grandfather had his office the last two years of his life — was named the ‘Banigan Building’ — though Providence pride has led to its recent renaming as the ‘Grosvenor Building’
* New on Archive.org, Imagen: Revista Latinoamericana de Cultura, No. 7 (2015). With a one-page review of a translated anthology whose title translates as ‘The Trail of Lovecraft’. The reviewer notes that it also had a scholarly introduction…
An important element of the book is the compiler’s prologue, which briefly examines the phenomenon of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his influence in Venezuela.
* Of possible interest to scholars of the younger end of Lovecraft’s circle, and their intersections with emerging fandoms and genre publishing, a call for papers from the Journal of Juvenilia Studies for a special-issue on Youth Writers and Their Worlds. “Youth” here = “under the age of 21”. Deadline: 15th December 2026.
* Tentaclii’s Terrific Technical Tips (1): Amazon are no longer delivering ebooks to older Kindle ereader devices. Boo. In this situation it’s useful that some indie authors kindly allow manual download of an .ePUB version of the ebook. However, this comes to buyers as a .ZIP file. Easy to convert when you know how: simply rename the .ZIP to .ePUB, and then use the free Calibre to convert the .ePUB book to the .AWZ3 format suitable for the early e-ink Kindles.
* Tentaclii’s Terrific Technical Tips (2): Do you get sea-sick from a wobbly camera on YouTube videos? It’s possible to convert a downloaded video into a slideshow. Download a video from YouTube, install ffmpeg, tell Windows where ffmpeg is (a one-time setup), and then…
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n\,375))" output.mp4
The command inserts every 375th frame x 375 times in the resulting video, converting the wobbly video to a slideshow of static frames. At the YouTube frame-rate, this command gives you static frames at a suitable pace. Audio is unchanged, and still in sync.
* And finally, a reminder that Lovecraft’s birthday is approaching. 20th August 2026. If you need a theme or a ‘hook’ for making a bithday present, then note that 2026 is the 100th anniversary of, among others: Lovecraft’s return home to Providence from the ‘Pest Zone’; the writing of “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, his ghostwriting work for Harry Houdini, the writing of Dream-Quest; and the first publication of “The Outsider”.
— End-quotes —
Lovecraft and skyscrapers / tall towers.
“I saw for the first time the Cyclopean outlines of New-York. It was a mystical sight in the gold sun of late afternoon; a dream-thing of faint grey, outlined against a sky of faint grey smoke. City and sky were so alike that one could hardly be sure that there was a city — that the fancied towers and pinnacles were not the merest illusions.” — Lovecraft to Moe, May 1922.
“Lovecraft and I sometimes would walk across the Manhattan Bridge [in New York City], the view of the skyscrapers from various parts of the footwalk being part of artistic efforts in the letters I had written him. To me, these views were scenes in a drama which only awaited the right author to find proper appreciation. To Lovecraft, what he beheld here had secret links with a number of dreams of mysterious horror…” — “Some Lovecraft Memories”, Rheinhart Kleiner.
“… in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — Lovecraft, from “He”, a nightmare vision of the towers of a future New York City.
“The skyscraper is not essentially novel; tall buildings having been common in mediaeval Italy, while Gothic towers approximate the same atmosphere. Modernism is manifested in certain proportionings based on the new structural materials (steel frame & concrete) employed for the practical purpose of the edifices concerned. A skyscraper (following Gothic lines or employing classical ornament) can be traditional […] I don’t especially like the Empire State Bldg. — but it’s the design & not the height which alienates me. I like its tall & fantastic neighbour ten blocks north — the needle-pointed Chrysler. When buildings reach this level of height their minor differences in altitude are not striking to the eye near the ground. I can’t say that either Chrysler or Empire State looks any taller to me than the old Woolworth. I intend to go up in the Empire State this year.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, February 1932. The Woolworth building had previously been the highest in NYC.
“… at this writing I am looking out the window [from his desk at 66 College St.] into a sunset as mystically glamourous as any which could have inspired [a poem … ] some of the lights of the lower town are winking on …. [Then, later… ] The rose & green gave place to crimson & orange — one vast sea welling up from the violet horizon. And the evening star blazed over the city’s tallest tower.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, February 1935.
“From some of the hidden interior meadows — remote from every sign of nearby human life — I secured truly marvellous glimpses of the remote urban skyline [of Providence] — a dream of enchanted pinnacles & domes half-floating in air, & with an obscure aura of mystery around them. The upper windows of some of the taller towers held the fire of the sun after I had lost it, affording a spectacle of cryptic & curious glamour.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, November 1936. Lovecraft on exploring “the region west of the Neutaconkanut Hill”, which he had never penetrated before… “Just before sunset I ascended the hill by a precipitous cart-path bordering an ancient wood”.