HPLinks #95.
* NecronomiCon Providence is now less than a month away, and The Armitage Symposium 2026 wing of NecronomiCon has released details of the scholarly papers. There’s a PDF with abstracts. Titles include, among many others…
— “Correlating the Mind’s Contents: Lovecraft’s Challenge to Philosophers”.
— “From Quebec to Kadath: Echoes of Canada in Lovecraft’s Late Fiction”.
— “Cold, Circulation, and Cosmic Affect: Bodily Experience and Sensory Language in Lovecraft’s Fiction”.
— “Galahad in the Rubble: Frank Belknap Long’s Letters to Donald Wandrei, 1927–1975”.
— “A Shared Bond through Greece and Rome: Classical References in the Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”.
— “Lovecraft’s Influence on UFO/UAP Ontologies”.
— “Lovecraft and the UFO”.
— “Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches’ Sabbath”.
— “Lovecraft and Eugenics: for HPL, It was Personal”.
— “The Antipodean Weird in Lovecraft and Others”.
In the main programming for NecronomiCon, I spotted Fred Lubnow on “The Science of the Dreamlands”, and panels on “The Collectable Lovecraft” and “Librarians & Archivists in Weird Fiction”, among many more. A very rich year, by the look of it, but sadly I can’t be there. Still, hopefully recordings will surface on YouTube in due course.
* Lovecraft’s own Newport, Rhode Island, is to host an academic conference on “Oceanic Horror” in March 2027. Curiously, given the setting and theme, the call for papers neglects to mention Lovecraft. Given the current state of academia, perhaps they’re simply unaware of a Lovecraft connection? But some academics may be interested in the call. Deadline for proposals: 30th September 2026.
* New from Spain’s University of Salamanca, the open-access book Echoes of Fantasy and Reality (2026). In English. Contains, among others…
— “Alphabets For The Shadows: The Design Of Three Alphabets To Talk To The Dead”.
— “Impossible Mazes: Transmedia Representations Of The Fantastic Rhizome”.
— “Unspeakable, The Art Of Talking About Forbidden Topics Through Fantasy & Horror”.
— “A Visual Reflection On The Fantastic And Magical Realism: Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781) and Bocklin’s Triton And Nereid (1873)”.
— “The Poetics Of The Immense: Scale And Visual Metaphor In The Cinema Of Denis Villeneuve”.
— “The Long and Cinematic Shadow of the Vampire Nosferatu”.
* The new edition of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy has “Stay Strange: A Computational Stylistic Analysis of Altered Consciousness in American Science Fiction 1960–1979”. Freely available in open-access, in English. Related is the forthcoming NeconomiCon 2026 panel on “White Rabbits and Purple Haze: The Influence of the Psychedelic Era on Weird Fiction”.
* PulpFest details the contents of this year’s convention annual, in “Highlights from The Pulpster #35″.
* The scholarly annual journal Lovecraft Annual No. 20 (2026) is now listing on Amazon UK, and is set for an August 2026 release. As well as the articles and reviews, it includes… “a comprehensive index to issues 11-20.” No table-of-contents on the Hippocampus Press site as yet, but the Amazon blurb gives a flavour of the contents.
* The SpraguedeCampFan blog considers “Robert E. Howard and the American Fiction Guild”.
* A rare bit of CAS scholarship in the scholarly journal Odisea, “The Reversion of the Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of the Enchanter’ (1933)”. Freely available online, in open-access.
* I see NecronomiCon 2026’s core programming has “The Pale Song of the Butterfly Collector: Nabokov as Weird Fiction” with a focus on the fabulous novel Ada, or Ardor (1969).
* Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys “The Fantasy Novels of Clifford D. Simak – Part 1”. The is ‘the late Simak’ of the mid 1970s paperback boom, his name firmly established and newly able to have fun in the space where fantasy and science-fiction meet. Which at the time didn’t endear him to the ‘genre police’ on either side, but the mood of the times was with him.
* The University of Chicago magazine has the new long article “Wonderland”, on their magnificent Stephen D. Korshak art collection. Freely available online. The collection is online here, and also in an affordable hardcover artbook as Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection (2025).
* Launching on Kickstarter on 4th August, Deep Space Lovecraft Collected Edition. A 184-page book collecting various one-man Lovecraft comics adaptations…
reimagined as tales of a retro-futuristic spacefarer encountering and enduring the very monstrosities conjured by Lovecraft’s own tortured mind, but in the environs and technologies of deep space and adapted to the artform of comics.
The book version adds two new adaptations, of “The Outsider” and “Dagon”.
* Coming soon on the Steam gaming platform, The Steeple, a one-man indie videogame which apparently aims to be a faithful version of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”…
Explore a stylized recreation of 1935 Providence in this story-focused adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s final work.
* Keen Gamer has a long and pithy review of the new $30 videogame The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu (2026).
* From Chaosium, a new Call of Cthulhu: Innsmouth Sourcebook (2026) for table-top RPG players. Also potentially useful as reference for Mythos writers.
* Here in the UK, on stage at the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer is “Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Innsmouth Crown”.
* In Austin, USA, this summer, the promenade theatre performance “Speak No More: Lovecraft”…
Physical theatre experimenters La Fenice [offer a] silent, site-specific, and immersive drama [which unleashes] Lovecraftian secrets, through an improvised narrative that audience members will walk through.
* This year’s NecronomiCon 2026 is also very strong on theatre presentations, with far too many to list here. Note also the performance of T.L. Wiswell’s Magic Lantern show of “The Call of Cthulhu”…
The magic lantern is an early version of the slide show, with hand-painted glass plates, phosphorus lighting (replaced for safety’s sake with an incandescent bulb), and a touch of the quirky.
* In Scotland, British Horror Studio have started filming for their indie “Lovecraft-inspired, feature-length horror anthology”, For We Are Many: Lovecraft. They plan a Kickstarter release in due course.
* Talking of film, the open source and local Marlin-2B (GGUF here) is a new small lightweight video-describing AI. It may be of use to some who wish to index (rather than transcribe the audio of) large video archives or film footage. The small 5Gb size means it can run even on entry-level Nvidia 3060 12Gb graphics-cards.
* On YouTube, this summer Strange Magick is making a series of YouTube Shorts visiting Lovecraft-related places. So far he has visited the Newport round-tower, the Dark Swamp, and Neutaconkanut Hill.
* And finally, I see NecronomiCon also has “Foraging Horrors: A NecronomiCon Mushroom Walk – OFF-SITE, at Blackstone Park” by the side of the Seekonk. Sunday 16th August 2026. Which suggests the humid and warm air of Providence in mid August yields early fungi? If so, then that changes how one imagines Lovecraft in his outdoor summer letter-writing grove on the bluff above York Pond, since there would also have been early-emerging fungi? Note also the related Armitage Symposium talk “In the Absence of Light… An Assessment of Lovecraftian Non-Photosynthetic Ecosystems”, in the early morning of the same day.
— End-quotes —
The following seems somehow approprate for the advent of NecronomiCon 2026…
N’ggah-kthn-y’hhu! Cthua flh gup r’lhob-g’th’gg Igh thok! G’llh-ya, Tsathoggua! Y’kn’nh, Tsathoggua!
It hath come!
Homage, Lord Tsathoggua, Father of Night!
Glory, Elder One, First-Born of Outer Entity!
Hail, Thou Who wast Ancient beyond Memory
Ere the Stars Spawned Great Cthulhu!
Power, Hoary Crawler over Mu’s fungoid places!
Iä! Iä! G’noth-ykagga-ha!
Iä, Iä, Tsathoggua!!!
— Lovecraft, from Selected Letters III, 7th October 1930. Not included in The Ancient Track.