HPLinks #106.
* In Spain, this year’s sixth edition of Barcelona’s 42 Festival of Fantastic Genres has a ‘Convencio Lovecraftcon’ day embedded within it. This appears to be centred around three panel discussions including “Lovecraft’s legacy in contemporary horror fiction”…
… why does this fascination remain so intense a whole century later? Even those who do not consider themselves influenced by his work inevitably end up engaging in dialogue with it in some way or another.
* The French magazine Elements interviews Aristide Leucate, author of a new French book of essays on Lovecraft. The interview is freely available online, in French…
Who truly knows Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), the penniless gentleman from Providence, more English than the English, more European than the Europeans, an aristocrat without a castle, a materialist haunted by the gods, a faux misanthrope who spent his life corresponding with his friends? In ‘Lovecraft: Modernity in Horror’ (La Nouvelle Librairie/Institut Iliade), Aristide Leucate, with his erudite and lively prose, leads us to discover an anti-modern thinker, steeped in Spengler, who saw industrial and commercial civilization as a form of barbarism. Essential reading.
* An abstract for an embargoed dissertation, “Tentacular web: adapting Lovecraftian worlds in film, television and games” (2026)…
puts forward the idea that they should not be considered just in themselves, but as part of a wider web of Lovecraft-inspired worldbuilding [… and, as we move forwards in history] complete faithfulness to the texts and media of the past should not be required in an adaptation within the cosmic horror genre.
* From the University of South Bohemia, a dissertation on “Lovecraftian Horror in Modern Visual Adaptations: Film, Video Games, and Manga as Media of Cosmic Dread” (2026). In English, and freely available online.
* In the journal Neohelicon, “A Genre Beyond Theory: The fantastic in history” (2026) ($ paywall)…
… a distinct, self-aware literary genre known as the fantastic, or rather le fantastique, did in fact emerge in France in the 1830s, catalyzed by the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works. [Such historical context is necessary for clarity in current academic thinking, evidenced by the] problematic absence — or superficial treatment — of the fantastic in contemporary scholarship on the gothic and the weird [… a] transgeneric approach would prove more fruitful when investigating nineteenth-century non-realistic and/or supernatural literature.
* An abstract for a 2026 conference paper, “Literature Both Wonderful and Strange: The Uncanny and the Familiar in Finnish Weird”.
* Zines & Teaching is a proposed edited collection of chapters, and the editors are now calling for proposals. They want to gather… “some of the many good ideas about how zines can fit into modern courses and how teachers and librarians can do zine-making right”, which also raising their student’s awareness of the historical contexts of zine culture.
* A proposed edited collection of chapters is now calling for proposals on Discarded Biological Ideas in Scientific Fiction, c. 1825 – c. 1925: From Poe to Gernsback.
* Seemingly in stock in France, the artbook Armel Gaulme’s Les Archives Lovecraft (Bragelonne 2024, 325 pages, foreword by Guillermo del Toro).
* SpraguedeCampfan considers “People of the Dark” by Robert E. Howard.
* Deep Cuts digs deep for Halloween and unearths… Tsathoggua! Specifically the fan-fiction “The Coming of Tsathoggua” (1951) by Herman Stowell King. Published in the fanzine Peon #17 (January 1951), and possibly due to this… “his particular contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos seems unusually overlooked”.
* Now on Kickstarter, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” by Nick O’Gorman with an adaptor’s emphasis on High as in ‘high on drugs’…
Acclaimed horror artist Nick O’Gorman returns with his eighth annual Lovecraft adaptation, a 24-page [comic-book] psychedelic ascension into the unknown. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s haunting tale “The Strange High House in the Mist,” this latest adaptation takes us to the rocky cliffs and craggy shores of Kingsport…
* Various little snippets of Lovecraft-related Halloween art are being posted, aided by Inktober 2026. A “what if Jack Kirby drew Cthulhu?” item especially drew my eye. Though Kirby would have penned far more dynamic holding lines.
* At Itch.io, Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: 16-Bit Dream Edition, being Dream-Quest presented in a retro pixel-art videogame that plays in your Web browser. There’s apparently a side-quest where the player visits Innsmouth.
* The Hardboiled GMshoe’s Office interviews David Okum on his new Pulp Inc. RPG game expansion Eldritch Horror.
* A little music-video I made for a Halloween screening, “Barrow”.
* M.R. James ghost stories are adapted in a new eight-story comics anthology, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: The Compendium (2026).
* And finally, talking of ghosts rising from the sidewalk, from eBay comes this unusual 1921 photograph of the area in front of Borough Hall, Brooklyn.
By the mid 1920s the steps and nearby benches were a regular after-hours haunt of… “the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section” (Lovecraft). This setting became a minor feature of his New York tale “The Horror At Red Hook”… “One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall.” [While the adjacent] “Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall”. It is at Borough Hall that Suydam is first noticed… “loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers”.
On a happier note, it was up these steps that the soon-to-be Mr and Mrs Lovecraft once bounded… “The [marriage] license stuff? Dead easy! We beat it to the Brooklyn borough hall, and got the papers with all the coolness and savoir faire of old campaigners. … you ought to have seen your old Grandpa, Sonny! Brigham Young annexing his 27th, or King Solomon starting in on the second thousand, had nothing on the Old Gentleman for languid fluency and casual conversation!” (Lovecraft).
The picture is by Brooklyn’s official jobbing photographer E.E. Rutter. A purely documentary photographer it seems, but do we see a touch of commentary in the spider’s web pattern reflecting the web of power and corruption emanating from city hall in the 1920s? For what it’s worth, alongside this image were two of Coney Island creek from the same period, which may interest Mythos RPG makers seeking a Coney Island setting and supporting period images: creek 1 and creek 2.
