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HPLinks #99 – HPL in Hebrew, lost tales, short pulp, vintage Providence pics, and more…

27 Thursday Aug 2026

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HPLinks #99.

* Catharsis Publishing has released new Hebrew translations of “The Call of Cthulhu” and Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone”, in one volume. Another companion volume has translations of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, paired with R.E. Howard’s “The Hoofed Creature” and “Doves from Hell”. The Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature has a 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair interview with the publisher, in English, though sadly it’s trapped in a horrible Instagram format.

* 334digital on “The Shape Outside the Frame: Lovecraft, Identity and the Haunting of Contemporary Culture”. 334 also has musings on the Lovecraft that might-have-been in lost and unwritten tales.

* Jeffery Pintabona on “Why You Should Read Pulp In 2026”. Among other reasons he suggests the relatively brevity will appeal to many…

It’s often a lot shorter than literary fiction. Pulp magazines were dominated by short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Rarely would you find something longer than 40,000 words. [Plus, very little padding but lots of pace]. Pulp writing emphasizes story, action, and keeping things moving. [Modern readers] might be intimidated by the thought of attempting to read a 500 page book, but they might feel comfortable braving a 200 pager.

* MPorcius revisits Weird Tales magazine for July 1925…

All three of the stories [Hoffman Price, Lovecraft, R.E. Howard] present a philosophy and/or try to make arguments about groups of people instead of just offering simple entertainment, and the philosophies and arguments are striking (if not necessarily convincing) and so contribute to the value of the stories, to their ability to maintain the reader’s interest.

* Deep Cuts digs up a never-reprinted 1942 tale “Hell in the Village” (1942) by Hugh Raymond, noting that…

the name of the villain, Von Junzt, was likely inspired by the author of Nameless Cults in the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of Robert E. Howard. Michel also tipped in references to Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley, which suggests the whole might be a nod to Weird Tales — with tongue firmly in cheek.

* A new German translation, Die Weiden Neue deutsche Ubersetzung . Mit Einfuhrung, Anmerkungen, Chronologie und Bibliographie (‘The Willows: A New German Translation. With Introduction, Notes, Chronology and Bibliography’).

* In the new Edinburgh Companion to Irish Literature and Periodical Culture (2026), the chapter “A Lord Abroad: Tracing the Fiction of Lord Dunsany in British and American Periodicals”.

* Previously unseen 1980s Providence photos from Steven J. Mariconda. The real and later-demolished Federal Hill church in “Haunter of the Dark”, and the actual Shunned House with interiors. Also the Patterson Museum in New Jersey, established by Lovecraft’s good friend Morton.

* Released as a Kindle ebook a week ago, The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft graphic novel. Given the price and the download-size, I assume it’s the trade edition which collects all the floppy single-issues in one volume. I seem to recall it’s been a collected graphic novel before now, from a small indie publisher, but I assume this new trade edition from a bigger publisher will also include new extras?

* IGN‘s The Sinking City 2 Video Review…

Nobody really gets a happy ending in the Cthulhu mythos. But I was pretty satisfied with this latest, harrowing peek into its writhing innards.

* Now crowdfunding, the abandoned documentary Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right. Currently 20% funded with 33 days to go…

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. We need your help to complete it and release it for the first time.

* And finally, the very worthy HPLHS audiobook The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, currently free for a “limited time” on Amazon UK when you get an Audible subscription. And seemingly free even if you just get the Trial…

— End-quote —

Talking of lost tales…

“I am still obsessed by the notion that one of the most extremely powerful of all tales would be an utterly realistic thing dealing with the sensations of a man deposited without a great amount of warning on another world. The one fatal weakness of nearly all interplanetary tales is that they almost completely ignore this factor of the situation. To my mind, the stupendous wave of emotion-incredulity, lostness, wonder, stark terror-incident to this supreme dislocation from mans immemorially fixed background would be so colossal a thing as almost to dwarf any events which might happen to a celestial traveller. I yet mean to write a tale whose one supreme climax shall be the hero’s discovery, after many torturing & ambiguous doubts, that he is on another world.” “… it would begin as a dream-phenomenon creeping on the victim in the form of recurrent nightmares, as a result of his concentration of mind on some dim trans-galactic world. Eventually it would enmesh him totally — leaving his body to vegetate in a coma in some madhouse whilst his mind roamed desolate & unbodied for ever above the half-litten stones of an aeon-dead civilisation of alien Things on a world that was in decay before the solar system evolved from its primal nebula. I doubt if I’d handle it as phantasy so much as a stark, macabre bit of quasi-realism. [..] In cold realistic fact any man with half an imagination would undergo a frightful mental shock at the mere idea of any contact with a planet other than this. This feeling would be the central element of any interplanetary story of mine; indeed, the whole thing would be more of a psychological study than an adventurous narrative…” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, letters of December 1929 and November 1930. Some basic components of the idea would appear to have been later woven into “The Shadow Out of Time” (written 1934-35).

Providence photos from Steven J. Mariconda

26 Wednesday Aug 2026

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Steven J. Mariconda writes and kindly encloses a few old pictures from “near the end of the 1980s”, which he says have not been seen online before. I have his permission to post them here.

1) St. John’s church (“The Haunter of the Dark”), Providence.

St. John’s was abandoned but still standing [at that time]. Apparently it was unlocked, as I recall we simply walked in. There are two photos of the church interior — the nave/sanctuary, and a ladder up to the tower.

We had low lighting conditions and no flash on the camara, unfortunately. The ladder led up from the landing at the topmost stairs. I believe, in retrospect, that it led from the louvered area in the brick structure [as seen from the outside] up to the black capped-space above. This was a 20+ foot wooden ladder that was not secured — merely leaning against the opening above. S.T. Joshi was a couple of dangerous rungs up before we got him off, thus possibly saving the entire field of Lovecraft studies.

2) “The Shunned House”, Providence.

One of the gang knew the owners of the Shunned House, who were congenial to the whole HPL tie-in. They allowed us inside to take a look at the basement. One photo shows the inside of the doors — which so many Lovecraftians have stood before in wonder on the outside — that exit directly onto the sidewalk. These were boarded over.

The other photos are of the fireplace of the Shunned House, sans rugose insect-like head dissolving at the top into a mist. But — and this is the really unique item — the owners showed us a photo-album which included pictures of their then-recent basement renovation. I took a photo of their snapshot showing a hole in front of the fireplace (caption: “Shunned House vampire unearthed.”)

3) Bob Price.

Also a picture of Bob Price at the Patterson Museum in New Jersey. This museum was run by Lovecraft’s mineralogist friend Morton. He had a special upper gallery which specialised in ‘glow in the dark’ minerals, crystals and rocks.

HPLinks #98 – Night-gaunt puppetry, Avernus, NecronomiCon 2026, Providence litfest, thieves in the night, and more

22 Saturday Aug 2026

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HPLinks #98.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, an audio reading of his “A Descent to Avernus” (1928).

* Released to YouTube especially for Lovecraft’s birthday, the handmade puppet film Night-gaunts (2023), and there’s also The Outsider (2024) from the same puppeteer.

* Edward Carmien reports from NeconomiCon 2026, in a series of posts. I Am a Man of Providence, 404: Lovecraft Not Found, A Day in Pictures, and a Post-NecronomiCon goodies round-up.

* The House of Shadows & Ink podcast interviews the Vendor Room Organizer at NeconomiCon 2026.

* A YouTube recording from this year’s Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon, a paper on “Gothic Echoes: Lovecraft’s ‘Rats in the Walls’ and Walpole”.

* The latest 30+ Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft podcast considers Lovecraft’s letters, in the new episode “Letters from the Editor”.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, philosopher Nick Nielsen considers “Lovecraft and the Epistemology of Cosmic Horror”.

* Grognardia has the birthday post “Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft”.

* The Journal of Southern History reviews the 2025 Robert E. Howard biography from the University of North Texas Press. Mostly free.

* SpragueDeCampFan reviews the book Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age.

* A forthcoming book, The Strange World of H.P. Lovecraft: A Guide to the Characters and Creations of the Cthulhu Mythos which is …”due out in the UK on September the 1st” according to the author.

* New and free at Archive.org, the Peter Harrington well-illustrated auction catalogue for Quo Vadis? Visions of the Future.

* To Live and Let Die gives details about a forthcoming novel which will recount the full events behind Lovecraft’s Dexter Ward. All the events and meetings and trips that are only alluded to or mentioned in passing, apparently.

* A current Humble Bundle (i.e. digital goodies sold for charity) for Lovecraft videogames. 20 days left.

* Will Vigar considers pop culture and Lovecraft at length, in “Lovecraft Out of Context”, with his coda “Lovecraft Out of Mind”.

By turning Cthulhu into a plush toy, an encyclopaedic wiki database, or a videogame boss with a quantifiable health bar, contemporary culture is merely repeating the exact failure of Lovecraft’s academic protagonists.

* The Providence city council reportedly has plans to host Providence’s first official literary festival… “in late January 2027. Planning is still underway and details will be revealed soon”. Possibly an opportunity to talk about the siting of the Lovecraft statue? A plinth on the Twin Islands would be my suggestion, which would somewhat protect it from leftist vandalism.

* And finally, Locus magazine reports a break-in at L.W. Currey, during which a book thief stole first-editions of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Shunned House”, along with much else. The thief was apparently… “6’4″ tall, dressed in black and wearing pointed-toe dress shoes”. No night-black cape, which seems rather an oversight.

— End-quotes —

“… if any thief touches this outfit; why, by _____, I’ll smash his ______ for him with one fist whilst I pulverise his _____ _____ with the other, meanwhile kicking him posteriorly with both feet in their most pointed shoes and manner!” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1926. [While living in Red Hook, Lovecraft has three suits, his overcoat, and Loveman’s radio set stolen one night by juvenile delinquents. Here he tells Morton that he has a new replacement outfit. In another letter, he comically remarked on his loss by drawing a cartoon of himself trudging the streets in a yeti-like costume composed only of his own hair.]

“… those night-daemons or personifications of darkness which appear in all Aryan mythologies as thieves or mischief-working entities more or less inimical to man. The element of thievery or mischief-making symbolises the theft of daylight by darkness.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.

[Lovecraft ligs his way into a party at the most fabulous private New Orleans mansion]. “I spend all my time in the Vieux Carre, & am constantly uncovering new street vistas, perspectives of massed chimneys, gables, & balconies, & garden-garnished inner courtyards. [… One very famous mansion is…] zealously guarded from vulgar sight by the proprietor. I hung around this place like a thief planning a large-scale cleanup, but was finally rewarded when a large party — evidently friends of the inhabitants — called & strolled about the patio & arcade with the gate open! [Lovecraft slips in on the tail, as if one of the party] — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1932.

“I saw that Wollheim article dealing with Hugo the Rat [i.e. Gernsback] — through the kindness of a bright young member of the Science fiction League, Kenneth Sterling, who has recently moved to Providence. It was nothing new to me — for more than one friend of mine has been robbed by that thieving son-of-a-beachcomber.” — Lovecraft to William Frederick Anger, April 1935. Gernsback was notorious for not paying his pulp magazine writers. Wollheim had published an expose of his methods.

An audio reading of “A Descent to Avernus” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft

19 Wednesday Aug 2026

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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Happy birthday, H.P. Lovecraft, for 20th August! This year, my present is an audio reading of “A Descent to Avernus” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft.

Download: At the Internet Archive.

The text describing his descent into the underworld was extracted from a long travelogue titled “Observations on Several Parts of America”, written in 1928. The text has here been lightly abridged for audio production and to ensure wide distribution. With a small addition from a letter written to Zelia Bishop, 28th July 1928, describing the same trip. I’ve also let his “Observations” run on a little after the visit to the caverns, to encompass his return to the city of Providence immediately afterwards.

Note that Lovecraft uses the term “buried aeras”, which does not indicate historical eras. The word aeras is ancient Greek in origin, and indicates a sort of ethereal breath or tremulous atmosphere blown out into the air. Probably believed by the Greeks to be breathed by divine beings. In Lovecraft’s use it then poetically indicates a mighty breath trapped or frozen in rock deep beneath the surface of the earth. The same word is also used in his famous story “The Call of Cthulhu”…

… those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars.

There “dim aeras” would seem to indicate the scientific method of cosmic transportation, implying a dimly-lit atmospheric cloud which surrounded the Great Old Ones when they were traversing the depths of outer space. This would then seem to relate to the idea they could ‘sail the star-winds’ without the need of spacecraft, as hinted at slightly later in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Such enveloping seems especially likely when we hear in the story that they were not made of normal matter…

The [Great Old Ones] had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.

HPLinks #97 – Bloch biography, Otto’s daemons, Worm ebook, Robert E. Price interview, sea-breezes and more…

13 Thursday Aug 2026

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HPLinks #97.

A less-full-than usual HPLinks this week, what with these being ‘the dog days’ of August and what with many goodies released last week ahead of NecronomiCon 2026.

* A new full biography of a member of the Lovecraft Circle, Psycho Century – Robert Bloch, American Horror Master (2026). Being… “the first full literary biography of this immensely influential author.”

* From the Concordia University Research Repository, the Masters dissertation “Daemons From the Stars: Discerning the Mysterium Horrendum in Otto and Lovecraft” (2026). Freely available online.

* In a timely post, amid the whirring of air-conditioning, Lonely Power Poles appreciates Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”.

* The Dreamands collection of tales by Gary Myers, The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2022), now seemingly has a $10 ebook version. The last time I looked the ebook was of the 2013 version.

* The latest July 2026 edition of the podcast 30+ Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft is “The Price of Fiction”, a 90 minute interview with Robert E. Price.

* Possibly an interesting curiosity, Dunhams Destroys Lovecraft! ‘zine. Crowdfunding on Indiegogo, and also soliciting contributions. The ‘zine…

is an upcoming quarterly journal published by Dunhams Manor Press. It will feature parodies, satires, farces, art, and all around irreverent Lovecraftian fun. Note: This is NOT an anti-Lovecraft publication.

* IGN reviews Chaosium’s new Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth Board Game.

* Avatar of Chaos examines Kadath (1979)… “which appears to be the first Lovecraftian video game, [and] is loosely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* The acclaimed major AAA videogame The Sinking City 2 is set for an 18th August 2026 release, with an Innsmouth-alike setting and an open world.

* My quick and vaguely Lovecraftian demo video, from the amazing new Minimax H3 video generator. Generated locally and quickly on my entry-level RTX 3060 12Gb graphics-card. Surprisingly, all but the tech-press have ignored this major game-changing open and free model.

* London’s esoteric bookshops are starting to list their autumn talks. These include An Evening with Lovecraft at Watkins Books in London, set for 20th August 2026.

Another London bookshop talk of possible interest to some is “The Golden Dawn and the Arts”, set for 29th September 2026.

* And finally, those now arriving at NecronomiCon 2026 in Providence may want to note that the Extended Programming page was updated yesterday. The page also has flyers/posters for the theatrical events.

— End-quotes —

It seems suitable for high summer and for the advent of the beside-the-ocean Necronomicon 2026, to offer a little trawl of Lovecraft appreciating the cooling sea-breezes…

On the sea-breezes of Charleston… ” At twilight — a very brief subtropical twilight — the birds sang in the gardens, and an insidious perfume of many blossoms floated cryptically over the whole city. Cool breezes sprang up, and those who disliked warmth would walk along the Battery, or White Point Gardens, at the very tip of the peninsula, which fronts the spacious harbour and receives a sweep of air from across the low islands dividing the harbour from the open Atlantick.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

“The atmosphere makes me feel twenty years younger and one hundred percent better — and I really seem to have a surplus fund of energy for the first time since last August. The sea breeze is always blowing, and I have become as tanned as an Indian in less than a week.” — Lovecraft in Charleston, to Moe, May 1930.

“And the screen Dracula in 1931 — I saw the beginning of that in Miami, Fla. [Florida] — but couldn’t bear to watch it drag to its full term of dreariness, hence walked out into the fragrant tropic moonlight!” — Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, February 1933.

“Darkness – sunset – dreams – mists – fever – madness – the tomb – the hills – the sea – the sky – the wind – all these, & many other things have seemed to me to retain a certain imaginative potency despite our actual scientific analyses of them.” — Lovecraft to Harold Farnese, September 1932.

“… his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village.” [to dream of the city of Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai] — Lovecraft, “Celephais”.

“But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits a thing untold by his grandfather. [That …] when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous, brooding silence [of the Strange High House, a silence that was] ever before the bane of Kingsport’s maritime cotters. And old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth’s joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly.” — Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

HPLinks #96 – Proceedings #6, Annual 2026 contents, Cat Book republished, Rats on stage, Providence mega-map and more…

07 Friday Aug 2026

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HPLinks #96.

* Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 6 is now listing on Amazon UK, with a shipping date of 20th August 2026. The paperback contains the 2024 proceedings of the Armitage Symposium at the NecronomiCon. The website hplovecraft.com has the full contents-list. There are three biographical articles: on the early poem “Providence in 2000 A.D.” (1912) in the context of 1912; on Lovecraft’s fateful trip to Cleveland in 1922; and an account of the history of Butler Hospital in Providence.

* The website hplovecraft.com now has the full contents-list for the Lovecraft Annual 2026. Too much goodness for me to select just a few items here, so take a look at the full contents-list.

* The latest Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (Vol. 37, No. 1) has a review of the book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida (2025). In print only, it seems. The book is also reviewed in the new Lovecraft Annual 2026.

* Ars Necronomica, the NecronomiCon 2026 art-show, now has a poster and artist-list.

* Eventbrite still has NecronomiCon Providence 2026 Tickets, at the time of writing.

* S.T. Joshi has usefully re-published the long out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft Cat Book (2019), under the new title Little Sam Perkins: Writings about Cats (2026). The book can now be had as a budget Kindle ebook… “This book contains Lovecraft’s complete writings on cats, including generous extracts from his letters in which he attests to his devotion to felines.” hplovecraft.com has the book’s original cover and table-of-contents. It’s not a complete survey of cats in the letters, but rather a “generous sampling” with a focus on cats in New York City. I’ll add a Kleiner memory of Lovecraft in New York City…

[Lovecraft] and I were sitting in George Kirk’s Chelsea Book Shop one night, after hours, and we were discussing the word parallelopipedon. Lovecraft, as usual, was primed with information, [and] it suddenly occurred to me that parallelopipedon would be quite a name for a cat, a pleasing supposition which I mentioned to him. Then, beholding the usual kitten playing around his chair, I stooped, and soothingly murmuring, “Here, my little parallelopipedon,” began to pet it. Looking up at Lovecraft, I beheld him in a state of helpless mirth. His face was contorted and he shook all over. He was so completely convulsed that it took him some time to return to normal” — Rheinhart Kleiner, “Some Lovecraft Memories”.

* A new long text interview with S.T. Joshi, “A Recognised Tradition of Weird Writing”, for the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction.

* In Caen, France, Symposium Lovecraft, set for 14th November 2026. The event appears to be broadly about Lovecraft as an outsider who struggled to find a place in ‘reality’, and will seek…

to understand what his work reveals about our own relationship with ‘the real world’. Through readings, short dramatic sketches, lectures, and audiovisual presentations, this symposium seeks to experiment with a form of “disappropriation” — accepting that reality is not intended for us, that it transcends our conceptual frameworks, and that not everything with a face is necessarily human.

* As the AI wars rage among writers, Cambridge University Press and Villanova University have usefully published the results of a ‘bot or not’ test for AI vs human fiction. It was an online self-reporting test of “adults in the United States between the ages of 18 and 81”, who were each paid $4 to do the test. And it offered participants only “realistic fiction”. Not ideal then, but the results still seem interesting. Even given the current fledgling state of creative writing LLMs, they are found to be currently… “capable of generating short stories that cannot be distinguished from human-written stories and that tend to be perceived as higher quality and more absorbing.” “Participants were no better than chance at differentiating between the human-written and AI-generated stories.” And that’s without human plot devising, or later human polishing and trimming. The paper and data are open-access.

* A new short film, “The Call of C’thulu”, on YouTube.

* SpragueDeCampFan considers “Robert E. Howard in Modern American Poetry”.

* From 1974-1980 “Gregg Press Turned Paperback-only Science Fiction Into Quality Hardcovers, Then Vanished”.

* John Coulthart recalls one of the classic comic-art portfolio sets of the 1970s, in “BWS & REH”.

* A new book from prolific British publisher Bloomsbury, The Devil’s Garden: The World’s Most Sinister Plants and Fungi (May 2026).

* In the UK, Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Wall” has been adapted for the stage. It will be performed in Yorkshire in October 2026. Booking now.

* I’ve found a stupendous business map of Lovecraft’s city in 1946. Showing in microscopic detail the names and positions of the shops, cafes, offices and streets of Providence. A useful aid to researchers, even though it was published 20 years later than one might prefer.

* And finally, it’s nice to see that a new ‘grandpa’ bench is now sited at the entrance to the wooded bluff above York Pond, Providence, one of Lovecraft’s favourite summer writing spots. Looking shiny and new in summer 2025, the bench can be seen on Google Earth.

— End-quotes —

Some bench-pressing with Lovecraft…

“Visitors at the Slater Avenue Primary and Grammar School in Providence, examining the desks and walls of the building, or the fence and the long bench in the boys’ yard, may today discern among the multitude of names unlawfully carved by generations of youthful irrepressibles frequent repetitions of the initials ‘C.P.M. & H.P.L.’, which the vicissitudes of sixteen years have failed completely to efface.” — Lovecraft recalls schoolboy days, in The Conservative for April 1915.

“Getting too dark to write now. This [Roger Williams] park is one of the finest in the country, though formal as compared with my old river-bank. I’ve been using it lately because the hospital (which I visit daily) lies in its direction. The squirrels here are extremely friendly — one little rascal is now on the other end of the bench on which I’m sitting.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1933.

“As I write these lines I am in very congenial K.A.T. company myself — for small tiger Alfred A. Knopf is ensconced in the curve of my left arm as I sit on a bench in the landscape garden …. occasionally chewing the edge of your letter, and occasionally reaching forth a sportive paw to pat the moving Parker [pen] which indites this document.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, August 1935.

“You may smilingly doubt the genuineness of Old Theobald’s retirement from the world — but look sharp! [… amid the hustle of Brooklyn, New York City, a certain] old gentleman … arose [in the early morning] to tuck his books under his arm and start for a solitary open-air day in nearby Fort Greene Park. There, on a bench against a secluded verdant slope, I read continuously all day; stopping only at twilight, when I wended my homeward way, pausing at John’s Spaghetti place for my usual Sunday dinner of meat balls and spaghetti, vanilla ice cream, and coffee.” — Lovecraft to Aunt Lillian, May 1925.

“I first became conscious of him [R.E. Howard] as a coming leader just a decade ago — when (on a bench in Prospect Park, Brooklyn) I read Wolfshead.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, July 1936.

“Finally I assented & seated myself upon a marble bench close by the open grave [and its newly-revealed “black passageway with a flight of stone steps”], telephone in hand. He produced an electric lantern, prepared the telephone wire for unreeling, & disappeared down the damp stone steps, the insulated wire rustling as it uncoiled. […] I sat on a marble bench in that very ancient unknown cemetery with the crumbling stones and tombs and long grass and dampness and the owl and the waning crescent moon.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, December 1919. Telling the dream of Loveman that later became the story “The Statement of Randolph Carter”.

HPLinks #95 – NecronomiCon 2026, Oceanic Horror conference, Pulpster 35, fungi by the Seekonk, and more…

30 Thursday Jul 2026

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #95.

* NecronomiCon Providence is now less than a month away, and The Armitage Symposium 2026 wing of NecronomiCon has released details of the scholarly papers. There’s a PDF with abstracts. Titles include, among many others…

      — “Correlating the Mind’s Contents: Lovecraft’s Challenge to Philosophers”.
      — “From Quebec to Kadath: Echoes of Canada in Lovecraft’s Late Fiction”.
      — “Cold, Circulation, and Cosmic Affect: Bodily Experience and Sensory Language in Lovecraft’s Fiction”.
      — “Galahad in the Rubble: Frank Belknap Long’s Letters to Donald Wandrei, 1927–1975”.
      — “A Shared Bond through Greece and Rome: Classical References in the Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”.
      — “Lovecraft’s Influence on UFO/UAP Ontologies”.
      — “Lovecraft and the UFO”.
      — “Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches’ Sabbath”.
      — “Lovecraft and Eugenics: for HPL, It was Personal”.
      — “The Antipodean Weird in Lovecraft and Others”.

In the main programming for NecronomiCon, I spotted Fred Lubnow on “The Science of the Dreamlands”, and panels on “The Collectable Lovecraft” and “Librarians & Archivists in Weird Fiction”, among many more. A very rich year, by the look of it, but sadly I can’t be there. Still, hopefully recordings will surface on YouTube in due course.

* Lovecraft’s own Newport, Rhode Island, is to host an academic conference on “Oceanic Horror” in March 2027. Curiously, given the setting and theme, the call for papers neglects to mention Lovecraft. Given the current state of academia, perhaps they’re simply unaware of a Lovecraft connection? But some academics may be interested in the call. Deadline for proposals: 30th September 2026.

* New from Spain’s University of Salamanca, the open-access book Echoes of Fantasy and Reality (2026). In English. Contains, among others…

      — “Alphabets For The Shadows: The Design Of Three Alphabets To Talk To The Dead”.
      — “Impossible Mazes: Transmedia Representations Of The Fantastic Rhizome”.
      — “Unspeakable, The Art Of Talking About Forbidden Topics Through Fantasy & Horror”.
      — “A Visual Reflection On The Fantastic And Magical Realism: Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781) and Bocklin’s Triton And Nereid (1873)”.
      — “The Poetics Of The Immense: Scale And Visual Metaphor In The Cinema Of Denis Villeneuve”.
      — “The Long and Cinematic Shadow of the Vampire Nosferatu”.

* The new edition of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy has “Stay Strange: A Computational Stylistic Analysis of Altered Consciousness in American Science Fiction 1960–1979”. Freely available in open-access, in English. Related is the forthcoming NeconomiCon 2026 panel on “White Rabbits and Purple Haze: The Influence of the Psychedelic Era on Weird Fiction”.

* PulpFest details the contents of this year’s convention annual, in “Highlights from The Pulpster #35″.

* The scholarly annual journal Lovecraft Annual No. 20 (2026) is now listing on Amazon UK, and is set for an August 2026 release. As well as the articles and reviews, it includes… “a comprehensive index to issues 11-20.” No table-of-contents on the Hippocampus Press site as yet, but the Amazon blurb gives a flavour of the contents.

* The SpraguedeCampFan blog considers “Robert E. Howard and the American Fiction Guild”.

* A rare bit of CAS scholarship in the scholarly journal Odisea, “The Reversion of the Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of the Enchanter’ (1933)”. Freely available online, in open-access.

* I see NecronomiCon 2026’s core programming has “The Pale Song of the Butterfly Collector: Nabokov as Weird Fiction” with a focus on the fabulous novel Ada, or Ardor (1969).

* Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys “The Fantasy Novels of Clifford D. Simak – Part 1”. The is ‘the late Simak’ of the mid 1970s paperback boom, his name firmly established and newly able to have fun in the space where fantasy and science-fiction meet. Which at the time didn’t endear him to the ‘genre police’ on either side, but the mood of the times was with him.

* The University of Chicago magazine has the new long article “Wonderland”, on their magnificent Stephen D. Korshak art collection and its collectors. Freely available online. The collection is online here, and also in an affordable hardcover artbook as Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection (2025).

* Launching on Kickstarter on 4th August, Deep Space Lovecraft Collected Edition. A 184-page book collecting various one-man Lovecraft comics adaptations…

reimagined as tales of a retro-futuristic spacefarer encountering and enduring the very monstrosities conjured by Lovecraft’s own tortured mind, but in the environs and technologies of deep space and adapted to the artform of comics.

The book version adds two new adaptations, of “The Outsider” and “Dagon”.

* Coming soon on the Steam gaming platform, The Steeple, a one-man indie videogame which apparently aims to be a faithful version of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”…

Explore a stylized recreation of 1935 Providence in this story-focused adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s final work.

* Keen Gamer has a long and pithy review of the new $30 videogame The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu (2026).

* From Chaosium, a new Call of Cthulhu: Innsmouth Sourcebook (2026) for table-top RPG players. Also potentially useful as reference for Mythos writers.

* Here in the UK, on stage at the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer is “Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Innsmouth Crown”.

* In Austin, USA, this summer, the promenade theatre performance “Speak No More: Lovecraft”…

Physical theatre experimenters La Fenice [offer a] silent, site-specific, and immersive drama [which unleashes] Lovecraftian secrets, through an improvised narrative that audience members will walk through.

* This year’s NecronomiCon 2026 is also very strong on theatre presentations, with far too many to list here. Note also the performance of T.L. Wiswell’s Magic Lantern show of “The Call of Cthulhu”…

The magic lantern is an early version of the slide show, with hand-painted glass plates, phosphorus lighting (replaced for safety’s sake with an incandescent bulb), and a touch of the quirky.

* In Scotland, British Horror Studio have started filming for their indie “Lovecraft-inspired, feature-length horror anthology”, For We Are Many: Lovecraft. They plan a Kickstarter release in due course.

* Talking of film, the open source and local Marlin-2B (GGUF here) is a new small lightweight video-describing AI. It may be of use to some who wish to index (rather than transcribe the audio of) large video archives or film footage. The small 5Gb size means it can run even on entry-level Nvidia 3060 12Gb graphics-cards.

* On YouTube, this summer Strange Magick is making a series of YouTube Shorts visiting Lovecraft-related places. So far he has visited the Newport round-tower, the Dark Swamp, and Neutaconkanut Hill.

* And finally, I see NecronomiCon also has “Foraging Horrors: A NecronomiCon Mushroom Walk – OFF-SITE, at Blackstone Park” by the side of the Seekonk. Sunday 16th August 2026. Which suggests the humid and warm air of Providence in mid August yields early fungi? If so, then that changes how one imagines Lovecraft in his outdoor summer letter-writing grove on the bluff above York Pond, since there would also have been early-emerging fungi around? Note also the related Armitage Symposium talk “In the Absence of Light… An Assessment of Lovecraftian Non-Photosynthetic Ecosystems”, in the early morning of the same day.

— End-quotes —

The following seems somehow approprate for the advent of NecronomiCon 2026…

 

N’ggah-kthn-y’hhu! Cthua flh gup r’lhob-g’th’gg Igh thok! G’llh-ya, Tsathoggua! Y’kn’nh, Tsathoggua!

It hath come!
Homage, Lord Tsathoggua, Father of Night!
Glory, Elder One, First-Born of Outer Entity!
Hail, Thou Who wast Ancient beyond Memory
Ere the Stars Spawned Great Cthulhu!
Power, Hoary Crawler over Mu’s fungoid places!
Iä! Iä! G’noth-ykagga-ha!
Iä, Iä, Tsathoggua!!!

— Lovecraft, from Selected Letters III, 7th October 1930. Not included in The Ancient Track.

HPLinks #94 – Nonentity graphic novel, REH items, Zothique issues, skyscrapers, and more…

23 Thursday Jul 2026

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HPLinks #94.

* The graphic novel Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft is back in print in August, as an affordable paperback.

* The Comics Journal reviews the recent graphic novel The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft. Freely available online.

* From France, the book Lovecraft par lui-meme: ou Lovecraft maitre de vie (‘Lovecraft himself: or Lovecraft a master of life’)…

This work, composed from translations of unpublished or little-known texts in French and Lovecraft’s private correspondence, draws a portrait of character as rich as those found in the great novels, and of a man even greater than his work.

* A repository open-access preprint from the forthcoming British Fantasy Society Journal 28, “Under the Spell of Fantasy: The Sword and Sorcery Production Cycle in British Popular Cinema of the Early 1980s”. Freely available online under Creative Commons.

* On now and running until November 2026, “Here Be Dragons: Anglo-Saxon Influence on Fantasy” is an exhibition at Jarrow Hall (‘Anglo-Saxon Farm and Village and Bede Museum’) in Northumbria, England.

* Black Gate considers David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard (Howard’s pirates, Bran Mak Morn) and Part Two (Red Sonja). Part Three is still to come.

* Southwest Historical Quarterly reviews Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author ($ paywall, but a substantial chunk of the review is free).

* RevERBerate, the Edgar Rice Burroughs journal, has now reached issue 4.

* Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion (Volume 4, Issue 1) has a Mark Valentine essay on “The Other Country: Numinous Landscape in English Supernatural Fiction”.

* A call for papers for an online one-day conference from the Ukraine’s Centre for Fantasy Literature Studies, themed around the “Mysteries of Night in Fantasy Worlds”. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* From Italy in Italian, the journal-zines Zothique 22 and Zothique 23.

* S.T. Joshi’s weird poetry annual Spectral Realms No. 25 (Summer 2026) is now available. The poems are accompanied by…

Steven Withrow’s interview with Ann K. Schwader — part of a volume of interviews of contemporary weird poets that Withrow has now completed.

* Taskerland’s blog considers Lovecraft’s “The Thing On The Doorstep”.

* Benjamin Cain’s Substack blog considers “Lovecraft and monotheism”…

… to the extent that Lovecraft’s weird tales satirically targeted monotheism, it’s no accident that any of the three Abrahamic religions might seem Lovecraftian when interpreted from [the] updated, naturalistic standpoint [arising from scientific knowledge].

* A fragment of evidence for the 1900s-1930s history of Providence bookshops and libraries. On eBay, a 1934 matchbook for “The Book Shop” at 5 Grosvenor Building, Providence. With a mini-map showing its new home in relation to its old one across the Market Square. Sadly it’s very blurred, but can just about be comprehended.

Not as quaint and olde worlde a book shop as the image suggests, perhaps. At least in its new location. It was up in a 10 story modern building at 10 Weybosset Street, which Mythos writers might like to note Lovecraft said had buried an old lane with the evocative name of Dunwell’s Gangway. This skyscraper had also housed Lovecraft’s neer-do-well uncle and his refrigeration company at one time, and in an even more distant time housed the office of Lovecraft’s grandfather. Lovecraft wrote…

One of our principal skyscrapers — where my grandfather had his office the last two years of his life — was named the ‘Banigan Building’ — though Providence pride has led to its recent renaming as the ‘Grosvenor Building’

* New on Archive.org, Imagen: Revista Latinoamericana de Cultura, No. 7 (2015). With a one-page review of a translated anthology whose title translates as ‘The Trail of Lovecraft’. The reviewer notes that it also had a scholarly introduction…

An important element of the book is the compiler’s prologue, which briefly examines the phenomenon of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his influence in Venezuela.

* Of possible interest to scholars of the younger end of Lovecraft’s circle, and their intersections with emerging fandoms and genre publishing, a call for papers from the Journal of Juvenilia Studies for a special-issue on Youth Writers and Their Worlds. “Youth” here = “under the age of 21”. Deadline: 15th December 2026.

* Tentaclii’s Terrific Technical Tips (1): Amazon are no longer delivering ebooks to older Kindle ereader devices. Boo. In this situation it’s useful that some indie authors kindly allow manual download of an .ePUB version of the ebook. However, this comes to buyers as a .ZIP file. Easy to convert when you know how: simply rename the .ZIP to .ePUB, and then use the free Calibre to convert the .ePUB book to the .AWZ3 format suitable for the early e-ink Kindles.

* Tentaclii’s Terrific Technical Tips (2): Do you get sea-sick from a wobbly camera on YouTube videos? It’s possible to convert a downloaded video into a slideshow. Download a video from YouTube, install ffmpeg, tell Windows where ffmpeg is (a one-time setup), and then…

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n\,375))" output.mp4

The command inserts every 375th frame x 375 times in the resulting video, converting the wobbly video to a slideshow of static frames. At the YouTube frame-rate, this command gives you static frames at a suitable pace. Audio is unchanged, and still in sync.

* And finally, a reminder that Lovecraft’s birthday is approaching. 20th August 2026. If you need a theme or a ‘hook’ for making a bithday present, then note that 2026 is the 100th anniversary of, among others: Lovecraft’s return home to Providence from the ‘Pest Zone’; the writing of “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, his ghostwriting work for Harry Houdini, the writing of Dream-Quest; and the first publication of “The Outsider”.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft and skyscrapers / tall towers.

“I saw for the first time the Cyclopean outlines of New-York. It was a mystical sight in the gold sun of late afternoon; a dream-thing of faint grey, outlined against a sky of faint grey smoke. City and sky were so alike that one could hardly be sure that there was a city — that the fancied towers and pinnacles were not the merest illusions.” — Lovecraft to Moe, May 1922.

“Lovecraft and I sometimes would walk across the Manhattan Bridge [in New York City], the view of the skyscrapers from various parts of the footwalk being part of artistic efforts in the letters I had written him. To me, these views were scenes in a drama which only awaited the right author to find proper appreciation. To Lovecraft, what he beheld here had secret links with a number of dreams of mysterious horror…” — “Some Lovecraft Memories”, Rheinhart Kleiner.

“… in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — Lovecraft, from “He”, a nightmare vision of the towers of a future New York City.

“The skyscraper is not essentially novel; tall buildings having been common in mediaeval Italy, while Gothic towers approximate the same atmosphere. Modernism is manifested in certain proportionings based on the new structural materials (steel frame & concrete) employed for the practical purpose of the edifices concerned. A skyscraper (following Gothic lines or employing classical ornament) can be traditional […] I don’t especially like the Empire State Bldg. — but it’s the design & not the height which alienates me. I like its tall & fantastic neighbour ten blocks north — the needle-pointed Chrysler. When buildings reach this level of height their minor differences in altitude are not striking to the eye near the ground. I can’t say that either Chrysler or Empire State looks any taller to me than the old Woolworth. I intend to go up in the Empire State this year.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, February 1932. The Woolworth building had previously been the highest in NYC.

“… at this writing I am looking out the window [from his desk at 66 College St.] into a sunset as mystically glamourous as any which could have inspired [a poem … ] some of the lights of the lower town are winking on …. [Then, later… ] The rose & green gave place to crimson & orange — one vast sea welling up from the violet horizon. And the evening star blazed over the city’s tallest tower.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, February 1935.

“From some of the hidden interior meadows — remote from every sign of nearby human life — I secured truly marvellous glimpses of the remote urban skyline [of Providence] — a dream of enchanted pinnacles & domes half-floating in air, & with an obscure aura of mystery around them. The upper windows of some of the taller towers held the fire of the sun after I had lost it, affording a spectacle of cryptic & curious glamour.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, November 1936. Lovecraft on exploring “the region west of the Neutaconkanut Hill”, which he had never penetrated before… “Just before sunset I ascended the hill by a precipitous cart-path bordering an ancient wood”.

HPLinks #93 – Argentina, cosmic humour, Gaslight reviewed, Sanz illustrates “Colour”, Hypnos filmed, and more…

15 Wednesday Jul 2026

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HPLinks #93.

* Deep Cuts digs deep and brings up the complete never-reprinted “Something from Beyond” (1941) by Paul Dennis LaVond.

‘Something from Beyond’ is pure Lovecraftian pastiche, albeit in an uncommon space opera setting, which gives it the feel of a very stripped-down prototype of Event Horizon.

* New to me, the Spanish-language book Lovecraft en Argentina (‘Lovecraft in Argentina’) (2015) by Carlos Abraham…

an exhaustive tour of the history of Lovecraftian letters in our country [i.e. the translators, editors and publishers, and also touches on the influence on the nation’s writers]. In an appendix, he also takes the opportunity to review the [Spanish] first editions of Robert Howard’s works. It is an interesting work, essential for the collector who intends to complete his library, but at times the book becomes difficult to read due to small type or the technical nature of the contents.

   Contents:

  – Introduction.
  – Dark beginnings (1939-1956).
  – The dissemination of a secret author (1957-1990).
  – Lovecraft as a classic (1991-2015).
  – Conclusion.
  – Appendix: The first Spanish editions of Robert E. Howard.

* Four years after a devastating Russian cyber-attack, the British Library’s EThOS (E-Theses Online Service) is finally restored and back online. The latest relevant “Lovecraft” British PhD thesis is from Manchester in 2022, ‘Live. Laugh. Loathe.’: cosmic humour and contemporary pessimism in literature and on screen (1969-2019). Currently posted online in May 2026 but under a repository embargo with one year to go before release to the public. The same author published a new book with Bloomsbury in June 2026, titled Cosmic Humour and Philosophical Pessimism in Contemporary Culture, which I assume is the PhD text… but revised and polished for publication?

* New in the latest History Today magazine, the short article “Fringe beliefs” (2026, Volume 76, Issue 7, page 6). Possibly this is a regular column(?), and in this instance its indexing-service abstract says the article discusses Lovecraft’s posthumous influence on the 1960s-70s ‘ancient astronauts’ theories.

* The Obelisk reviews Michael Shea’s 1984 novel The Color Out of Time, in “Watchers on the Threshold vs. Vampiric Jelly”…

The Color Out of Time is a mess of a book. It is ‘Lovecraftian pulp’ rather than cosmic horror. Plus, Shea’s attempt to mirror the Master’s purple prose comes across as stiff, and it does little to help the simultaneously simple yet hard-to-follow plot. […] As a homage, it is nice enough. Shea writes like someone who actually enjoys Lovecraft and his works [which is refreshing today …]

* RPG Review reviews the late-Victorian London “Cthulhu by Gaslight” role-playing adventure book from Chaosium.

* The English translation of Gou Tanabe’s “The Dunwich Horror” is still on track for release as a deluxe hardcover at the end of September 2026, and now has cover. Also due around the same time, an 80-page illustrated German translation of “The Colour Out of Space”. A hardback “with four-color, full-page illustrations by Salvador Sanz”, an experienced Argentinian comic-book artist, animator and comics teacher. Looks promising, even in German.

* At the Annecy International animation festival, the U.S. Cartoon Network announced development on a Conan animated series, helmed by Genndy Tartakovsky (Primal). Reported to be an adult Conan animation series, and a project he’s been trying to get off the ground since 2008. Possibly set for 2029, judging by what’s said in animation trade journal reports?

* Lovecraft’s undervalued story “Hypnos” is being filmed, as part of a feature-length indie anthology currently on Kickstarter. No further details.

* And finally, plucked from eBay… I found an amusing one-page 1978 underground comix strip which riffs on street names in Lovecraft’s Providence. Was it a one-pager, or were there more pages? The one page is all that’s being sold on eBay.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft on street-names.

“In 1912 my first bit of published verse appeared in The Evening Bulletin. It is a 62-line satire in the usual heroic couplet, ridiculing a popular movement on the part of the Italians of the Federal Hill slums to change the name of their main street from “Atwells’ Avenue” to “Columbus Avenue”. I pictured Providence in 2000 A.D., with all the English names changed to foreign appellations.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1916. The poem is “Providence in 2000 A.D.”

“Street names are notably picturesque [in Paris], including such specimens as Rue Git-le-Coeur (Street Where the Heart Lies), Rue Chat-qui-Peche (Street of the Fishing Cat — probably named from a bygone shop sign), Rue de l’Arbre Sec (Street of the Dry Trees), and so on. This quaint nomenclature is typically French, and is paralleled in other towns of France, and in Quebec on our own continent. Many streets are likewise named for the illustrious dead — not only statesmen and warriors, but men distinguished in the arts — a practice also common in Germany, but in America followed only in Boston.” — Lovecraft on Paris street-names, in “European Glimpses”.

“Amongst the [Boston] streets named for illustrious men I was pleas’d to note a Belknap-Street, commemorating the Revd. Jeremy Belknap, minister of a church in Federal-Street, and founder of the Boston Historical Society. The name of this street hath since been chang’d to Joy-Street, and I am sure that no reader of my small Belknap’s phantasies can deny that Belknaps invariably afford joy!” — Lovecraft to Galpin & Long, February 1923. Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model” faithfully used Boston North End street-names in the tale.

“Providence thank heavens has avoided the stultifying custom of numbering [streets, as in New York City] ‐ our only numbered streets being ten obscure ones in the north end of the town.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, suggesting he knew the names of just about every street and lane in Providence.

As Providence grew into a large city… “still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west [of College Hill], spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old waterfront recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.” — Lovecraft, Dexter Ward.

“Some years ago Long and I attempted to explore the Fulton Fish Market section of New York — which is full of quaint scenes and buildings. I don’t know where I left the lunch I had eaten an hour previously — for I was too dizzy to read the street signs! In the end I managed to stagger out of the stench without actually losing consciousness …” — Lovecraft in a letter of 1933, Selected Letters IV.

Frankly dotty…

10 Friday Jul 2026

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As a technical exercise in moiré removal on an old newspaper image, I tried Flux2 Klein 4B with a small 788px image of Frank Belknap Long. It can sort of be done, which is a miracle in itself, compared to what Photoshop tinkerers could do 10 years ago. But the moiré dots can’t be totally cleared.

He appears to be holding a small pipe.

HPLinks #92 – Clara and Lovecraft, bestiality, fandom research, the OED, film, theatre, and more…

09 Thursday Jul 2026

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HPLinks #92.

* Deep Cuts asks “Who is Clara in Lovecraft’s Letters?” and ably uncovers a new Lovecraft acquaintance in Providence. I’d add that the Westport Historical Society has a Clara Buffum page, with additional details of her summer home in Westport and her cataloguing work at the Providence Athenaeum. The Providence Athenaeum Bulletin reveals she also worked on the Delivery Desk in 1897, around the same time as the cataloguing work. Later the Providence Handicraft Club has her giving a talk on bookbinding to the Club in 1923, and her correspondence and mail-order sales address in 1926 was “42 College St., Providence, R.I.” which is that of the Club. Later the American Art Annual 1932 lists her as a member of the Club. Both the cataloguing work and the Club would tie Clara to Lovecraft’s aunts.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Profiles In History: Autograph Catalog 41 Winter 2006. Offers a 1930 Lovecraft letter to C.A. Smith, with transcript…

Carlsbad = the famous Carlsbad caverns. 20 years ago one could have had this letter for what today would be deemed a bargain price.

* From Indiana University, the Phd thesis The Edge of Cognition: Enchantment in Weird Fiction (2026). Freely available online.

* New in the 2026 of the French open-access annual journal Res Futurae, “Lovecraft sans Cthulhu. Epistemologie et esthetique de la bestialite dans l’oeuvre lovecraftienne” (‘Lovecraft without Cthulhu: Epistemology and the aesthetics of bestiality in Lovecraftian work’).

This article reconstructs the author’s intellectual landscape to better understand the interfaces between the pattern of bestiality and racialist zoo-anthropology. The study of the stories ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and ‘The Dunwich Horror’ allows us to articulate bestiality with an aestheticized evolutionary imagination.

* From the University of Marburg in Germany, a new open-access journal titled Fandom | Cultures | Research. Dedicated to fandom and fan-cultures research and research methodology. So far, four issues have been produced. Mostly English items.

* On YouTube, Archiving Horror! The S.T. Joshi Interview. A new Joshi interview.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Arkham House Catalog and Stock List With Addendum, 1986-1987.

* A new book Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination (2025), which may interest some.

* Murray Ewing has a new blog post on “Lovecraftian Labatut”, musing on the curious similarities between the “strange and disturbing new insights” of the physicists and mathematicians, and the entities and cosmic vistas their workings can appear to glimpse.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog announces…

the Friends of August Derleth is a going concern, and we are actively soliciting members. As can be seen from our website at friendsofaugustderleth.org, which is still in a somewhat rudimentary stage, a membership is remarkably inexpensive, and at a later time members will be allowed special privileges (such as access to books published by the Friends) not available to non-members.

* Among other items, Joshi also notes his participation in a…

conference on Lovecraft’s philosophy put on by Steven K. Stakland and others and taking place in Japan on [29th June – 1st July. Other speakers] included papers by such veterans as Robert M. Price and Steven J. Mariconda. [The papers] will not be available online, but it appears that a book of all the papers is likely to be published by Routledge.

* DMR considers “R.E. Howard’s “The Garden of Fear”: Flowers of Evil and a Tower of Dread” and “”The Valley of the Worm”: Forging the Myth Behind the Myths”.

* On YouTube, “…when I last see him” The de Camp Interviews on Robert E. Howard…

Michael K. Vaughan discusses a rare, limited-edition book containing unedited interviews by L. Sprague de Camp regarding Robert E. Howard. These primary source transcripts offer fans and scholars a transparent look at the original accounts from those who knew the author

* Adventures Fantastic has A Brief Report from Robert E. Howard Days 2026.

* From veteran audiobook reader Horror Babble, what appears to be a new full reading of “The Shadow out of Time” (July 2026). I’ve not listened to it yet, but I assume it’s a more polished re-read of the earlier version HB released to YouTube some years ago. There’s also another fine unabridged reading free on Archive.org.

* The Obelisk has “Atom Age Lovecraft: A Review of Frank Belknap Long’s Journey Into Darkness”.

* New to me, an early item in Lovecraft scholarship Out for Blood (1984). A chunky A5 booklet, apparently aimed to “…prove that Lovecraftian analysis is not ‘worked out’ as many believe. [Gives] evidence to support my conviction that Lovecraft’s fictional concepts were developed with consistent logic and form a unified body of work”. However, the contents-list on the back suggests an essay selection with some intriguing topics.

* Comics publisher Dark Horse has announced a cover and a firm 2027 release date for the Gou Tanabe graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark in English translation. To be paired with “Dagon”.

* “Crowdfunded $10K film ‘It Calls'”…

a psychological cosmic horror film inspired by the mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft […] Filming began in mid-May and is taking place throughout Roseburg, Bandon and other locations across Southern Oregon, with production expected to wrap on the 1st of August [2026]. Produced on a $10,000 budget raised entirely through crowdfunding, the studio said It Calls represents its most ambitious production to date.

* Germany’s Miskatonic Horror Theatre will be staging their biggest show yet, “The Call of Cthulhu” in Hamburg from 21st-23rd August 2026. Taking to the stage at the big open-air stage in Hamburg’s city park. Booking now.

* RobbieTheRobot has a current page of the choice selections he’s making from the itch.io mini-games and interactive fiction which have Lovecraft as the theme.

* A long English abstract for the Polish undergraduate final dissertation “Horror in Pixels: How Ugly Games Generate Fear” (2025).

When coupled with a cosmic or Lovecraftian narrative, even modest graphics can transform a game into a masterpiece.

* A slick new Cthulhu Mythos – H.P. Lovecraft Concordance for 14 stories, as a new website.

* And finally, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has added the word “Lovecraftian” in their latest update, tracing the first use of the word to 1936 and Robert Bloch in a letter to Weird Tales.

— End-quotes —

“… drifting down a stagnant river betwixt high basalt cliffs, & wondering why I drifted; since the water had no motion, & there was no breath of wind in the awful SILENCE.” (Lovecraft to Kleiner, May 1920). “… conscious of drifting down some hideous stagnant river in a rotting boat, between terrible overhanging cliffs of basalt. There was no wind, and I wondered why I moved down so still a stream. The insects were of strange form, and made me shudder as their numbers increased and they began to light all over me” (Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920). — Lovecraft recalls a dream, to two correspondents, in 1920.

“About the most daemoniac place I ever saw was a valley in New Jersey — in the foothills of the Ramapos — where the sides were covered with the outcroppings of a black crystalline basaltic formation, & the floor was strewn with curiously angular fragments. I only saw it once, but its image has lingered with me.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“Primal Basalt Bridge over the black & oily River Gnar. Time of the Bulbous Shape’s passage up-stream” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1933.

“Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it — and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me. Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, just one example of various uses of basalt at key moments in Lovecraft’s tales and poetry.

HPLinks #91 – new reviews and papers, Lovecraft comics, film and animation, and more…

30 Tuesday Jun 2026

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HPLinks #91.

* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews Ken Faig Jr’s book More Lovecraftian People and Places (2025).

* From Brazil, a new item that translates as “The Rhetoric Of Doubt: Unreliability, Inner Focusing And The Construction Of The Weird In H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror Literature” (2026). Appears to be a final dissertation. Freely available online. Focuses on “The Whisperer in Darkness” and the second part… “analyzes the persona of the narrator Wilmarth, his limitations as a man of science, and the use of the epistolary genre as a resource for double unreliability”.

* New in the paywall journal American Gothic Studies, “Cosmic Horror and Acidic Apocalypse from the American Counterculture: The Psychedelic Gothic in Cinema and Beyond” (2026). This appears, judging by the partial free abstract, to focus on the feature film Eggshells (1969). But the title suggests the article then goes on to range more widely? Sadly, the paywall extends even to the full abstract.

* From Eastern Europe, a research repository has a new record and abstract for the 2026 journal article “Bibliographic Menace in Lovecraft’s ‘The Festival’: Terror by Quotation and Refusal”. Academic DOI links are useless half the time, and thus predictably the DOI link here gives an error. However, a little hand-searching gets me to the Ostrava Journal of English Philology issues-page and thus the full text of the article…

H.P. Lovecraft’s tale ‘The Festival’ (1925) makes the ‘Necronomicon’ frightening by scarcity: a supervised consultation of the grimoire at Miskatonic University and the translation of a single paragraph relocate horror from ‘contents’ to citation and refusal. ‘Bibliographic menace’ names the dread produced when an archive proves real and institutionally guarded, yet remains larger than any extract the narrative permits. Close reading traces the tale’s archaic cadence and pseudo-scholarly framing; brief comparison with other ‘Necronomicon’ tales clarifies its distinctive economy and later adaptability across media.

See also the related conference paper “Scarcity, Pseudobiblia, and the Literary Work of Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’ in “The Festival””, previously linked in my HPLinks #89.

* Talking of the Necronimicon, it seems remarkable that… “90% of surviving Renaissance Latin texts have never been translated”. So says Amsterdam’s new Source Library, which is doing something about it. With the aid of one of the world’s greatest collections, harnessed to the new capabilities of AI. The “first 6,000 translations” are now online, with facing originals so Latin-reading AI-sceptics can instantly glance across and check. The Source Library has an apparent initial focus on Renaissance philosophy, esoterica and occultism. All freely available and open. No fragments from the Necronimicon have surfaced, as yet.

* Taskerland reviews reviews The Occult Lovecraft…

The Occult Lovecraft is a beautifully-made [1975] zine by contemporary standards and the sheer quality and discernment on display only become more apparent when you realise that the entire thing pre-dates the existence of desktop publishing. […] A beautifully produced historical artefact from a strange and revealing moment in Lovecraft fandom, where rationalism, occult enthusiasm, and personal testimony collide.

* The latest edition of the German open-access journal Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven Mediavistischer Forschung (‘The Middle Ages: Perspectives In Mediaevalist Research’) is a special issue on ‘Medieval Patterns in Modern Fantasy’. Includes an article on examples of Merlin in analogue games, which may be of interest to some.

* Public-domain Spanish audio for “Presentacion del libro Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft. El horror cosmico en los comics, los videojuegos y el sexo. Volumen 2″ (‘Presentation on the book We Will Always Have Lovecraft: Cosmic horror in comics, video games and sex. Volume 2.’). June 2026, 40 minutes.

While the first volume analyzed the literary work of Lovecraft, this new book explores how the concept of cosmic horror and the adjective ‘Lovecraftian’ have been expanded and adapted to multiple media

The new book is available in Spanish via Diabolo Ediciones.

* New from Italy, a book of four comics adaptations of Lovecraft, plus an original Lovecraftian tale as a comic. Lovecraft: Cinque strade nella follia…

Under the expert guidance of screenwriter Marco Cannavo, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Temple, and The Rats In The Walls are transformed into comic stories by Francesco Biagini, Francesca Giulia Massaglia, Paolo Massagli and Corrado Roi. Michele Penco also transforms an original story by Cannavo.

* Also new in Italian comics, Vanello Sergio’s H.P. Lovecraft: Dagon e altri racconti brevi (2025) (‘Dagon & Other Tales’). Eight Lovecraft tales as comic-book… “reinterpretations enriched by a new visual dimension”. A 96 page album, some b&w strips, some colour. Sergio produced a similar ‘Erich Zann and Other Tales’ book in 2019.

* Dream Apex Pictures have filmed Lovecraft’s “Celephais”…

H.P. Lovecraft film adaptations have largely ignored his Dream-cycle, and we are thrilled to bring the Dreamlands to life. Producer Joe Lemieux and director Michael Neel are passionate Lovecraft fans, and we have made the kind of film that we would like to see. […] special effects, by Jeff O’Brien and Nicholas Flanagan (Shuttle, Drive-In Horrorshow, God of Vampires) are all practical, including latex gore, puppetry, and camera tricks. With the exception of compositing our effects using a computer, there is nothing in this film that couldn’t have been done one hundred years ago. We filmed at fourteen locations in New England, Lovecraft’s home and ours.

Now available free on YouTube, or as a Blu-ray via IndieGoGo.

* It appears there’s to be no Colin Wilson conference in the UK this year, and instead there’s a new 2026 collection of essays to mark the 70th anniversary of Wilson’s famous book The Outsider (1956).

* New to me, Around the Outsider: Essays Presented to Colin Wilson on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday (2011), now available as an ebook on Amazon. Includes an essay on The Mind Parasites, which was Wilson’s tribute-novel to Lovecraft. Incidentally it’s interesting to learn that, apparently, Wilson once worked as a visiting lecturer at Brown University in Providence. One wonders if his archived papers have unexamined Lovecraft-related photographs and writings from his time on College Hill?

* Newly spotted on eBay, a framed 1932 hand-drawn map of Providence.

* Witch House: Amateur Magazine of Cosmic Horror. A new PDF ‘zine, now calling for contributions for issue 6. Fiction and poetry wanted, no non-fiction, reviews or interviews. Deadline: 2nd August 2026.

* New on Archive.org, a run of Different Worlds Magazine 1979-1987. A substantial general early RPG magazine, but with an obvious interest in Cthulhu mythos and R.E. Howard games/scenarios.

* More videos are surfacing from this year’s Howard Days event in Cross Plains, Texas. Specifically the recordings for the one-day conference ‘Afterlives of World Building: The Legacy of Robert E. Howard’: the Keynote by Sara Frazetta, the First Panel and Second Panel.

* New on Archive.org, Profiles In History: Comic & Illustration Art Auction 87 July 30, 2016. Being a sumptuous auction catalogue which offers a feast of Frazetta (Bran Mak Morn), Barry Windsor-Smith (Conan + the BWS 1970s wall-posters), Berni Wrightson, and some Moebius.

* Remember all those the old ‘magazines about comics and comics-artists’ that were recently uploaded to Archive.org? They now have Kwakk, a dedicated keyword search-engine. Said to search across more than a million pages, and counting.

* More details about the forthcoming Lovecraftian animated feature film from a studio of animation professionals, Ages of Madness: The Howling of the Jinn. Starting production in late 2026, and set to be an anthology movie consisting of “nine shorts” set across “four settings”, with each short connecting to the history of the Necronomicon. Aimed at adult audiences, not kids.

* And finally, talking of dazzling animation… see two literary immortals locked in mortal combat! Yes, it’s J.R.R. Tolkien vs H.P. Lovecraft.

— End-quotes —

“Raindrops [are felt]… but the sky shews a light rim near the horizon which impels me to take a chance and stay … for a moment. No — too much sprinkling. Have moved down into the piny valley toward the east. Am on a great rock beneath thick evergreen shade. Now let it rain (up to a certain limit) and be damn’d. This section of the wood is really primeval. Indians and 17th century colonists have seen these giant firs. There are houses as old as 1670 and 1687 within a mile of here. Rain increases — but what the hell? … Started pouring — with thunder and lightning — and my pine shelter proved inadequate. … I’m quite a bit irrigated …” — Lovecraft tries to write an outdoor letter to Barlow, as a heavy storm eases in, end of May 1935.

[A September visit to Providence by Donald Wandrei] “… was spoilt by a torrential rainstorm — which transformed most of the city to a lake & broke all weather-bureau records.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1932.

[in Quebec] “I beheld several atmospherick spectacles of the highest interest […] a strangely burning flood of ruddy vespertine light upon roofs, spires, ramparts, & the trans-fluvial cliffs of Levis — coupled with a dense funnel of churning nimbus cloud extending from the zenith to the southeastern horizon. From this interloping mass jagged streaks of lightning darted frequently down to the distant country side beyond Levis, whilst low rumbles of thunder follow’d tardily after. Then, to crown all, a pallid arc of rainbow sprang into view above the verdant Isle d’Orleans, its upper end lost in the forbidding black cloud.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1933.

“… the skies exert the utmost fascination upon me; nor is the weaving of wild dreams about their unplumbed deeps & suns & worlds in the least hampered by the precise astronomical data which my scientific side demands. Indeed, there is nothing in the baldest truth about the sky which does not enhance rather than enfeeble one’s awe at its fathomless & indescribable immensities.” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, April 1927.