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HPLinks #63 – HPL in Korea and Mexico, Horrorbabble’s HPL megababble, Roerich, and more.

14 Friday Nov 2025

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HPLinks #63.

* In the Books pages of The Korea Times newspaper, “Lovecraft’s madness finds new form in three Korean books”. Freely available online..

“Honford Star, one of the leading publishing houses for translated speculative Korean fiction, has released three books filled with daring tales under the Lovecraft Reanimated Project. They pay tribute to the American writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) […] two novellas and a graphic novel”

* Mexico had a large Gothic Fan Fest a few weeks ago, with ‘Poe & Lovecraft’ as the 2025 theme.

* PulpFest 2026, now calling for attendees to “Register for PulpFest 2026”.

* The venerable audiobook maker Horrorbabble has released Lovecraft’s Complete Cthulhu Mythos: Expanded Audiovisual Edition 2025. Free on YouTube.

* The new fundraiser to conserve the Robert E. Howard house for future generations is already now a quarter of the way to its goal, having raised $25k of the required $100k.

* DMR considers the maps for R.E. Howard’s Kull. This is a “part one” post, so more parts are coming.

* Dyerbolical has a new appreciation of the double-bill b-movie Die, Monster, Die!” (1965)… “When H.P. Lovecraft Invaded British Soil and Boris Karloff Became Cosmic Horror’s Last Gentleman”.

* Talking of horror movies I see that the next movie from film director Luc Besson (Fifth Element, Valerian) will be Dracula. It’s missed a Halloween release, but is apparently set for Christmas 2025. Sadly it’s been ‘re-imagined’ as more of a romantic love story than horror, and Besson says he’s not much interested in horror as a genre.

But I guess Besson is lucky to be able to make a film at all, after the huge flop of his $250m spectacular space opera Valerian. Which some may recall for being bloated with cringy ‘love interest’ and unaccountably lumbered with a mumbling and wooden lead-actor. Note however, that there is a fan-edit titled Valerian: No Love Lost Edition, which is said to more or less rescue the film.

* And talking of rising from the dead… popping up on Archive.org is Totem. This was yet another of those 1970s European comics magazine, akin to Heavy Metal. How many of these eurocomic monthly magazines were there? Anyway, the run of Totem is on Archive.org, offering another source of vintage fantasy, horror and sci-fi illustration.

* Rob Hansen’s weighty history THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 has a new 2024 edition, “corrected and updated”.

* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal Penumbra has published the 2025 edition.

* 70 years on, The Blog Without a Face appreciates Ray Bradbury’s The October Country in “70 Years Buried”.

* A $25 charity fundraiser for the videogames Sinking City Remastered and a bunch of the Sherlock Classics including the Lovecraftian The Awakened. A quality bundle, and the offer has two weeks to run. The charity being helped is the Malala Fund, which supports schooling for girls in cultures which frown on such things.

* Stable Diffusion image-makers may want to know about the new Nicholas Roerich Style for SDXL, available as a free LoRA (i.e. a style-guidance plugin). Readers will recall that Roerich was near the top of the list of Lovecraft’s favorite artists.

* Talking of AI, I find that Stable Audio Open can after all do human vocalisations. I recall that when I first installed it I had tried in some awkward way to get it to output text-to-speech, and had concluded that it had only ingested the non-human field recordings from Freesound. I was wrong. Thus makers of films, games, enhanced audiobooks and suchlike can indeed use this for generating royalty-free human utterance sounds (e.g. “shambling zombie moans horribly”). The 6Gb portable version takes about five minutes to load up on Windows 11, but thereafter does work… so long as you have a decent graphics-card (a NVIDIA 3060 12Gb or better).

* And finally, The Notes & Commonplace Book employed by the late H.P. Lovecraft (1938), in good clean plain-text on Wikisource.

— End-quotes —

“… good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone [New York City]. There is something in his handling of perspective & atmosphere which to me suggests other dimensions & alien orders of being — or at least, the gateways leading to such. Those fantastic carven stones in lonely upland deserts — those ominous, almost sentient, lines of jagged pinnacles — & above all, those curious cubical edifices clinging to precipitous slopes & edging upward to forbidden needle-like peaks!” — Lovecraft to James F. Morton, March 1937.

“Possibly I have mentioned to you at various times my admiration for the work of Nicholas Roerich — the mystical Russian artist who has devoted his life to the study & portrayal of the unknown uplands of Central Asia, with their vague suggestions of cosmic wonder & terror … surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time, & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen.” — Lovecraft to his aunt Lillian D. Clark, 21st/22nd May 1930.

“I live in such worlds of endurable memory & dream & cosmic expansion & escape as my feeble creative powers are able to devise for me — always staving off the suicide-line by illusions of some future ability to get down on paper that quintessence of adventurous expectancy which the sight of a sunset beyond strange towers, or a little farmhouse against a rocky hill, or a rocky monolith in Leng as drawn by Nicholas Roerich, invariably excites within me. I don’t believe, intellectually, that I can ever do it — but it is consoling to imagine that I might, through some accident.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.

Bargain letters

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

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A small Lovecraft Library for sale in the UK, on eBay. Including some bargain books of letters, and also an expensive copy of the firmly out-of-print graphic novel Some Notes on a Non-Entity: The Life of H P. Lovecraft. I’d have had two of the books of letters at £13 each, but sadly the seller doesn’t offer “Click & Collect” on purchases. Potential buyers should know that the Kleiner and Galpin letters were later published as expanded editions — the ones for sale here are likely the earlier editions.

HPLinks #62 – Lovecraft the interior designer, new CAS biography, a prop Necronomicon, musical fungi and more…

06 Thursday Nov 2025

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HPLinks #62.

* New from Argentina, “El interiorismo del afuera en H.P. Lovecraft”. Freely available online, in Spanish.

In certain stories [by Lovecraft], it is possible to identify his careful attention to the specialized language associated with fine arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Its precision and abundance, as I propose in this article, is an attempt to bridge the gap between the artifacts and their perception that becomes a description by narrators and characters. The cultivation of this artistic knowledge, which is also expressed in his essayistic and epistolary corpus, allows us to consider Lovecraft as a well-versed interior decorator …

Offering some historical context here is the new exhibition review, “The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home”…

This engaging exhibition told the stories of four men — “bachelors” — who devoted themselves to designing their homes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New England. The exhibition beautifully displayed well-selected objects from the men’s homes and contextualized them with archival materials. An eloquent, witty accompanying book devotes chapters to each of their stories. […] they are situated in late nineteenth-century ‘bachelor culture’, which celebrated unmarried men and homosocial life within carefully crafted, comfortable, highly designed domiciles.”

* In the new edition of the journal Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, “Strange associates: Weird affect, weird fiction and the weird short story”. Freely available online.

… this paper investigates weird fiction’s relationship with the short story, and argues that the short story is perhaps the most ‘natural’ form for the weird.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog reports that he has finished his forthcoming Clark Ashton Smith biography. It weighs in at 164,000 words, so is presumably likely to appear in two volumes. “Will be published in the summer of 2026 by Hippocampus Press”.

* At Law and Liberty magazine, a Halloween article “Poe, Forevermore”. Freely available online.

* “Local librarian nominated for fantasy fiction award”… “The Dagon Collection is an anthology published as a fake 1929 auction catalog of items from a federal raid on the Esoteric Order of Dagon cult.”

* For Halloween, LibriVox offered its latest free audiobook collection Short Ghost and Horror Collection 080. The collection led with Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, closely followed by his “Cool Air”. Also includes tales by August Derleth and the Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.

* In videogames… Games Industry Ecosystem reports the “The producer of the first Diablo [game] has raised $500,000″ from an investment firm… “to develop Innsmouth Mysteries — a cooperative RPG [videogame] with elements of horror and extraction games, whose storyline is inspired by “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

* In comic-books, Pullbox reviews the one-off The Cats of Ulthar, a Tale Reimagined (for children). With interior page images.

* H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025 poster, now available. Plus the streaming dates in December 2025.

* From Australia, a new Lovecraft miniature to buy…

* Archive.org has a new set of screen-captures of Lot #54 – Necronomicon. Being auction images for a sophisticated movie-prop Necronomicon used in the movie Army of Darkness.

* And finally, Fungi music, in which British art-boffins wire up live fungi and have them play musical synths.

— End-quotes —

“I seldom notice what the cover-design of any cheap magazine is. Only once in an age does anything worth a second glance appear. If Wright [editor of Weird Tales] were to use a really effective weird design the bulk of his half-illiterate readers wouldn’t know what it was all about, and would write scornful and ungrammatical letters to the Eyrie.” — Lovecraft to Conover, September 1936.

“Not many of us, even in this age, have any marked leaning toward public pornography; so that we would generally welcome any agency calculated to banish offences against good taste. But when we come to reflect on the problem of enforcement, and perceive how absurdly any censorship places us in the hands of dogmatic and arbitrary officials with Puritan illusions and no true knowledge of life or literary values, we have to acknowledge that absolute liberty is the lesser evil. [Their recent actions show that] censors actually do seek to remove legitimate and essential matter [… And yet] ironically enough, this same censorship blandly tolerates, through legal technicalities, infinite sewers full of frankly and frivolously nasty drivel without the least pretence of aesthetic or intellectual significance.” — Lovecraft in The National Amateur, March 1924.

“I don’t know as it does much good to interfere with the vices & vulgarities of plebeians [through censorship]. The sooner they go to the devil, the sooner they’ll die off, gordam ’em.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1927. Lovecraft deftly anticipates the current state of pornography + birth-rate demography.

“I’ll endorse a censorship [of art and literature only after] the Watch and Ward Society have disposed of the blunders of Eddie Guest and of the designers of houses and public buildings of the 1860-1890 period. There is some ugliness that ought to be abolished by law in the interest of the good life! Down with French roofs and imitation Norman Gothic ….. keep the children from the degrading contamination of scroll-saw porch trimmings and octagonal cupolas and Richardsonian quasi-Romanesque ….. fie on the immortality of cast-iron lawn deer!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1931. The Watch and Ward Society were a notorious pro-censorship group based in Boston, New England. Eddie Guest was probably Edgar Albert Guest, the sentimental popular poet then known as “the People’s Poet”.

HPLinks #61 – unpublished Lovecraft postcards, McNeil’s books, Lovecraft in Florida film, comics, and more…

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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HPLinks #61.

* New on eBay, two postcards from Lovecraft and one from his friend Everett McNeil (then very elderly, on his way to Tacoma and thus weeks from death), all sent to Talman.

   i) The card on the left is unpublished, judging by the internal dating: Talman appears to be honeymooning in New York City, “Poor old Mac is going west Oct 20”, and Lovecraft gives Talman his Barnes St. phone number (“DExter 9617”) in anticipation of a visit from the newlyweds.

   ii) Also unpublished. Everett McNeil offers the useful information “I have left behind me most of my books”, and we also get the exact Tacoma address he had moved to. No mention of where all his Lovecraft letters (still missing, today) were, though. It sounds to me like he was keeping the rent paid on his New York flat for a few months, just in case of a return, and that the Lovecraft letters were likely there along with the books. But then the flat would have been cleared after his sudden death. Presumably any New York bookdealer and/or family members would have had no idea of the $$$s they were throwing away, as they discarded what would now be perhaps a million dollars worth of letters. Note that this flat was not the Hell’s Kitchen flat where the Kalems met, but a new one he had for a short time due to some unexpected book royalties… “in Astoria at the foot of Ditmars Blvd.”

   iii) The 1929 Lovecraft card is partly unpublished. Letters to Wilfred B. Talman only has it (p. 119) as a brief excerpt, as previously printed in The Normal Lovecraft.

* Newly listed on the HPLHS Store, Ken Faig Jr’s new scholarly essay collection More Lovecraftian People and Places (2025).

* We’re still waiting for the long-awaited Lovecraft in Florida (the book), but for now there’s a completed Lovecraft in Florida (the screen documentary)… “Mike T. Lyddon’s new short documentary film Lovecraft in Florida is now in the mix for the 2025 – 2026 film festival season.” This appears to be unrelated to its namesake book, except via the topic.

* A Reddit review of the CD of The Curious Sea Shanties of Innsmouth.

* Freely available online, the “Blood and Insight: Monstrosity in Bloodborne” (2021). Originally in a small journal from the Gothic Studies crowd that appears to now be defunct, with its website dead — Aetemum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. The article has this week popped up again on HCommons.org. The author makes special reference to Lovecraft in videogames.

* Everything Theatre has a theatre review of a recent staging of H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” at the Old Red Lion Theatre, London. The staging had a 1920s setting, and it sounds like the show was a fine success.

* For Halloween DMR Books blog outlines “The Long Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe”.

* Decadent Serpent has a long footnoted essay on “Horror To Some Purpose: H.P. Lovecraft and Colin Wilson”. Freely available online.

* Blavatsky News has a Halloween post on “Blavatsky & H.P. Lovecraft”. Who knew that… “Blavatsky herself penned some intriguing occult tales, published in Theosophical magazines, gathered in [the collection] Nightmare Tales”. Actually, now… there’s an interesting starting hook for an alt-history fiction: the head of the Theosophist Soc. hires Lovecraft as Blavatsky’s ghost-writer circa 1931 (literally her ghost-writer, as she died in 1891), at a price he can’t resist. Then, as he takes a long wished-for trip to Britain on the handsome proceeds, her spirit actually starts to contact him from the great beyond.

* A new “Lovecraft-inspired” one-off 33-page comic-book of the First World War in Europe, “Whispers Beyond the Trench”. Is that an alt-history Lovecraft on the cover, joined up and shipped to France? Only Kickstarter backers get to find out, it seems. Since that’s the only way to get the comic.

* The Weird Tales brand is set to offer a new comics anthology via Kickstarter. Sadly it’s not a set of linked true-life tales and poignant biographical vignettes drawn from the magazine’s rich publishing history. But rather a collection of new horror strips containing, among others, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Skulls in the Stars” novella, plus two Mythos tales by modern writers.

* The Online Review of Rhode Island History this week has a new page of Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916. Photos from the City Hall, not of the City Hall. One of these reveals something I’d never noticed… “In the upper window of the Market House is the Masonic symbol.” Removed, after it became the Board of Trade house. Also interesting to know is that the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Providence served as a substantial membership library, having… “a 4,000-book library with 70 daily and weekly newspapers”. One wonders if similar libraries were part of the attraction of YMCAs, for Lovecraft on his travels?

* Por Por boggles at some of the (other) figures in Penthouse magazine for October 1978… “This October issue of Penthouse had a lengthy article, ‘Science Fiction Fever,’ by journalist Tom Nolan. The article covers the science fiction boom then sweeping the popular culture.” The post reminds today’s readers of the power of print SF publishing in those days, with Penthouse revealing that Starlog magazine was circulating 500,000 copies per issue, and Bantam Books had sold 17 million Ray Bradbury paperbacks.

* The Shadowed Circle has published a “50th Anniversary Edition” of Gangland’s Doom (1974), one of the first non-fiction books on the long-running pulp magazine character The Shadow.

* In Chicago, the large art exhibition Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination, on now at The Art Institute of Chicago.

* And finally… thinking of fleeing the UK, before the tragic Autumn Budget announcements? I see the increasingly popular expat destination of Dubai now has a special museum and cafe to make fantasy fans feel welcome, Legendarium Fantastic Museum Dubai. The slick website alone is impressive, and gives a crisp and colourful view of the themed exhibit rooms.

— End-quotes —

“That metropolis [New York City in 1922, when Lovecraft first saw it and was not yet disenchanted] wouldn’t be much without honest old Mac! And because it is [now] a vision-metropolis; “out of space, out of time”, and without linkage to the mundane, the material, and the perishable; it indeed never need be without him. Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces, and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod [as a] phantom among phantoms…” — Lovecraft fondly recalling his passed-way friend Everett McNeil.

In the notorious Hell’s Kitchen slum, McNeil’s… “little flat [is] an oasis of neatness and wholesomeness with its quaint, homely pictures, rows of simple books, and curious mechanical devices which his ingenuity concocted to aid his work — lap boards, files, etc., etc. [Due to poverty, for many years] He lived on meagre rations of canned soup and crackers,” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 114.

“I recall the first time I saw him — at Dench’s, by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [by the old then-rural Dutch ‘marsh country’ of New York City]. He used to like to go there […] And I recall how he shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination […] and through it all the little white-haired guide plodding along with his simple, idyllic dreams of sunny Wisconsin farm-worlds, and green, beckoning, boy-adventure worlds…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 94. McNeil was a farm-boy from Dunkirk Township, Wisconsin. He upped and walked to New York to seek his fortune, aged 32. He achieved success as a professional writer there from 1906 onwards, got into the movies and then became one of the best-known writers of historical-adventure books for boys. Despite this his publisher Dutton trapped him into a series of what Lovecraft called “vile starvation contracts”.

“And I remember when good old Mac display’d Hell’s Kitchen to Little Belknap and me — a first glimpse for both of us. Morbid nightmare aisles of odorous Abaddon-labyrinths and Phlegethontic shores — accursed hashish-dreams of endless brick walls budging and bursting with viscous abominations and staring insanely with bleared, geometrical patterns of windows — confused rivers of elemental, simian life with half-Nordic faces twisted and grotesque in the evil flare of bonfires set to signal the nameless gods of dark stars — sinister pigeon-breeders on the flat roofs of unclean teocallis, sending out birds of space with blasphemous messages for the black, elder gods of the cosmic void — death and menace behind furtive doors […] fumes of hellish brews concocted in obscene crypts…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 122.

My detailed biography of McNeil is titled Good Old Mac.

HPLinks #60 – new guide to Lovecraft’s Providence, Arcturus, a Jungian Mythos, Icons and more…

22 Wednesday Oct 2025

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HPLinks #60.

S.T. Joshi’s Blog brings news of the English translation of A Guide to Lovecraft’s Providence… “a 131-page booklet with numerous full-colour illustrations of important sites relating to Lovecraft in his native city.” The Amazon blurb reveals it to be the product of… “four tours carefully prepared on the spot, original maps and photos, quotes, biographical, historical, and topographical references to accompany you step by step on the tracks of Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. Available now as a paperback.

* Now officially free on Archive.org, Murray Ewing’s new biography I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay. Author of A Voyage to Arcturus (2025). Also available for purchase in hardback.

* A forthcoming book in French will attempt to answer the question… “How could an obscure ultra-conservative writer, born one hundred and thirty years ago, become omnipresent and central in current pop culture?”, seemingly via a broad 500-page survey of the life and work. L’Oeuvre de Lovecraft: Terreur cosmique et angoisse humaine is due in early December 2025 from Third Editions.

* From Japan, a detailed abstract and outline for “Negative Jungian Psychology: The Abyss of the Unconscious and Monstrous Archetypes” (2025). Suggests that… “archetypes can manifest not only as symbolic patterns such as the Hero or the Mother, but also as monstrous and incomprehensible figures akin to the deities of the Cthulhu Mythos”

* I spotted, too late, a public talk on Lovecraft given at the Swedenborg Library in Chicago on 21st October 2025. Unusual for being from a highly experienced academic folklorist interested in Lovecraft. Some listings suggested a possible new book. However, I now think this was artifact of the event service’s broad-brush tagging of ‘Literary Events – Talks – Debates – Book Launch in Chicago, United States’, and that there is no new book. The speaker was the author of “A last defense against the dark: Folklore, horror, and the uses of tradition in the works of H.P. Lovecraft”, which appeared in the Journal of Folklore Research in 2005. He can be heard talking on the topic on a 2022 podcast “Folklore and Lovecraft with Dr. Tim Evans”, which is freely available online. And if you search for “A last defense against the dark” on Google Scholar you should be able to find it free via a Academic.edu copy (Scholar has a special relationship with them, allowing free download for non-members, so I can’t link it here).

* The latest edition of the scholarly journal Mythlore is mostly Tolkien, but there are also book reviews of Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature; Once Upon a Place: Forests, Caverns & Other Places of Transformation in Myths, Fairy Tales & Film; and Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. Freely available online.

* PulpFest calls for contributions to The Pulpster 35, their magazine/journal for the forthcoming 2026 event.

* In Delaware, the substantial exhibition Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection runs until 9th December 2025. Accompanied by a 200-image catalogue. The show includes original… “rare masterpieces that defined the visual language of beloved classics” in fantasy and science-fiction.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation has put out a call to “Save the REH Museum” in Cross Plains, Texas.

… the hard-working folks of Project Pride in Cross Plains have restored and cared for the House since acquiring it back in the 1980s, their small volunteer army cannot address the extensive repairs that will be needed. Professional restoration is required for this 100+ year old home on the National Historical Register, and it is needed now, before the damage gets worse.

* Also in REH this week, Spraguedecampfan’s blog takes a long look at Robert E. Howard and his School Writings (now published), and on YouTube Gates of Imagination has a new fine free audiobook reading of a Solomon Kane tale, “The Hills of the Dead”.

* In the world of Lovecraft theatre, this week I read that… “The Ada Shakespeare Company will present ‘Tales from the Shadows’, an original stage adaptation of two short stories: “Cool Air” by H.P. Lovecraft and and “The Shadow on the Moor””. In Ada, Oklahoma, from October 23rd through 26th October 2025.

* And finally, in 1920s Lovecraftian gaming, this week there’s news that Asmodee Picks Up Cthulhu: Death May Die…

In a move that has sent ripples across the tabletop community, global gaming giant Asmodee has officially acquired the intellectual property (IP) and games for Cthulhu: Death May Die. This acquisition is more than just a transfer of ownership; it’s a profound inflection point for the popular miniatures game…

— End-quotes —

“Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock” — Lovecraft, in the tale “Polaris”.

“… the refulgent orange-red star Arcturus. This orb is of great size, even as stars are reckoned, being about 100 times larger than our own sun. It is also distinguished for its rapid “proper motion”, it having traversed a distance in the sky equal to twice the apparent diameter of the moon since the days of classical antiquity. This fact reminds us that, although we are accustomed to call the stars “fixed”, they are actually rushing through space at incredibly rapid rates; only their enormous distance giving them that comparatively unchanging aspect which we know. Delicate instruments are able to record the changes in a star’s position during many years; and the spectroscope, whose prismatic image or “spectrum” of an object moves in one direction when the object is receding and in the other direction when it is approaching, enables us to learn that many stars apparently at rest are in reality moving in the line of sight; that is, moving exactly toward or away from us. The rates at which the stars are travelling differ greatly. All are very high, yet the distances involved are such that a period of over 3000 years is necessary for us to perceive any distinct alterations in the figures of the constellations.” — Lovecraft, “June Skies”, writing for a popular New England rural audience, June 1917.

“It does not matter what happens to the [human] race — in the cosmos the existence or non-existence or the earth and its miserable inhabitants is a thing of the most complete indifference. Arcturus would glow just as cheerfully if the whole solar system were wiped out.” — Lovecraft, “Nietzscheism and Realism”, 1921.

“All is chance, accident, and ephemeral illusion — a fly may be greater than Arcturus, and Durfee Hill may surpass Mount Everest — assuming them to be removed from the present planet and differently environed in the continuum of space-time.” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923. An initial musing on the new Theory of Relativity, for which a first scientific proof had only come a month earlier.

“A slight change of angle could turn [Randolph] Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanil itself…” — “Through The Gates of the Silver Key”, Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, finished April 1933. Lovecraft is using ‘plastic’ in the scientific sense of ‘highly malleable and easily moulded’.

HPLinks #59 – movies and more movies, Italian comics, and a footnote killer…

15 Wednesday Oct 2025

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HPLinks #59.

Something of a ‘video and films special issue’, this week. Purely by chance, though I guess it may also be partly because universities and academics are swamped with work due to the start of the new teaching-year.

* PulpFest.com has a page collecting many links to Recordings and Reviews of PulpFest 2025.

* Feuilleton takes an extended look at Innsmouth, Japanese-style. This being the…

Japanese TV [movie] adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which was written and directed by Chiaki Konaka in 1992.

* Also in movies…. new on Reddit is an appreciation of “Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), an underrated Lovecraftian masterpiece”. Looking into it, I learned that the movie was butchered by the studio execs for cinema release, and as of 2025 there’s still no Director’s Cut. You either love or hate the 1983 result, it seems, judging by reviews. Some love it enough that a remake was seriously planned in 2023. Though many reviews by horror buffs are negative, I must warn readers, so don’t blame me if you view and find it unsatisfactory. The early-80s Tangerine Dream soundtrack doesn’t endear it to some. However, a little more digging by me revealed two possible aids to liking the movie: 1) a basic low-res fan-edit on Archive.org which simply splices on the longer and apparently more coherent ending (used for a TV broadcast); and 2) a five-issue mini-series comic of the original novel, with a single-volume hardcover graphic-novel version announced in May 2021 (the latter seems to have sunk without trace, perhaps due to Covid). Amazon UK “knows a’ nurthing” about the comic in any form. The 2005 comic adaptation can however be found on Archive.org, and it may help fill gaps in the extended movie.

* An abstract for the recent Netherlands conference paper “Evil in Cosmic Horror” (2025). Focuses on movies, and specifically Event Horizon (1997).

* More news of theatre/music activity in Germany. New Original Soundtrack For New Lovecraft-Inspired Theater Production in Germany…

Westend Theater Wuppertal invited the music project Dos Asmund to compose music for a new theatre production based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The result is the soundtrack for the play LOVECRAFT. The premiere took place on 11th October 2025. Additional public dates are already being planned.

The resulting album is now on Bandcamp.

* I see the Italian heavy metal singer and comics maker Enrico Teodorani is creating various Lovecraft tribute and Lovecraftian comic-strips. His growing list of horror strips alerts me to 2025 Italian collections such as Le tenebre di Lovecraft, from the Associazione Culturale ESESciFi, and Il libro blasfemo di Cthulhu from Dagon Press (Italy). Several of his strips are in the new Eyrie #32 (2025) which can be had on Amazon, and his blog reports… “Two short comic stories by Enrico Teodorani (one of which is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft) will be published in issue no. 4 of the Bloody Gore Comix anthology”.

* Le tenebre di Lovecraft turns out to be an illustrated 420-page anthology of stories + essays and comics, published in Italy in August 2025.

* A German hardcover edition of Providence: Omnibus: Alan Moore’s Lovecraft-Mythos endlich als hochwertige Gesamtausgabe is listing on Amazon, set for 21st October 2025.

* Also in comics, the creator of Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom now has his new Cats of Ulthar: A Tale Reimagined. A 26-page one-off comic-book published August 2025, apparently aimed at child readers. It…

follows a family of cats on the eve of returning home, where a father recounts to his children the tale of their grandfather, which begins as a bedtime story and becomes a dark memory of captivity, vengeance, and rebirth.

* And finally, something scholarly (phew…). Footnote remover, a new free online service to remove all footnotes and in-text superscript numbers from a PDF file. Perhaps useful if, for instance, you wanted to make a text-to-speech audiobook of an annotated text. Or ingest something like Lovecraft’s letters into an AI.

HPLinks #58 – gothic formulae, Baranger meets Tanabe, the Lovecraft Cult in German, and more…

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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HPLinks #58.

* Les Navigateurs, a new French ‘BD’ graphic novel by Caneva & Lehman, has won the Rene Goscinny Best Writer Award in France. Apparently it’s a graphic novel in which… “Lovecraft meets the waters of the Seine river”.

* Also in France, the Angouleme 2026 comics arts megafest will feature “Francois Baranger meets Gou Tanabe”. Billed as an “exceptional encounter between two masters of H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpieces: Gou Tanabe on one side, and Francois Baranger on the other.” Set for 31st January 2026.

* Gou Tanabe’s 370-page manga adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time has a date for the English edition from Dark Horse, 23rd December 2025.

* The new Routledge Anthology of Global Science Fiction Origins (2025) has “The Machine Man of Ardathia” (1927) by Francis Flagg of Tucson, Arizona, the pseudonym of Henry George Weiss. He was Canadian by birth and moved to America as a boy, but the anthologist pegs him as “Canada”. The introduction to the tale notes his Lovecraft connection…

Flagg engaged in a friendly correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s influence might be apparent in Flagg’s story, “The Blue Dimension” (1928) which tells of a scientist’s invention that allows the user to not only see into other dimensions but, eventually to travel to those other dimensions bodily. An even more direct borrowing from Lovecraft is Flagg’s story, “The Distortion out of Space” (1934), which uses a meteorite impact as its inciting event. The parallels to “The Color Out of Space” are clear and frequent. Flagg placed stories regularly into Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Science Wonder, and other prominent genre magazines.

Lovecraft started corresponding with Flagg in “early 1929” [Joshi, I Am Providence], so the 1928 influence must have come about simply by reading published Lovecraft tales. Lovecraft would not have contributed any outline or advice on re-writing the tale. “The Distortion out of Space” was published in Weird Tales in August 1934, and — given the above — one wonders what Lovecraft made of the close “parallels”.

* Barbadillo reviews the new book Lovecraft, poeta dell’abisso, in Italian. This reveals the book is actually a reprint of a 1979 book, but here with new…

… essays on, among other things, the relationship between the literature of the ‘recluse of Providence’ and esotericism, the Italian translations of his works, and the illustrators of his tales. [Readers also get the] two chapters which were removed from the first edition at the time, concerning the early myths surrounding Lovecraft and his literary legacy.

The review continues, here in translation…

[Lovecraft has a] “philosophical vision centered on a reevaluation of the tragic. This is clearly evident from some of his letters published at the beginning of the book. In them, among other things, one can read: “Since the entire plan of creation is pure chaos […] there is no need to draw a line between reality and illusion. Everything is a mere effect of perspective”. There are no facts, as Nietzsche knew, but interpretations of them. This conception is a-teleological and, on this subject, he notes: “I cannot imagine the scheme of life and cosmic forces in any other way than as a mass of irregular points gathered in directionless spirals”. Even more significantly: “I believe that the cosmos is a purposeless and meaningless set of endless cycles […] consisting only of blind forces operating according to fixed and eternal patterns”. The matter [he] gazes upon is Lucretian, animated; it is not “matter” in the modern sense. He is aware that transcendence exists only in immanence, in physis, and, in it, establishes the magical possibility of the impossible. Lovecraft’s cosmos is a Leopardian one, horrific and astonishing at the same time. His gaze is of a “detached observer” and his inquisitive curiosity is detached from any anthropocentrism […]. His existential and political conservatism must be understood, then, as a response to chaos, an attempt to order, to give “form,” even if momentary, to that which is not ordered.

* From Russia, “The ‘Gothic Plot’ as Outlined in Lovecraft’s Notes” (2024). A short journal article in Russian with English abstract. Freely available online. Examines Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and “Notes on Weird Fiction”, to determine exactly what Lovecraft considered ‘the Gothic Plot’…

the unnatural revival of an “antiquity” which was isolated from progressive society, forgotten and mummified, [was considered] to be the mainstay of the Victorian Gothic. The catalyst for the Gothic plot is usually an mechanistic attempt to assimilate alienated relics. Lovecraft identifies several plot ‘formulas’ for a revival of antiquity which threatens modern civilization: (1) activation of spiritless matter (corpse, “lower” realms of nature, bodily parts and organs, inanimate “facilities”), that ultimately inverts the hierarchy of psyche and physiology; (2) recurrent memories that literally resurrect the historical or biological past; (3) psycho-somatic degeneration and impersonation (which is presented as a local substitution of higher forms for lower, rudimentary ones).

* New details of an article for a forthcoming Edinburgh University Press journal article, “World War Weird: Blackwood and the First World War”.

* “Weird Weather Against the Pathetic Fallacy” of Ruskin (2025), an undergraduate final-year dissertation. Freely available online.

Ruskin’s work calls attention to the literary trope of assigning weather in literature emotion, yet Algernon Blackwood and Shirley Jackson intentionally deviate from the pathetic fallacy and make the weather in their stories weird and eerie by both breaking its connection with humanity and intentionally removing human emotion from the weather and natural settings.

* A new paper in the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research, “Cold Words, Heartless and Miserable: Tolkien’s Approach to Supernatural Horror”. Tolkien’s…

“Fog on the Barrow-downs” is basically a tale of supernatural horror [and] demonstrates that Tolkien, as a horror writer, could innovate and improve on his materials.

* In Current Research in Egyptology 2024: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Symposium, “The Call of Nighted Khem: Tracing Ancient Egypt through Weird Fiction”. The book is free online in open-access.

* A forthcoming Society of Illustrators exhibition, “Something Else Entirely: The Illustration Art of Edward Gorey”.

* New on YouTube, Michael K. Vaughan goes “Revisiting The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”.

* A stage play titled “Lovecraft Cult”, with a premiere on 29th October 2025 and then running on over Halloween. Apparently to be staged ‘in the round’ in an old surgical Dissection Room at the University of Goettingen, Germany…

A group of students interested in cryptomycology has gathered for a lecture, to learn more about the research of their eccentric Professor Dr. von Tannenberg regarding the mysterious fungus “Tenebris”, whose spores he found in an ancient burial chamber.

* And finally, new on Archive.org is a run of the UK’s The Flying Saucer Review (1955-1969). It looks like there are lots of ideas here for writers considering a crossover ‘UFO-logists unwittingly meet the Lovecraft Mythos’ tale or two. Or even a TV sitcom along the same lines (think ‘Detectorists but with UFO hunters, set in the mid 1970s’).

— End-quotes —

[… on seeking Lovecraft and arriving in] Angell Street [you will] see a tiny piazza [i.e. plaza… You will then] discover upon the corner post of the plazza some figures […] the three modest figures — 598! Your journey is indeed o’er, & your pull of the bell will in all probability bring before you the ungainly form & pasty face of the Demon Critick — the Boeotian Ogre — Ludovicus Theobaldus II” — Lovecraft gives instruction on how to reach his home at 598 Angell St, Providence, June 1918.

“Only last night I had another dream — of going back to 598 Angell Street after infinite years. The neighbourhood was deserted and grass-grown, and the houses were half-falling to pieces. The key on my ring fitted the mouldering door of 598, and I stepped in amidst the dust of centuries. Everything was as it was around 1910 — pictures, furniture, books, etc., all in a state of extreme decay. Even objects which have been with me constantly in all later homes were there in their old positions, sharing in the general dissolution and dust-burial. I felt an extreme terror — and when footsteps sounded draggingly from the direction of my room I turned and fled in panic. I would not admit to myself what it was I feared to confront but my fear also had the effect of making me shut my eyes as I raced past the mouldy, nitre-encrusted mirror in the hall. Out into the street I ran — and I noted that none of the ruins were of buildings newer than about 1910. I had covered about half a block — of continuous ruins, with nothing but ruins ahead — when I awaked shivering.” — Lovecraft recounts a dream of his old home, to C.A. Smith, November 1933.

“When, as a youth of twenty, I laid in these ochraceous pads [pads for writing, purchased in bulk in 1910] did I ever think a grey-headed old has-been of almost forty-five would be scrawling on ’em in the virtually fabulous future of 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? Where have all the intervening twelvemonths gone to? Even 1910 is fantastic enough to one whose sense of existence is somehow curiously oriented to 1903. And can it be that the world of 1910 will in turn give place to something as different as 1910 is from 1450?” — Lovecraft to Morton, on a sense of ‘living beyond one’s time’, April 1935.

HPLinks #57 – 16mm Lovecraft’s pals doc revived, graphic novel about Lovecraft’s cat, new article by Lovecraft’s uncle, and more…

30 Tuesday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #57.

* Here in the UK, Edinburgh Napier University newly posts some details of what sounds like an important H.P. Lovecraft Documentary Project which is well underway and about to launch a crowdfunder…

Restoration of archival 16mm footage shot by Sean Martin in 1989/90 about writer H.P. Lovecraft, featuring unique footage of Lovecraft’s then surviving friends and colleagues. Work-in-progress cut was screened at the Lovecraft Centenary Conference at Brown University in 1990. Project received ENU research funding in 2024 to digitise footage. This has now been completed (90 mins of material digitised), and a crowdfunder is being launched in autumn 2025 to raise monies needed to digitise the remaining footage. Industry contacts are in place to assist with restoration and additional postproduction.

* Another ‘Lovecraft as character’ graphic novel, from Argentina, which Deep Cuts usefully reviews this week…

… a story about a boy [Lovecraft] and his cat. It is not a historical work that delves into the nuances of the cultural forces that went into such names, [but rather for those who] want a heartwarming fantasy about Lovecraft and his beloved pet, which has gained a kind of literary immortality.

I found a review from Harartia magazine in Argentina, which concluded the book was… “essential reading for both lovers of horror literature and for those who seek stories that, in their apparent simplicity, hide a moving depth.”

Sounds good. I certainly hadn’t spotted it here, and the news is very welcome. It was published in Argentinia by Jano Comics in 2023, and runs to 103 pages. There’s no sign of it on Amazon or eBay. The closest I can get to a possible store source is AleComics in Buenos Aires, which appears to be selling it locally by mail-order.

* Talking of cats, Grognardia this week considers “The Cats of Ulthar” and points out that… “in its conception of a higher, more mysterious order” of justice, it “stands in marked contrast to the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft’s later, more famous works”. In this sense it shares, I’d add, something with his “The Street”.

* I found a real-life ‘horror story’ from Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark (d. 1915), writing in 1876. Friend’s Review reprinted his survey article in the Sanitarian, on a horrible pig parasite which also infects and quickly kills humans. Eeek!

* The latest Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast tackles the two ‘most Lovecraftian’ tales of Borges, “There Are More Things” and “The Book of Sand”. It seems the podcast’s Patreons also get a bonus interview with Andrew Leman of the HPLHS.

* A new book chapter on “The Visual Realization of Fantastic Worlds in Book Cover Design”. Now free and open-access, as part of the book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (2024). This is No. 4 of a German publisher’s The Middle Ages and Popular Culture series, but the text is in English.

* Just published (according to Amazon’s date and reviews, though shipping seems uncertain), the popular culture history book Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries. This comprehensively surveys movies and TV series / specials… “positioned as documentaries, that began with Chariots of the Gods (1970) and ended with The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981)”.

* The Hippocampus Press website now has “December” as the shipping date for the forthcoming A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

* In the related world of R.E. Howard, another fine free audiobook reading from Gates of Imagination, Robert E. Howard’s substantial Solomon Kane tale “The Moon of Skulls”, first published in Weird Tales over two issues in summer 1930. A few years ago Jeffro’s Space Gaming blog was reading through Kane and found that with this tale Kane became… “even more heroic, more imposing, more inspiring, and more awesome than his preceding tales could indicate.” The new reading of “The Moon of Skulls” runs over two hours. There may be frequent ads if you just listen on YouTube, thus an .MP3 download will be far more enjoyable.

* Open Letters Review reviews a new graphic adaptation of “The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard. One of my favorite Conan tales, and here paired with art by Valentin Secher. Not really a graphic novel, by the looks of the samples. More of a sumptiously illustrated tale that might work well if paired with an English audiobook reading. At least, it would if you’re someone who doesn’t already have their own very clear visualisation of this classic ‘young Conan the thief’ tale.

The review states the 2022… “Bragelonne original was nearly 11-by-15 inches” and that the new small Titan printing in English is very inferior by comparison. Bragelonne has a page which reveals the French title was Conan illustre : La Tour de l’Elephant, and a title search reveals that Amazon FR and Amazon UK have the same two copies left in stock. Personally, the art really doesn’t fit how I’ve always visualised the tale (too brightly lit, too cliched) or Conan (too old, too steroid-pumped), so the book is not for me. But some collectors may want a big French copy of the book, before they sell out.

* I’m pleased to hear about the second issue of the revived Heavy Metal comics magazine, and the vibes coming from a few trusted HM connoisseurs feel good. My look at the contents-list reveals a new strip by HM veteran Enki Bilal, and even a revival of “The Bus” strip. A reasonable $30 gets you a one year digital subscription to the new quarterly, though sadly it’s a “subscription starts with the current issue” sub. Those only now discovering the HM revival may well want a “start me with issue one” sub, which doesn’t appear to be on offer.

* From Poland, a 2025 B.A. dissertation abstract for “Digital character sheets in RPGs, exemplified by the Call of Cthulhu system”. Not available in full-text. Examines…

… character sheets in role-playing games (RPGs). It also presents the design and implementation of the web application SheetKeep which serves as a virtual character sheet. […] Discusses the history and theory of such, and then] formulates the application’s design requirements. The outcome of this analysis is an application that enables users to create and manage character sheets for the Call of Cthulhu system within their own campaigns.

* And finally, a free HMS Challenger Botanic illustrations LoRA for use as a ‘style plugin’ with Illustrious. Based on scans of Ernst Haeckel’s book, presumably. Lovecraft’s uncle lyrically explains the historical context…

What beauties, what wonders, then, are found miles beneath the sea? The great steamship, the Challenger, sent out for a four years’ cruise by the English Government, has now returned. It has brought back with it the story so long concealed in these darksome and almost fathomless depths; the story of that great and strange and hitherto unknown country stretching for 140,000,000 square miles beneath the dark blue waves.” (Lovecraft’s uncle, Franklin Chase Clark, 1878).

Lovecraft knew and was strongly influenced by Haeckel’s anthropology and philosophy, but if he knew Haeckel as an artist of bizzare marine biology is unknown. The LoRA’s demo images are poor, but I was able to easily generate satisfactory ‘pages’ such as this…

— End-quotes —

“As for sea-food — it is simply intensely repulsive to me. […] From earliest infancy every sort of fish, mollusc, or crustacean has been like an emetic to me.” — Lovecraft on his disgust at the smell of fish out of water, to R.E. Howard, November 1932.

“Miami did not produce much of an impression [but I] sailed out over a neighbouring coral reef in a glass-bottomed boat which allowed one to see the picturesque tropical marine fauna & flora of the ocean floor.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, July 1931.

The Miami boat… “gave splendid views of the exotic tropical flora and fauna of the ocean floor — grasses, sponges, corals, fishes, sea-urchins, crinoids, etc. A diver went down and brought up a bucket full of sea-urchins for distribution among the passengers, but I restored mine to its native element because I had no means of preserving it.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1931.

“Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, written 1934-35.

“[… The madman said] “It is amphibious, you know — you saw the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm deep sea. It can’t stand up in there — too tall — has to sit or crouch.” […] The madman was bidding him hear the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door — and now, God help him, he did hear it! […] Phobic paralysis held him immobile and half-conscious, with wild images racing phantasmagorically through his helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There was a padding or shuffling, as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was approaching. …” — Lovecraft, “The Horror in the Museum” (written 1933).

HPLinks #56 – Lovecraft and plants, new translations, pulp and comics art, Bloch letter up for auction, and more…

24 Wednesday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #56.

* A new book in German, Tierwerden und Pflanzendenken in der Literatur: Okologische Entgrenzungen von Franz Kafka und H.P. Lovecraft bis heute (2025). (‘Animal and Plants in Literature: ecological delimitations in Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft’). Due for publication on 31st October 2025, and if you can read German the Kindle edition is currently free to preorder on Amazon. The table-of-contents shows the specific Lovecraft stories being discussed…

* Spanish readers now have the new book Barbarie y Primigenios, Tomo 3: La Correspondencia entre H.P. Lovecraft y Robert E. Howard (2025), being the final volume of the Lovecraft – R.E. Howard letters in Spanish translation.

* Italian website Nerdpool reviews the new Italian translation of the mammoth philosophical-political letter Lovecraft sent to Woodburn Harris. In Italian, but here’s a taste in English translation…

Before reading the book it is necessary to pay attention to the warning of the author, who invites the recipient not to read the [very long and dense] letter in one sitting […] 96 years later the author’s words are still sadly current. [The letter is followed by the] observations of the curator and translator, who offers us important biographical ideas to better understand the importance of the letter, [and he also suggests why it was] worthy of being translated and transformed into a book.

* Threads that Bind on “The Nihilistic Void of Lovecraft’s Cosmicism”, and possible personal solutions.

* Now posted for free at the author’s blog, the Phantasmagoria magazine issue 27 review of Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author… “an incredible book, utterly readable, insightful and impressively thorough, one of the best biographies of a writer I have ever read”.

* New in open-access in the journal Word & Image, the article “Coloring the Mind: fantasy, imagination, and stereotype in early twentieth-century pulp fiction illustration” (2025). Only shows front-covers as illustrations.

* New to me, the book The Visionary Art of Franco-Belgian Comics, 1930s to 1960s (2025). An academic chapter book from Leuven University Press, but one that’s apparently well-illustrated with interior panels — due to being able to draw on a fabulous lifetime collection. Good to hear that… “This book will be made open access within three years of publication”.

* Feuilleton discusses the Lovecraftian art of Jean-Michel Nicollet, which appeared mostly on the covers of French paperbacks (all new to me), but he also had a short comic-strip in the 1978 Heavy Metal Lovecraft issue. Feuilleton offers a selected gallery.

* In Greece, a new 2024 volume of Lovecraft… “translated by writer Thomas Mastakouris and illustrated by Ariadne Tzounakou”. Her ArtStation gallery has the cover without text, and also gives a good look at her style.

* New to me, a very slight appearance of ‘Lovecraft as a character’. In Subconscious Password (National Film Board of Canada, 2013), a short CG animation made with the 3D technology of the time. He briefly appears on a game-show, and attempts to explain how to pronounce Cthulhu, before being swallowed by a tentacle monster. Possibly the first CG animated Lovecraft?

* And finally, currently up for auction is one of Lovecraft’s letters to Robert Bloch (published), with envelope. Good pictures. It’s Christmas Day 1933…

On envelope: “The more I look at KADATH the more he fascinates me. I have him propped up besides the fireplace amongst my Yultide decorations.” (“KADATH” was a drawing by Bloch, sent to Lovecraft)

— End-quotes —

[The young Lovecraft makes a little ‘model garden’] “This was my aesthetic masterpiece, for besides a little village of painted huts erected by myself and Chester and Harold Munroe, there was a landscape garden, all of mine own handiwork. I chopped down certain trees and preserved others, laid out paths and gardens, and set at the proper points shrubbery and ornamental urns taken from the old home. My paths were of gravel, bordered with stones, and here and there a bit of stone wall or an impressive cairn of my own making added to the picture. Between two trees I made a rustic bench, later duplicating it betwixt two other trees. A large grassy space I levelled and transformed into a Georgian lawn, with a sundial in the centre. Other parts were uneven, and I sought to catch certain sylvan or bower-like effects. The whole was drained by a system of channels terminating in a cesspool of my own excavation. Such was the paradise of my adolescent years, and amidst such scenes were many of my early works written. Though by nature indolent, I was never too tired to labour about my estate, attending to the vegetation in summer, and shovelling neat paths in niveous winter.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, September 1920.

“Vrest Orton’s house is an early 19th century farmstead; white & rambling, & with the small-paned windows […] The grounds are ample & lovely; with great elms, numerous peach trees now in pink blossom, a rambling brook, a sunken garden, & a series of grape-arbours, flower-beds, & climbing rose vines which will give an even greater exquisiteness to the scene later in the season. Activities are of a sort congruous with the setting — yesterday we changed the course of a tributary to the brook, built two stone footbridges, pruned the fruit trees, & trained the vines on a new homemade trellis.” — Lovecraft stays with Vrest Orton and repays the hospitality with some unpaid heavy-labour in the garden. Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, April 1929.

Though there were very different gardens in his dreams…

“… alien & incredible scenes — crags & pinnacles lit by violet suns, fantastic piles of cyclopean masonry, vari-coloured fungous vegetation, half-shapeless forms lumbering across illimitable plains, bizarre tiers of waterfalls, topless stone cylinders scaled by rope ladders like ships’ ratlines, labyrinthine corridors & geometrically frescoed rooms, curious gardens with unrecognisable plants, robed amorphous beings speaking in non-vocal pipings …” — Lovecraft gives an impression of one of his recent dreams, in a letter to Barlow, May 1935.

HPLinks #55 – ‘atmospheric war’ and Lovecraft, Barlow’s Yoh-Vombis, Portland FilmFest programme, magic-lantern Cthulhu, and more…

17 Wednesday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #55.

* An interesting new psychogeography Phd thesis, Atmospheric War and the Fantastic: Andre Breton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Richard S. Shaver (2025), from the University of California. Freely available online, and 165 pages. Examines how…

each writer conceives of the fantastic as an atmospheric phenomenon in culture. By characterizing the fantastic as an atmospheric phenomenon [the writers respond] to a broader process taking place in the twentieth century, whereby technological and scientific innovations increasingly made it possible to intervene into background conditions of life that were hitherto beyond the scope of human access or understanding [ By engaging with this ] process I call atmospheric war […] writers such as Lovecraft and Shaver carry forward Surrealism’s project to develop a collective myth that would make art the basis of a new, revolutionary life praxis.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of the new book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (2025). A bibliographic scholar and book sleuth assiduously traces how Barlow’s fabulous collection of the weird (kept in a special closet) was built, and then later dispersed and travelled across time…

The book has important implications regarding the dispersal of the books in Lovecraft’s library. A must for all Lovecraft and Barlow scholars and collectors!” (Joshi)

Available now as a Kindle ebook. Also as a paperback and one that’s surprisingly affordable, in these days of expensive ever-price-ratcheted print-on-demand paperbacks.

* Joshi also notes in his blog that… “David E. Schultz and I are also working on a volume of Derleth’s essays on weird, fantasy, and science fiction”. This will be a selection from Derleth’s huge output.

* Here in the UK for the past three years, The University of Oxford has been running a successful series of public talks by scholars on aspects of Tolkien’s work and life. Now they’re branching out, with “H.P. Lovecraft: The Madness and the Horror”, set for 16th October 2025. “Booking required” for this one, though, since I guess it’s one more likely to be disrupted by leftist students.

* Now online, the schedule for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Portland). To also include panel discussions on “Psychedelics and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and “Dreams, Madness, and Monsters: Translating Lovecraft to the Screen”.

* From France, the forthcoming book Pixels Hallucines: Lovecraft et les jeux videos (‘Hallucinating Pixels: Lovecraft and videogames’). Set for release on 6th November 2025, according to Amazon UK. The book appears to be a multi-author chapter collection.

* Grognardia, in the midst of making a Dreamlands RPG, has a new long thoughtful post on Lovecraft’s “The White Ship”.

* A stage performance of Lovecraft in London, H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” (20th and 21st October), followed at the same venue by a “magic lantern + live theremin” preformance of “The Call of Cthulhu” (27th – 28th October 2025)…

Fresh from a series of sold out Lovecraftian shadow-puppet shows, T.L. Wiswell turns her hand to the magic lantern, bringing “Call of Cthulhu” to life in a new and original format with Sam Enthoven’s live theremin [music] building the dread.

* For R.E. Howard readers and scholars, new on YouTube is a recording of “REH in 1935” from Howard Days 2025.

* Chaosium Con in Poland. This is the big one for Call of Cthulhu RPG gamers in the UK, Europe, Eastern Europe, Greece etc. 30th October – 2nd November 2025.

* A 1962 postcard of old Providence that Lovecraft would have been pleased to receive, had he lived to old age. Here seen in its wall-poster version…

* And finally, behold the genesis of… The Meowthos…

— End-quotes —

“[it became] a youthful mystery of my own […] You doubtless recall the closing passage of Poe’s “Premature Burial” — where, after an allusion to Carathis which baffled me till I had read Vathek, there occurs the tenebrous final simile: “but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.” Now that image of Afrasiab sailing down the mysterious Oxus (a cryptic stream whose imaginative associations always fascinated me) on an accursed vessel full of sleeping daemons — ineffable nighted things — held for me a macabre terror of peculiar intensity; a terror all the acuter because I could not trace the allusion to any source. I wove all sorts of hideously fanciful images about that voyage, and made obscure references to it in many of my juvenile tales. At first, the name of Carathis was woven into the mystery, but that faded when I found it in Vathek. Afrasiab and his daemons remained the tough nut, and for a while I thought they must be derived from some version of the Arabian Night more ample than any I had seen. Only after years did I find out somehow that Afrasiab came from Firdousj’s great Persian epic […] But I have not yet succeeded in finding any translation of the Shah-Namah, hence am still ignorant of Afrasiab’s frightful adventure with the daemons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffman Price, March 1933.

Lovecraft read Vathek (1786) in July 1921, learning of “the demonic songs sung by Vathek’s necrophilic mother Carathis”.

“In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales — “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss”.” — Lovecraft, “The Nameless City” (1922)

Fabled Samarcand of Silk Route fame was “on the Polytimetus, a branch of the Oxus”.

“Arabia …. Haroun al Raschid …. the Golden Road to Samarcand …. Vathek …. Palace of Eblis …. Sinbad …. the Roc …. the ghouls ….” — Lovecraft demonstrates his associative chain-of-imagination thinking to Morton, over several pages, January 1931.

Each distant mountain glows with faery grace,
    The flame-lit lakelet laps the level strand;
Lur’d by dim vistas beck’ning out of space,
    We take the Golden Road to Samarcand!

— Lovecraft, some lines of his poetry sent to Morton, November 1929.

“… that elusive, ecstatically mystical impression of exotick giganticism and Dunsanian strangeness and seethingly monstrous vitality which I picked up in 1922, before I knew [the city] too well […] Cyclopean phantom-pinnacles flowering in violet mist, surging vortices of alien life coursing from wonder-hidden springs in Samarcand and Carthage and Babylon and Aegyptus, breathless sunset vistas of weird architecture and unknown landscape glimpsed from bizarrely balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces” — Lovecraft recalling his first impressions of New York City, seen at sunset/dusk in 1922.

” [I nightly heard] … whining monotones on a strange bagpipe which made me dream ghoulish and incredible things of crypts under Bagdad and limitless corridors of Eblis beneath the moon-cursed ruins of Istakhar. I never saw this man, and my privilege to imagine him in any shape I chose lent glamour to his weird pneumatic cacophonies. […] In truth, I never saw with actual sight the majority of my fellow-lodgers [while living in Red Hook]. I only heard them loathesomely­ and sometimes glimpsed faces of sinister decadence in the hall. […] And what scraps of old papers with Arabic lettering did one find about the house! Some­ times, going out at sunset, I would vow to myself that gold minarets glistened against the flaming skyline where the church-towers were!” — Lovecraft, recalling his squalid rooming-house on the edge of Red Hook, New York City.

Lovecraft here as if taking the part of Afrasiab on his voyage down the Oxus, with his unseen fellow lodgers taking the part of the demons… “they must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.”

Weeird Tales

14 Sunday Sep 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraft as character

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In an alternative timeline, Lovecraft not only ‘got the cover’ of Weird Tales, he was the cover. As fantastic tales of his alter-ego Randolph Carter became as popular as those of Seabury Quinn did in our timeline…

SDXL + LoRAs inc. my new Lovecraft character LoRA. I find that SDXL can sometimes generate somewhat reasonable text if placed in inverted commas in the prompt and prompted for a vintage magazine or poster, e.g. “Weird Tales”. Who knew?

HPLinks #54 – Poet of the Abyss, Crypt unearthed, Angell Street, Coq translated, The Spark Devil and more…

12 Friday Sep 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #54.

* The latest The Vermilion reviews a new Italian book whose title translates as H.P Lovecraft: Poet of the abyss (2025). Not on Amazon UK, or even Amazon Italy.

The review is in English but seems to have been auto-translated from the Italian into English. Thus I’ve clarified it in this quote…

… an exhaustive manual [of Lovecraft], full of information of all kinds, suitable for readings of different intensity, and with a narrative that includes biographical details and curious anecdotes, together with an in-depth analysis of the entire work and exploring the literary, philosophical and esoteric connections of its production. The book does not neglect a critical and attentive look at the vast secondary literature …

* I seem to have missed noting a ‘zine release. Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu #115 was published back in summer 2023, and I see it can still be had as a digital ebook. Mostly fiction, but there’s also an interview with Richard A. Lupoff, and an essay comparing “At the Mountains of Madness” with the 1933 novel which was later made as the ‘finding Shangri-la in the mountains’ movie Lost Horizon.

* The HPLHS has announced their new edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street, being the 1961 book of Eddy memories of their knowing Lovecraft in the Providence of the 1920s. The new $65 edition is described as a… “substantially expanded and embellished edition … more than doubling its size” to 174 pages. I should note that some of these supposed memories have been criticized as “fabrications” (Joshi and Schultz, Lovecraft Encyclopedia), and one hopes these will be footnoted as such. But the book’s page has nothing on that point. Indeed, we’re not even told if buyers will actually get any new information about Lovecraft. Nor do we see a contents-page. The new expanded edition is set to ship in September 2025, and is currently pre-ordering.

* New in the Spanish open-access scholarly journal Alambique, two reviews of the recent book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book…. “seeks to fill [a] historiographical gap by exploring the Spanish roots of epic fantasy through a theoretical analysis and an anthology of representative texts.” Review 1 and review 2. Freely available online, and both reviews are in Spanish.

* I see that Maurice Sand’s Conan-like epic fantasy novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867) has been reprinted in paperback in France, by PRNG in 2024. The book…

… reads as one of the first heroic fantasy or even sword-and-sorcery works ever written in modern times. The ‘rooster’ of the title looks and acts in a similar way to Howard’s Conan. Its fictional world is also fully Howardian both for its themes and its style.” (from the journal article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe”).

The new paperback of Le Coq is in French, and scans of the original book are not on Hathi or Archive.org. However, there is now a free English translation PDF on Archive.org.

* The Sprague de Camp Fan blog has a new and lengthy survey of publications related to Robert E. Howard’s early schoolboy writings.

* VoegelinView reviews the new book John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism (2025) and asks why this English author is today “ignored by readers and academics alike?”. Well… he’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I did try to read his A Glastonbury Romance once, having managed to actually find a copy in those pre-Internet days. But I recall he was just so boring that I gave up after a chapter or two, and for £1 passed the then-scarce book on to a colleague who was seeking a copy. The new review does interest though, since it reveals something new to me, that… “his last novels are ‘fantasies’ that can read like a kind of futuristic science-fiction”. SF Encyclopedia notes the relevant titles and some details of contents, remarking that his final works are… “fabulations, some of them unhinged”.

* A new podcast “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett”, a long interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries. Possibly a useful backgrounder for Mythos writers and RPG makers?

* The latest Appendix N Book Club podcast discusses H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of From The Sorcerer’s Scroll a long-ago ‘zine which had the article “The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons” (1978). Last month Grognardia had a post on this same seminal article. It appears to have been one of the very earliest attempts to translate what was then the “Lovecraftian Mythos” into role-playing games (actually it was Lovecraft + Derleth, but few could tell the difference back then).

* Grognardia is also developing a new RPG for Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and now has a public comments and suggestions post on his blog, which welcomes ideas and suggestions.

* The HPLHS has a pre-order page for their The Spark Devil, this being a complete prop-heavy Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure set in Providence in 1935. It… “makes extensive use of real Providence history and locations to create the most authentic setting possible”. Set to ship in October 2025. Also includes audio-props, which play via this device-prop which is included in the boxed-set…

* I see another nice set for luxury tabletop gaming, seemingly this very week. New Call of Cthulhu collector editions… “for Pulp Cthulhu, The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic, and the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep [adventure, in two volumes]”.

* And finally, LongPage is a new dataset of 300 novels with applied… “multi-layered ‘planning traces’ including character archetypes, story arcs, world rules, and scene breakdowns.” It’s free, uses public-domain, and seems useful for training AIs to plot and plan (or even write) novels in a coherent manner. I guess RPG makers may also find a use for this.

— End-quotes —

— Lovecraft on Angell Street —

[On the death of his beloved grandfather in 1904, Lovecraft at age 13] … mother and I were forced to vacate the beautiful estate at 454 Angell Street [built by his grandfather in 1880–81, and then numbered 194] … My home had been my ideal of Paradise and my source of inspiration — but it was to be profaned and altered by other hands. Life from that day has held for me but one ambition — to regain the old place and re­establish its glory — a thing I fear I can never accomplish.”

“… my grandfather transferred all his interests to Providence (where his offices had always been) & erected one of the handsomest residences in the city — to me, the handsomest — my own beloved birthplace! [in Angell Street]. The spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees, & a delightful fountain. Back of the stable is the orchard, whose fruits have delighted so many of my sad (?) childish hours. The place is sold now, & many of the things I have described in the present tense, ought to be described in the past tense. The house has been sold to one purchaser; the stable & orchard to another; & an ugly garage now smells to high heaven where once the crystal waters of the fountain played! Such degeneracy! Why could not the purchaser have kept his car elsewhere, & suffered the ancient fount to sparkle as of yore?”

“I never liked any other colour combination so well as black-and-gold. To my naive and undeveloped aesthetick sense that represents about the apex of dignified beauty — perhaps because that was the scheme in the front hall of my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. […] Ebony and gold is the aesthetick mixture [I like] — although old gold and rose is a great scheme, as the front parlour of my birthplace amply proved. There was an almost Oriental richness in that room, as in the palace of a caliph — I used to read the Arabian Nights there with an especial zest.”