Monthly Archives: October 2026

HPLinks #105 – the uncanny, vampires, Jungian fear, comics, Bride of Cthulhu, and more…

22 Thursday Oct 2026

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HPLinks #105.

* A short Hungarian Masters dissertation The Shadow over New York: The Strain Vampires (2026) sees Lovecraftian themes and ideas in The Strain Vampires TV series (2014-2017). Freely available online, and it turns out to be in English.

* Narrative and the Uncanny from Hoffmann to Lovecraft: Desire and the Phantom Self (2026), a new book from Bloomsbury…

… develops an aesthetic of the uncanny that draws together elements of hauntology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and ideology. In terms that reconcile Freud’s theory of the uncanny with Lacan’s analysis of desire, he also puts forth an analysis of the uncanny in fiction that delineates the ideological implications of narrative technique.

* New and in Portuguese, the journal article “O Medo Do Desconhecido. Jung E A Compreensao Do Medo E Sua Representacao No Horror Cosmico De Lovecraft” (‘The Fear Of The Unknown: Jung’s Understanding Of Fear And Its Representation In Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror’). Freely available online.

* Also new in Portuguese, the journal article “Clausurando lo sublime en la vineta. Los cuerpos monstruosos de At the Mountains of Madness, de H.P. Lovecraft, en las adaptaciones de Gou Tanabe e I.N.P. Culbard” (‘Enclosing the sublime in the comic strip: The monstrous bodies of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, in the [graphic-novel] adaptations by Gou Tanabe and I.N.P. Culbard’). The URL is currently unresponsive, but almost all Latin American journals are open-access.

* New in the journal The Polar Journal, “Historic and scientific detail in early Antarctic speculative fiction” (captcha and $ paywall).

* The new journal article “Did communist women dislike comic books? Motherhood, communism, and moral panic in the 1950s?”. Unearths evidence that the 1950s moral panic about horror comics was in part fuelled by Soviet-aligned communist groups and their fellow travellers.

* A new issue of Mythlore, freely available online. Includes among others the article “Conservative Demons and Countercultural Creators: Hellish Societies in the Dark or Modern Age of Comics”.

* On YouTube, this year’s annual Halloween look at The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, from the REH Foundation.

* Taskerland reviews the Barlow and Lovecraft collaboration “The Hoard of the Wizard Beast”.

* Fandom Pulse on “Forgotten Legends: Robert Silverberg”, specifically Silverberg as an editor and gatekeeper.

* An unusual item on eBay, Dino Battaglia‘s Doctor Jekill & Mister Lovecraft, a 1983 ‘BD’ eurocomic with a double-bill of two tales. So it appears that it’s not “Dr. Jekyll meets Lovecraft the man”.

* On YouTube, The Rybrary recalls “My Weekend at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival”.

* A call to Register for PulpFest 2027.

* S.T. Joshi’s new blog post notes… “plans to publish the scripts of the Open Circle Theater adaptations of Lovecraft’s works”, staged decades ago in Seattle. He also notes that 65 Prospect Street (formerly 66 College Street) is now up for sale for piffling $1.25m (American house prices look so cheap, from here in the UK). Surely an amount that’s not beyond a crowd-funder, these days? And I guess it’s not impossible it could be moved again.

* An Edmund R. Whitcomb has three new chunky paperback-only books new on Amazon, Who’s Who in H.P. Lovecraft: A Guide to the Characters, Families, Scholars, Explorers, Occultists, and Narrators in His Fiction; and A Gazetteer of H.P. Lovecraft: A Guide to the Cities, Towns, Streets, Rivers, Buildings, and Other Places of Lovecraft’s Fiction; and The Lovecraft Bestiary: A Guide to the Creatures, Races, and Beings in His Fiction. The blurbs don’t reassure me that ChatGPT has not just assembled the 1000+ pages of the three volumes, which is rather off-putting. Could be the labour of a lifetime, now seeing publication at last… or could be the product of a day merrily spent burning tokens with ChatGPT? Who knows?

* And finally, an interview from the latest Providence Journal newspaper, “How an acclaimed opera singer became Providence’s Bride of Cthulhu”. No region-block or captcha for me, but you may not be so lucky.

— End-quote —

As a youth… “I acted ‘plays’ innumerable in the library at home, to the music of my own whistling — substitute for the enthralling orchestra at the Opera House. The best of my plays was Elizabethan — ‘The Tragicall Historie of ye Emperour Caracalla’. I rather shocked everyone by my ferocious delineation of the murder of Geta, the Emperor’s brother.” — Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, November 1916.

“What a second home the old Opera House used to be to me!” — Lovecraft in Letters to Family. He had also trodden the boards, when as a youth he had “slung from the stage” of the Opera House great slabs of a Shakespeare tragedy, given with “vigorous, orotund delivery”.

“Much remains to be discovered about the suggestibility of the human imagination, & this ‘occult’ business deserves minute examination. […] Of the nature of that magic, the investigations & the duplicating feats of the late Houdini give at least an opening clue. I saw him do on the stage of the Providence Opera House only a fortnight before his death things impossible according to the known laws of the physical world.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, October 1936. The Opera House had been torn down in 1931.

HPLinks #104 – dreams and paganism, the madhouse, dreamlands, prayers, and proofreading

10 Saturday Oct 2026

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HPLinks #104.

* McFarland’s website claims to have the book H.P. Lovecraft and Modern Philosophy “in stock”, though I note that Amazon UK knows nothing about the book at present. McFarland’s page for the book also indicates the contents…

    – Phenomenological and Lovecraftian Excavation of Meaning.
    – Heideggerian Ruminations and Lovecraftian Ruination.
    – Alien Dispossession in Lovecraft and ­Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Phenomenology.
    – The Genesis and Decomposition of the Self in Levinas and Lovecraft.
    – Multiple Alterities: The Weird Interpellation.
    – Welcome to the Cthulhucene.

* A new article in French in the psychiatric journal L’Evolution Psychiatrique, “Reve et creation: du phenomene onirique dans ses rapports a la fonction subjective de la creativite chez l’ecrivain HP Lovecraft et le peintre G. Garouste” (‘Dream and Creation: The Dream Phenomenon in its Relation to the Subjective Function of Creativity in the Works of the Writer H.P. Lovecraft and the Painter G. Garouste’). The article… “draws on a rigorous reading of his numerous written accounts — particularly his correspondence — regarding the function of [dreams on Lovecraft’s] artistic practice. […] notably a letter to Clark Ashton Smith” (from a Google ‘Quick Read’ AI summary, the article itself being blocked by a captcha).

* Details of a Spanish PhD thesis Revising Paganism in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (2025). This has a…

classification, description, and detailed explanation of these [pagan] elements and their origins in the anthropology of his time [plus a survey of the] influence that paganism had on the genesis of his pantheon of fictional deities and his mythopoetic cosmogony”, and goes on to suggest parallels with modern pagan notions such as cyclical time.

* The journal Studies in Gothic Fiction appears to have left Cardiff University Press (no longer listed on their journals page, website dead). But Cardiff’s online repository now has Studies in Gothic Fiction 7, seemingly newly out-of-embargo and available under Creative Commons. This was a Lovecraft special issue. No unified TOCs for this issue, regrettably, but search reveals…

    – Introduction: adapting Lovecraft in weird times.
    – Weird experience: transformations of space/place in Lovecraftian LARP.
    – Narrative archaeology: excavating object encounter in Lovecraftian video games.
    – Gamifying fictions of defeat: adaptations of Lovecraft to games media.
    – Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic monstrosities (book review).
    – “‘His madness held no affinity’: reimagining Arkham Asylum”, from which…

The Gothic madhouse present in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction is not a dimly lit padded cell situated in a former manor house. Rather, Lovecraft gives little description to his mental hospitals, which is curious given the many narrators who end up in such institutions. […] this article compares the depiction of asylums in two fictions by Lovecraft: “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919), and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933), considered alongside [Batman in the form of] Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), and Dan Slott’s serial Arkham Asylum: Living Hell (2004).

* Ginger Nuts of Horror has a new review of the recent Welsh Mythos anthology, Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country Review.

* According to the latest Locus magazine, PS Publishing have the Darrell Schweitzer edited anthology Lovecraft’s Dreamlands set for November 2026. I also see PS has Robert Silverberg’s Ghosts and Things due in October 2026, a follow on from his Monsters and Things collection. Neither book has details on PS’s forthcoming titles page, as yet.

* Deep Cuts digs up another post-Lovecraft lost tale from the pulps, this being the EC-horror comics-like tale “Fiend of Fire” (1952) by Eando Binder… “it has never been included in collections of the Binders’ pulp fiction, as far as I’ve been able to determine”.

* In the latest Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, “Documenting Fandom: A Content Analysis of 1970s American Comics Prozines” (open-access, but blocked by a captcha)

* This week DMR surveys Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe.

* A relative newcomer to DeviantArt, Mark Fuller Dillon is posting fine old pulp illustrations and golden-age paperback covers, along with a few classic comic-book covers, and he now has over 500 items.

* Eldritch Prayers I: An Anthology of Cthulhu Mythos Poetry and Art appeared in 2025. Duotrope’s Submission Manager Platform currently has details of what appears to be Eldritch Prayers II (Cthulhu Mythos Poetry Anthology). With a stated June 2027 opening date for submissions, and some details…

… we are going to try using Kickstarter with stretch goals to increase the payment to the poets. We hope to have the book ready to print by the end of the Kickstarter Campaign (October [2027?] with Halloween in everyone’s minds).

* And finally, Bethaniel is an excellent freeware offline copy-editor and proof-reader. On testing I find it handles a 60,000 word novel in an hour without problems, and also interfaces very sweetly with Microsoft Word. If you run a strict firewall, on install you need to lower the firewall to get both the .GGUF and the Llama.cpp CUDA models to install. It’s one of those annoying ‘install and then have the software silently download Gb’s of unknown models, to make it work’ bits of software. But it’s fine once it’s working, and it will then run on your GPU rather than CPU… assuming you have a graphics card with 12Gb VRAM or more. Bethaniel is of course verboten to the anti-AI zealots, but may be a god-send if you have very long texts to fix.

— End-quote —

Lovecraft on proofreading.

“… our good old friend W. Paul Cook of the Recluse Press — and boy! how he did back me up! In the face of all sorts of troubles and delays and blunders on the part of his office force, he turned out what is undoubtedly the finest piece of bookmaking ever produced in amateur journalism; so that he really ought to have had an equal share in the dedication. Above all, he was ineffably patient with my hyper-critical proofreading, so that we have produced that rarest of literary marvels — a volume absolutely without typographical errors.” — Lovecraft to Talman, June 1928, on producing a posthumous book of the poetry of the Anglo-Canadian poet and fellow amateur journalist John Ravenor Bullen.

“Thanks for the set of proofreading symbols — which I am filing in my professional department beside the other card you so kindly sent. Wish I could get a chance to turn proofreading to financial advantage!” — Lovecraft to Talman, dated October 1932 in Selected Letters IV, but possibly mis-dated from 1931 (see quote below).

“I suppose proof-reading is merely a light indoor sport with you [i.e. with Derleth] …. yet at that one has to keep a sharp eye open for tricky, almost imperceptible errors. My biggest job in that line was the Dartmouth College history which I did (making certain revisions in the proofs) in the autumn of 1931.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, January 1934.

“Just now all my writing is in abeyance [due to] the large book job which I went to Hartford to [learn about, it involves] revision and proofreading (aided by your chart of symbols) of a long history of Dartmouth College — and I may add that it has kept me tied down for a fortnight with a concentration which may or may not have been responsible for the sick-headache-and-bum-digestion spell out of which I am only just now pulling. I finished the damn thing last Tuesday, and got it off by parcel post Friday.” — Lovecraft to Talman, October 1931. The book was the History of Dartmouth College, 1932, and Lovecraft was paid only $50 for the work.

HPLinks #103 – 10,000 Stars, Joshi on the letters, Le Monde edition, and more…

01 Thursday Oct 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #103.

* The unfinished documentary Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right has been funded on Greenlit, albeit with only £10,000 of the target £20,000. It seems a target doesn’t have to be hit for Greenlit to release the funds? Good to know.

This is the first film ever made about H.P. Lovecraft — and almost no one has seen it. Shot in 1989–90, it features unique interviews with Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues. It has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years.

* S.T. Joshi has republished his 1982 Starmont introductory book on Lovecraft as an budget-priced ebook… “under the title H.P. Lovecraft: A Short Critical Analysis and …

In this edition I have added my lengthy discussion of Lovecraft’s correspondence (“A Look at Lovecraft’s Letters”).

* Joshi’s latest blog post also notes a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ novel, albeit in Italian. “Stefano Varanelli has written a novel about Lovecraft and Houdini”, Sotto la Piramide (2026). The author is an accomplished TV writer in Italy. A translation of a blurb accompanying a podcast interview with the author (spoilers) reveals the framing…

The year is 1927. After months of mourning the sudden death of his wife, Bess, Harry Houdini reconnects with an old associate: H.P. Lovecraft. Orphaned and recently expelled from boarding school for very good reasons, Houdini’s niece Anna finds herself unwillingly swept up in the adventures of Houdini and Lovecraft, who become — albeit imperfect — surrogate father figures to her. Invited to a coastal Rhode Island manor, this mismatched trio must piece together a centuries-old chain of events surrounding the disappearance of the estate’s owner, the inventor and entrepreneur Randolph Baxter. […] The novel balances between historical reality — known in detail yet also the stuff of dreams — and fantasy, fueled by the genre’s conventions as well as by true history.

* A new PhD thesis from Manchester Metropolitan University, England, Towards a Weird Hydropoetics: Hybridity, Thalassophobia, and Transcorporeality in Modern and Contemporary Oceanic Weird Fiction (2026). The first half of the thesis looks at the history of “The Weird and the Sea”, and then in this light examines Lovecraft’s tales “Cthulhu” and Innsmouth”. Freely available online.

* The French newspaper Le Monde has an article noting new books of Lovecraft’s tales. It’s a shallow example of the typical hasty journalist’s potted ‘Lovecraft for absolute beginners’ article. But it usefully makes me aware of a substantial new French edition of Lovecraft. The collection being noted turns out to be published by the newspaper as a set, with the books seemingly using the text of the recent and acclaimed new translation — but here issued as a handsome but affordable multi-volume set. Of most interest to English-speaking readers will be the artwork extras, such as the accompanying poster and prints sets.

Le Monde also has a short interview with the cover artist Tomas Hijo…

I like to think that my illustrations capture something of the brutality and naivety of those early images [in pulp magazines, yet at the same time Lovecraft’s imagination evokes] … impossible geometries, nonexistent colors, illogical structures [so…] I wanted to draw on certain now-traditional representations of the bestiary and transpose them into a universe of unsettling shapes and colors, which suggest these qualities described by Lovecraft. [The linocut style was chosen to work for] “stories full of grimoires, ancient manuscripts, and works that one can easily imagine being illustrated using a technique of this kind, like medieval codices.

* Jason Thompson, who made a fine complete graphic novel of Lovecraft’s Dream Quest along with a Dreamlands wall-map, has a new book due in 2027. Dungeons! Illustrated Maps of Classic Dungeons & Dragons Adventures.

* New from McFarland, the book Myth and Fabulation in the Fantasy Fiction of Neil Gaiman, which started life as a 2012 French PhD thesis. The blurb suggests it may overlook Lovecraft as a key influence, though…

Available in English for the first time, this wide-ranging critical study examines Neil Gaiman’s fiction through the lenses of intertextuality, metafiction, and cultural context. Informed by comics, novels, short stories, and film, Camus situates Gaiman’s oeuvre within a literary network that includes Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Philip Jose Farmer, Jack Kirby, and Winsor McCay. The study explores how myth operates across Gaiman’s fiction as both an inherited narrative and an evolving cultural practice, shaping the meaning and structure of his works.

* Florida’s 48th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts has the theme “Fantastic Appetites” and is now calling for papers, with “hunger for knowledge” being one the suggested themes. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* Coming this weekend, the 2026 International Edgar Allan Poe Festival. Tickets still available.

* Jules Burt has a YouTube tour of the recent Innsmouth Literary Festival, a gathering of UK Mythos writers…

We tour the dealers room and have a close look at the tables of Dorset Bob and many other exhibitors and authors. We get to interview artist Les Edwards, editor and publisher Trevor Kennedy and author and editor Stephen Jones.

* Some advance details of a ‘sound novel’ videogame of “Ex Oblivione — Lovecraft’s 1921 text, dreamed six ways”.

H.P. Lovecraft’s prose poem of the same name, read in full, and then dreamed five more times. Each dream retells the same eleven paragraphs, and each takes one of the senses away, in the order the Tibetan Book of the Dead gives for dying. There is no combat and there are no puzzles. There is text, a voice (Lani Minella narrates every dream), and a dark ambient score by Last Offices that dissolves along with the senses. It comes to Steam in 2027, with a demo during Steam Next Fest in February. Follow here for news, and for glimpses of how a sound novel is built.

* Taskerland considers “The Slaying of the Monster: Lovecraft, Barlow and a Misread Protege”…

Written during the autumn of 1933, “The Slaying of the Monster” (full text) is only six paragraphs long and appears not to have been formally published until the mid-1990s when an effort was being made to exhume all of the work to which Lovecraft had contributed. The story is insubstantial and its author thought so little of it that he never got round to submitting it for publication, but it is biographically significant as the first official collaboration between Lovecraft and the boy who would eventually be selected as his literary executor.

* Brett Rutherford has personally uploaded his poetry collection An Expectation Of Presences to Archive.org under Creative Commons. Including poems such as “H.P. Lovecraft at the Newsstand”.

* Also new on Archive.org, a newly uploaded 20-issue archive of Starlog’s spin-off magazine Future Life, from the late 1970s/early 1980s. Sadly it passed me by at the time, perhaps because it was never distributed here in the UK? But I see it had a 31-issue run, showcasing cosmic optimism rather than cosmic horror. As such it seems an interesting view of a moment when some tried to push back against the doomsters. (Update: Thanks to John Coulthart, who points me to the full run of 31 issues).

* Talking of vintage publications, eBay currently has the 1997 Cyber Cthulhu Calendar issued by the Lovecraft band The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets. With sample images (various artists in b&w).

* Reel & Rock is waiting for the bus with H.P. Lovecraft.

* Chaosium invites you to submit questions for the forthcoming official podcast on the new Encyclopedia Cthulhiana edition… “Our host Bridgett Jeffries will be talking with Encyclopedia Cthulhiana author Dan Harms.”

* Currently on Humble Bundle (software bundles sold for charity), STL Lovecraftian Miniatures Mega Bundle. Collections of digital files for 3D printable miniature figures, intended for Lovecraftian tabletop adventures. STL also have a current Kickstarter for their forthcoming collection “Worshippers of the Waning Moon” (Leng in the Dreamlands: Moon-Beasts, Men of Leng, investigators, and the High Priest Nyarlathotep). You need a 3D printer for these, though I imagine the .STLs will load in any good 3D editor, and then a grey render could be used as a reference image for generative AI.

* The excellent new generative video model Minimax H3 now has a 1920s horror LoRA along with an ‘aged film’ slider LoRA (two variants, oxidisation or scratches). LoRAs help guide the video generation onto the style you want, in combination with your text prompt. All free, as is the way with local AI.

* And finally, eBay has a picture new to me of the Arcade in Providence, one of Lovecraft’s favourite places in childhood and later. The image provides a context I wasn’t previously aware of – right next door was the twice-daily + Sunday newspaper the Providence Daily Tribune. The young Lovecraft published astronomy articles in the newspaper.

— End-quote —

The young Lovecraft is saved from a watery suicide in the Seekonk, by the Providence Daily Tribune… “[19]06 …. or very possibly, ’07. About then I had a nervous breakdown (winter ’05-’06) & had to stay out of school for months, & my lack of energy stopped my even thinking about anything. Then the Providence Tribune was founded, & I learned that I had a good chance of breaking into print at last … contributing monthly astronomical articles just like Prof. Upton’s [of the Observatory] in the [Providence] Journal & Bulletin. One couldn’t miss a chance like that! Let suicide wait! And the articles landed…” — Lovecraft to Vernon Shea, February 1934. The articles can be found in Collected Essays: Science.