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HPLinks #48 – Lovecraft and music, new and old comics, D&D 5.5e Lovecraft, and more…

31 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #48.

* The Great Dangerous Books podcast this week on H.P. Lovecraft & The Apocalypse. Discussing the… “philosophical implications of Lovecraft’s stories, particularly the themes of knowledge, reality, and the human condition.”

* In France, the 23rd Festival de Bourgogne (seems to be in Burgundy, France) is to offer a two-day “The World of Lovecraft” event in late August 2025…

Films by Marc Thomas Charley and Martine Chifflot will introduce the world of Lovecraft to mark his birthday on 20th August 2025. Three short biopics, and bio-fiction films in the evening. The 21st August meeting will then address the themes of witchcraft, documentaries, and Lovecraftian fiction. Two documentaries, three biopics, and audience discussions will take place before another evening screening, which will feature a documentary by Marc Charley, “The Curse of the Feathers,” a true case of witchcraft, followed by a new black-and-white version of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in The Witch House”. “Ritual” will be shown that evening. Followed by discussions with the audience, these screenings revive the spirit of the Festival’s film club by presenting inventive art-house films. A moment of sharing, discovery, and emotion for all in the Chauffailles cinema.

* In the latest Cryptology #3 (Spring 2025), Lovecraftian Will Murray has an article on the Charlton horror comics. I recall some of these titles fondly, when they were unusual items found in the dusty bargain-boxes of British comics shops.

Writer Will Murray does the first part of “A Requiem For Charlton Horror”, looking at their early horror titles with a selection of covers.

* Also in comics, Broken Frontier reports this week that Gou Tanabe’s Comics Adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ “is to be translated and published by Dark Horse” in English. Set for January 2026.

* Feuilleton has “Lettering Lovecraft”, meaning hand-lettering.

* DiGRA 2025 now has its papers and abstracts online. This year’s major videogames think-fest will offer papers such as “Tentacle to the Metal: Ecosophy, Metamodernism, and Splatoon 3″, “The Fractured Imbunche: a Study of Chilean Horror Games”, and (abstract only) “Ecology of Killer Insects and Violent Nature in Grounded”.

* Also in the world of games, Form of Dread has a new and very detailed and technical review of Cthulhu by Torchlight. This new gamer book is meant to transform the core tabletop RPG game D&D 5.5e into a Lovecraftian world.

The single biggest highlight of Cthulhu by Torchlight are the subclasses, which are among the better-designed out of all those that I have seen made for 5e. [But the] bestiary [is disappointing], specifically the statblocks of the Mythos Deities. These are genuinely underwhelming, having few options to influence the battlefield and generally being ‘bruisers with one extra trick up their sleeve’.

Not to be confused with Cthulhu by Gaslight.

* A fledgling attempt to pin down some of the linguistic specifics of a R’lyehian language.

* Forthcoming, a French edition of Encyclopedie H.P. Lovecraft, being the encyclopaedia by Joshi & Schultz. Due in mid October 2025 from Bragalonne, according to Amazon UK. 500 pages and newly illustrated.

* A very niche new survey of a subset of Lovecraftian tales, the illustrated Powerpoint presentation “Cthulhu Returns to Camelot: New Works of Lovecraft-Inspired Arthurian Fiction” (May 2025). Available from academia.edu, and note that a Google Scholar search will get you an open PDF download without having to sign up to academia.edu.

* Seeming to me to be relevant to Lovecraft’s travels and campaigns to keep venerable old buildings, and his sense of resigned loss when they were demolished, is the new journal article “Spectres of gentrification: Towards a hauntological framework for exploring the impacts of gentrification” (2025)…

Using a case study of a gentrifying neighbourhood in New England, this article describes the utility of the hauntological framework in understanding ‘more than material’ impacts of gentrification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, alongside photovoice and walking interviews with long-time residents, this article describes how participants and residents are often haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood.

* A new book chapter, “Empty horizons: Library music and the occult”, meaning stock ‘music library’ tracks which were licensed by production companies and broadcasters and used to accompany supernatural scenes. Part of the new book Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2025).

This essay focuses on a particular strain of library music that engages with the occult and the supernatural, produced at a time when there was a countercultural fascination with esoteric belief systems. New technologies such as the Moog and Arp synthesizers were able to create other-worldly sounds, the like of which had not been heard before

* And finally, in keeping with this HPLink’s focus on comics and music, “The Music from Beyond”. A Chamber of Darkness comic-book adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Zann”.

— End-quotes —

“Decidedly, Grandpa is an eye-man & not an ear-man! If any one thing killed my musical taste it was the violin-lessons I took betwixt the ages of 7 & 9. Back in ’97 I thought I liked music, but a year or two of classico-academic drill on a 3/4 size fiddle soured me completely. They wouldn’t let me scrape the tunes I wanted, but confined me to useful exercises & insipid folk-tunes out of a book. As a result, practicing became a hell, & the whole damn practicing became a hell, & the whole damn business drove me so close to nervous exhaustion that two physicians (I was little short of a neurotic semi-invalid as a kid) told my mother that a halt would have to be called. […] Today I can scarcely tell one end of a violin from another, & don’t recall a cursed thing about reading music” [i.e. from sheet music] — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., December 1936.

“Merely because the world is haphazard & imperfect, with certain satisfactory [aesthetic] adjustments attainable by only a part of the population, he jumps to the erroneous & irrelevant conclusion that nobody can attain such adjustments; that those who say they do merely pretend it, & that it is a waste of time to seek such a type of felicity. In other words, because some people can’t appreciate music, it is foolish for anybody to seek the pleasures of harmony.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, October 1933.

“I revel in absolutely frivolous light opera & musical comedy airs, I cannot bear serious Music with a capital M. However, I am not so narrow that I do not understand its aesthetic value, & I never laugh at it in the manner of Lord North and other celebrated anti-musical personages. So fond am I of light and catchy music, that I tried to write a comic opera when about ten years old!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Despite my vast ignorance [of music], there are musical compositions which tend to evoke from my imagination certain definitely visual concepts which could be expressed (had one the skill) either in poetry or painting.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, May 1934.

HPLinks #47 – vitalist Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the Po Delta, re-evaluating CAS, a new Lovecraft Atlas, and more…

24 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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HPLinks #47.

* More Lovecraft + philosophy. New from Hungary, “Lovecraft, antimodernism and new vitalisms” (2025)… “H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre is considered as a specific genre iteration of antimodernist themes, but also as a formative influence on the philosophy of speculative realism.” In Hungarian from the Dept. of Philosophy at Zagreb, and freely available for download.

* Overthink podcast Episode 134: Weirdness with Eric Schwitzgebel, interviewing Eric about his philosophy book Weirdness of the World (Princeton University Press, 2024). With a substantial discussion of the book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

* Aetherium Arcana blog has a new short article on “Lovecraft and the Unconscious Structure of Empire”, followed by the new longer essay “Self-devouring Racism: Subversion and Collapse in Lovecraft’s Mythos”.

* New from Spain in English and open-access, “Development of Expert Systems by means of Large Language Models”. The authors feed Lovecraft’s fiction to a leading AI LLM, and have it try to find and map connections. Freely available online, those the images are rubbish quality and partly unreadable even in the source zip. This is as good as they get…

* Strange Aeons has a Catalog and Contacts link-list for the Italian Lovecraftians. Seems to have first appeared in 2023, and was last updated on 23rd July 2025.

* Also in Italy, Wu Ming 1 on Lovecraft, appearing at the Lunatico Festival. On 25th July 2025 he presents his new novel featuring Lovecraft-as-character, and then… “the geographer Francesco Visentin and Andrea Olivieri will dialogue with the author”. Followed by a presentation of…

The graphic-musical project [that depicts] the imaginary journey of H.P. Lovecraft in the Po Delta in 1926, between hallucinated visions, esoteric confraternities and monstrous water creatures. Designed by the Italian-English musician Jet Set Roger and the Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograph, preseting a concert event that merges music and literature in a game of cross-media references with the Wu Ming novel.

* Decadent Serpent considers “The Reevaluations of Clark Ashton Smith”. Part of the discussion is of “The Quest of Iranon” by Lovecraft, compared to “Xeethra” by CAS.

* Black Gate has a long event-report with excellent photographs, “Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days” 2025.

* A useful new survey article of all the “Biographies of Robert E. Howard”, issued prior to the new and well-reviewed biography from the University of North Texas Press.

* Forthcoming in French, Atlas Lovecraft, a 180-page book that sounds like a cartographic atlas for Lovecaft. Due in October 2025 from reputable publisher Bragelonne.

A completely unprecedented atlas offering tangible geographic and cartographic representations of the emblematic places of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. An illustrated work in colour presenting plans of Providence, the State of Massachussetts, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich and its region, a map of the Antarctic Expedition and a cartographic statement of mountain areas… [etc]

* And finally, a LoRA add-on for Flux, meant for generating images of whimsical toon Happy Shoggoths. Not on CivitAi, thankfully — since (as of today) the go-to site for creative AI is effectively banned here in the UK. I’m happy now that I nipped in just in time with my Windows 11 Superlite upgrade, and thus I now have the SD 1.5 turbo LoRAs, SDXL, Flux Kontext and Wan2.1 all downloaded and set up with workflows and ComfyUI to run them.

— End-quotes —

“I have always been fond of maps & geographical details (I’ve drawn a map of “Arkham’ to keep my local references straight), & my lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., February 1936.

“I used to row [in a boat] considerably on the [River] Seekonk, which you’ll find on your city map … and also on general maps of R.I. Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, April 1934.

[Lovecraft is delighted to find that he can circumnavigate the city of Charleston entirely via its many graveyards …] “the President of the Charleston Garden Club some time ago form’d the notion of mapping out an idyllic cross-town walk which might include as many as possible of these with a fair degree of continuity.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

[Lovecraft rises to the very top of the highest building in New York City …] “The assembled clan’s first move was up — clean up to the top of N.Y.! It costs half a ducat [dollar] per rube [person], and is worth it. Loveman was dizzy, but your grandpa wasn’t — gawd knows how hard I worked when I was ten years old to conquer my native tendency to dizziness from altitudes! I walked on high railway trestles, and hell knows what not! But I digress. All Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City lay below, outspread like a map — in fact, I told Mortonius [Morton] that the city-planners had done an excellent job in making the place almost as good as the map in my Hammond Atlas at home.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1922.

HPLinks #46 – Lovecraft & Science conference report, CAS conference, Sonia update, Vondy letters, Tanabe and Stanley at work on new projects, and more…

17 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #46.

* In the journal Transatlantica, a new and detailed 5,000-word summary and conference report from the recent major international conference on Lovecraft and the Sciences, held at the University of Poitiers from 4th-6th December 2024. In French, but here’s the Google Translate link.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other things, he has news of a one-day conference “The Smith Circle: A Clark Ashton Smith Conference”. To be held in Smith’s hometown of Auburn, California, at the Auburn Carnegie Library on 18th January 2026. Booking now.

* My thanks to Ken Faig for tipping me off to Sean Donnelly’s long article on the Vondy-Spink correspondence file…

I sat down with the file of Vondy-Helm letters and hoped to find some clues. After all, they both knew Lovecraft and they were writing to each other during the last 14 years of Lovecraft’s life. There must be some reference to him in all those letters.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog (on Lovecraft’s wife) has an update on 2025 Sonia Scholarship.

* New from the Italians, Potrebbe anche non esserci piu un mondo (2025)…

Lovecraft’s longest single letter, delivered to the Italian reader in the form of a book. Here is Lovecraft as a man who is sober and calm, full of healthy common-sense, an acute and resigned critic of the modern age and anticipator of the future.

Possibly the letter to Woodburn Harris, then? Although the blurb has it that the letter was addressed to an unknown recipient.

* A 700-page script? No problem, for the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. Purgatory Chasm is their new audio production with a difference, a choose-your-own-adventure in audio with multiple storylines and music. The setting is 1922, when a geologist discovers mysterious glyphs and artifacts in a New England cave.

* Another excellent new reading of R.E. Howard’s ‘El Borak’ tales, “The Lost Valley of Iskander”. Free on YouTube. Note that the reader’s Patreon patrons are able to suggest stories to be newly recorded in future.

* Gou Tanabe has reportedly started work on his manga adaptation of Dexter Ward. Given the length and complexity, I’d imagine it might be offered across two or more graphic-novel volumes? Although, given the glacial pace at which his work reaches an official English translation, I guess we may not see it in English for three or four years yet.

* Another more long-term project should be underway relatively soon. Richard Stanley’s movie version of The Dunwich Horror is still planning to start filming in Providence in early 2026. The movie aims to be the follow-up to his acclaimed Color Out of Space movie, set well after the events of Color and making Dunwich into “a futuristic version of Arkham”. It seems that Stanley hopes to film on the Brown campus and on College Hill, in his words… “to actually shoot the beast on College Hill and on the Brown campus”, fees and campus politics permitting. So presumably digital CG / AI / FX will give the present-day Providence a makeover, transforming it into a future-Arkham. Sounds good.

* HPL in the 18th century.

* Call of Cthulhu Ireland (Chaosium, 2025) is… “an update of the 2012 Miskatonic University Library Association (MULA) Monograph ‘Mysteries of Ireland'” for role-play gamers. 230+ pages, a 1920s setting, and also likely to be of interest to writers (as a spur to ideas and plotting within this setting). Currently nominated for the 2025 ENNIES Awards for new RPG books. Doesn’t appear to be on Amazon, and is possibly only on DriveThru RPG (which flung a ‘captcha’ road-block at me on trying to visit, and thus I didn’t visit and they don’t get a link here).

* And finally, order now to beat a 5% price-rise at print-on-demand publisher Lulu. All the store’s print book prices go up by 5% from 1st August 2025, due to inflationary back-end costs.

— End-quotes —

“… according to O’Hart’s Pedigrees [Irish Pedigrees (1892)] [in my family-tree] my Caseys are descended from Baudoin Ui Niall (O’Neill), 137th King of Ireland. Begorra …” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1933.

“My mother and aunts knew the daughters of Joseph Banigan from childhood, and found them really worthy in every respect. The grandchildren were my earliest playmates, though it made me shudder in my British soul to know ‘Dicky Banigan’, ‘Robert McElroy’, ‘Edmund Sullivan’, etc!! [… The Banigan mansion is now] one of the ‘show places’ of the neighbourhood, and excited Klei[ner]’s vast admiration when he was here. It is a Gothic manor-house of brick and stone, such as its peasant builder may have seen and admired at a distance in his boyhood in Ould Oireland. The grounds are extensive and beautifully kept, with hedges, trees, and stables of pleasing architecture. It lies almost exactly half way betwixt the house where I was born, and that which I inhabit. Altogether, I fancy the Irish have helped rather than harmed the locality!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, September 1919.

“One of the great puzzles of Northern ethnology is the origin of the peculiar facial & cranial type associated with the Gaelic Celt of western Ireland & northern Scotland — the type with upturned nose, long upper lip, heavy eyebrow-ridges, &c. This type has no known analogue anywhere else in the world, & the ethnologist is at a loss to determine how it arose.” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“Most conservative anthropologists think it unlikely that — despite the vivid legends of diminutive Picts and elfin brownies in Scotland, tiny fairies and subterrene leprechauns in Ireland, sinister underground ‘little people’ in Wales, and Robin Goodfellow’s merry crew in England — any miniature race has ever actually inhabited the British Isles. We derive such tales entirely from the experience of our ancestors at a former stage of migration on the European continent.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.

HPL in the 18th century

12 Saturday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

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HPL in the 18th century. Would he have been a College Hill gent as he hoped, or (more likely) a jobbing waterfront printer and local news-sheet editor?

No, not the result of the new Flux Kontext, which is a bit ‘off’ in terms of this sort of thing since it works from a single image. Also slow. Instead I made an SDXL LoRa of his face and shoulders, and used it with the superfast four-step SDXL checkpoint realvisxlV50_v50LightningBakedvae.safetensors   Considering this generates a 1024px image in about 3 seconds on a very modest 12Gb graphics card, the quality here is acceptable. Not superb, a little glitchy if you look hard for it… but acceptable. And yes, tweaking the prompt will cause him to smile. But I thought I’d spare the reader that.

The new Flux Kontext does have its uses though, including easy manga-fication of images.

HPLinks #45 – more Lovecraft philosophy, Hokusai, Pennell for SDXL, fine bindings, Carter by Tanabe, horror sound FX, and more…

10 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #45.

* In the latest edition of the journal Castilla: Estudios de Literatura, a review in Spanish of the Spanish book A Traves del Abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024). (‘Through the abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’). The review is freely available online, under Creative Commons Attribution. The book is also reviewed in the latest 2025 issue of the open-access journal Brumal: Revista de investigacion sobre lo Fantastico.

* A new book-a-journal from Argentina, Ontologia Analeptica IV, H.P. Lovecraft: La Anti-vida y el destino cosmico (2025). (‘H.P. Lovecraft: Anti-Life and Cosmic Destiny’). The book is paid, and is currently available to buy.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the most decisive writers who speaks to our present moment. With his work he penetrated to the heart of the great civilization changes, progress and modernity that define contemporary times. In doing so he has become a prophet of the future of humanity. Therefore, his work is here analyzed from an eminently philosophical perspective, while also engaging closely with the literature.

* Deep Cuts takes an extensive look at “Lovecraft & Hokusai”, the Japanese print artist. Lovecraft — an appreciator of Japanese screen actors and arts since his teens — saw a 1934 exhibition of his prints in Providence, and heard a lecture on them…

a splendid lecture & special exhibition pertaining to my favourite Hokusai, & the entire [Art Museum, Providence] quarterly bulletin was devoted to the subject of Japanese prints”. (Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V, page 127)

* Flame Tree Publishing is offering a 2026 Wall Calendar, Lovecraft: Illustrated by Jason Engle.

* The Yog-Blogsoth blog is in the midst of drawing and posting some of the more obscure creatures referenced in the Lovecraft mythos and beyond.

* New on YouTube, the explainer video “What is the Robert E. Howard Foundation?”. Also a fine new Josh Greenwood 84-minute reading of the ancient Irish tale “The Grey God Passes” by Robert E. Howard.

* Adam’s Notes / Eric’s Notes delves into “Robert E. Howard, Grettir the Outlaw, and the origins of two-fisted Weird Fiction”.

* PulpFest surveys “Fifty Years of The Man of Bronze”, anticipating the Doc Savage Doc Con 2025 and PulpFest combo in August 2025. In a fine example of local outreach, note also that the article states… “The general public is welcome to attend our afternoon and evening programming events free of charge”.

* Who knew? A Jack Kirby exhibition in Los Angeles, on now. “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity” is a substantial exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, until 1st March 2026.

* The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025, set for 22nd-24th August 2025 in Providence. No tickets available yet, but it can’t be long now.

* The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) announce their forthcoming The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, a sumptuous table-trembling volume of the Joshi-corrected texts, plus… “a reader’s guide to ten of the most significant tales”. Currently pre-ordering.

* Amazon is listing Gou Tanabe’s L’Indicible for release as a French hardcover on 4th September 2025. This appears to be his graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter tales, presumably minus the Dream Quest. Possibly with some biographical detours(?)…

Gou Tanabe brilliantly gives body to Randolph Carter, Alter Ego of H.P. Lovecraft … and through him express the thoughts and fears of the inventor of the cosmic horror.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of “Bibliography Of H.P. Lovecraft”, which was published in the journal Extrapolation in 1961. Long since superseded as a bibliography, but some may want it as an indicator of what was available to scholars by the early 1960s.

* And finally, need sound FX .WAV files for your project? An Archive.org .torrent has Stable Audio Open 1.0 WebUI Portable for Windows. This AI ingested all the public domain field-recording clips at Freesound, into a prompt-able local AI in a very simple interface. Tested and working on Windows 11. See the review for useful instructions for this standalone portable version. Not to be confused with a very similarly named music-generator.

Multitracking is done in the prompt, e.g. “A balanced mix between a good field recording of a man walking through dry leaves in winter, and a recording of small birds calling plaintively in the surrounding Canadian boreal forest.”

— End-quotes —

“Fine bindings don’t make good text!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1936.

“Acquire as many books of the right sort as you can afford to house, for ownership means easy and repeated access and permanent usefulness. Don’t be a foppish hoarder of fine bindings and first editions. Get books for what’s in them, and be glad enough of that. Marvellous bargains can be found on the dime counters of second-hand shops, and a really good library can be picked up at surprisingly little cost.” — Lovecraft, “Suggestions for a Reading Guide”.

Though some items may be curiously unobtainable…

“A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith.” — excised from an unpublished typescript for Lovecraft’s “The Hound”, before publication.

And don’t forget to buy some fire insurance…

“The flames devoured the volumes greedily — leaping up in strange colours and emitting indescribably hideous odours as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormy bindings succumbed to the devastating element.” — Lovecraft recounts a dream he had, to Bernard Austin Dwyer in August 1933.

HPLinks #44 – Whelan in the Mountains, Howard Days recordings, sea serpents and saurians, and more…

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #44.

* Deep Cuts this week examines “Black Thirst” by C.L. Moore and notes Lovecraft’s several reactions to the story when it appeared in Weird Tales in 1934.

* From the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, a Musical Engineering team issue a final report for 2025. Freely available online…

We chose the Cthulhu mythos as a conceptual anchor — not for its narrative, but for its emphasis on the “indescribable” and the unseen, which aligns with sound’s capacity to express fear beyond the visual realm. Guided by psychoacoustic theory, we designed two contrasting video clips with different sonic objectives.

* On SubStack, “The Life of Michael – artist Michael Whelan at 75”. Showing and discussing his painting “The Astrophysicist” (2008). Elsewhere, DMR brings news that Whelan is not resting on his 50 years of laurels, and that… “he is, at this moment, finishing up a glorious illustrated version of Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ for Centipede Press.”

* Broken Frontier reviews Gou Tanabe’s “The Colour Out of Space” graphic-novel in its just-released English translation. Spoilers-alert (for those who haven’t read the tale, which apparently includes at least one of Lovecraft’s most vocal critics).

* The latest The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast has a long discussion of “Art and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and the topics-list suggests the listener will enjoy widely-spiralling flights through esoteric dreamlands.

* From an Argentine journal, a new survey of “Nueva ficcion extrana Latinoamericana: hibridaciones narrativas, cine y juegos de rol” (‘New Latin American Weird Fiction: narrative hybridations, cinema and role-playing games’) (2025). Freely available online.

* Faunus 51 has been published, this being the scholarly journal devoted to Arthur Machen.

* A new scholarly overlay journal which may interest some, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism. The editors welcome your news of items and links of interest.

* Lots of R.E. Howard audio material this week, in the wake of the annual Howard Days event in Texas. Recordings now online include “Bob Howard & the Spicy Adventurers” (from PulpFest, rather than Howard Days), “Robert E. Howard in 1935, Professional and Personal”, “What’s Up with REH?” (on new publications coming down the dark river), “Spear & Fang” (REH’s first published story), and “Bob’s Photos”. Also, new on YouTube is a good free reading of the Solomon Kane tale “Rattle of Bones” by Robert E. Howard. A weary Solomon visits a forest inn for the night, with a travelling companion.

* Talking of rattling bones, a free LoRA add-on for models based on the AI image generator SDXL titled Wizard’s Vintage Creepy Creatures. This is Wizard as in ‘the vintage weekly British comic’. This well-loved title may recalled by British readers of a certain age, who may also recall the ‘Ken Reid’s Creepy Creations’ splash pages.

Ken (or perhaps a company heavily inspired by him) was also into generative art long before anyone else, shipping a long-ago ‘dial a monster’ cardboard-constructed frame to toy shops. Cleverly constructed with knobbed-dials which changed the head, eyes, nose, mouth/chin parts, to assemble an ever-changing random ‘creepy portrait’…

I recall it fondly from boyhood, but have never been able to find any trace of it since it was jettisoned during a house move. Until a Facebook page popped up recently, from the owner of what must now be one of the rarest vintage toys in the world. He too had been utterly unable to discover anything about it, but he managed to obtain one after a long search.

* Talking of generative image-making, I’m currently testing the new free image-editing AI called Flux Kontext Dev run in ComfyUI. I find it excellent for difficult watermark removal (e.g. a slip of cellophane with lettering on it saying “DO NOT COPY”, placed over the image of an eBay postcard). But it’s too crude for auto-colorisation of b&w images, compared to online services such as Palette or Kolorize. That’s a pity, and its line-art/comic style-transfer also leaves much to be desired in terms of subtlety. It can however easily take a head-and-shoulders picture and envision the person in a new environment. Such as Lovecraft riding the ‘last bus to Innsmouth’, here made by using Khoi Nguyen’s digital sculpt of Lovecraft’s head as the seed…

I’ve yet to explore its similar full-body capabilities, which apparently include the ability to keep intact the character costumes in the seed image (e.g. full-body character concept-art).

* For the real Lovecraft, visit the Wisconsin Historical Society H.P. Lovecraft | Photograph page, as there they offer the option to purchase a large version. Hopefully without what looks like a dreadful bit of scanner-moire across HPL’s cheek. Though perhaps that’s there to stymie AI upscaling using Gigapixel AI. Or maybe just original protective cellophane. From their ‘Harold Gauer papers, 1935-2008’.

* Now that I run Windows 11 as my OS, I can also test various locally-run “LLM” AIs. Next up, installing LM Studio AnythingLLM MSTY and trying out some of the local AIs. Eventually ones for audiobook and music/FX production, and Zork-style ‘choose your own adventure’ text-RPGs. Not to mention eventually distilling a ‘Lovecraft reanimated’ AI chatbot. I know… it’s a pleasant summer (for once) in England and I should be jigging around and eating dodgy hot-dogs at music festivals etc. However, living the high-life costs $’s and AI is free. No contest, and no dysentery.

* Talking of audiobooks… Librivox has just released a Weird Tales Double Feature public-domain audiobook. This being “The Salem Horror” by Henry Kuttner and “The Black Kiss” by Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.

* In the latest edition of The Fossil, the worthy and long-running journal of the Historians of Amateur Journalism… “David Goudsward describes a sea serpent that was the subject of a 1923 story written by Sonia Greene [Lovecraft’s wife]”. Freely available online.

* Hot from Pulpfest, a recording of a panel on Pulp Paleontology”, on dinosaurs and dinosaur-hunters in the pulps.

* And finally, talking of digging up fossils… “Startling Percentage of Neuroscientists Say We Could Extract Memories From Dead Brains”, referencing a paper published in the open-access megajournal PLOS One. Maybe we could store them inside the Moon in future?

— End-quotes —

“A few days ago I went over to Anastasia Island […] Tall trees casting a sinister twilight over shallow lagoons — funeral garlands of trailing Spanish moss — and the whole ground surface alive with scaly, wriggling saurians” — Lovecraft visits an alligator island in Florida, May 1925.

“… many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance — scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling.” — from “The Nameless City”.

“I am not only a non-modern but a violent anti-modern. Intellectually I believe in nothing; aesthetically I believe only in the irradiate dreams of childhood. Sophistication I loathe and abhor with all the venom inherited from aeons of reptile and saurian ancestors in palaeolithic abysms of terrestrial history, and I even despise intellect when not directly concerned in the process of philosophical and scientific intellection. By this latter paradox I mean that I see nothing of beauty or pleasure in intellect, but only the hideous fascination of the forbidden Golden Door for the miserable Agib who stands before it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1921.

Last bus to Innsmouth

30 Monday Jun 2025

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Playing around with a local install of Flux Kontext Dev. Not much use for auto-colourising old postcards (too crude, compared to Palette or Kolorize) or comic book pages (too inaccurate across panels), I’ve concluded. But one of the things it can do is take an image of someone and ‘re-imagine them’ in a new situation. Here’s Lovecraft on the last bus to Innsmouth…

Thanks to Khoi Nguyen for his digital sculpt of Lovecraft’s head, a render of which provided the seed image.

HPLinks #43 – Lovecraft and philosophy, “Thing” in Russian, a new Dexter Ward audiobook, imaginary cities, drawing Cthulhu, and more…

26 Thursday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #43.

I’m pleased to say I’ve nearly completed my move to Windows 11 (‘superlite’, not the monstrosity that is the regular version). I only have a bit more work to do on the OS and on various bits of software, plus a few more niggles to fix. The move to a new OS was arduous, but worth it, and Windows 11 opens up access to newer software and local AI options. Thanks for your patience on this. HPLinks now returns to a fuller format…

* In the latest Taiwan Humanities Bulletin, “A Schopenhauerian Reading of Lovecraft’s Fiction: The Will, the Intellect, and Never-Ending Struggle of Life in Cosmic Horror” (2025). Freely available online, in English.

* Now freely available at the Stanford Repository, seemingly after a five-year embargo(?), “Lovecraft and the Question of an Uninhabitable Universe”. A final-year undergraduate dissertation from 2020, and likely a brave one given the fevered political climate of elite U.S. campuses in 2020. The author argued that…

… his work can be understood as a continual attempt to convince its reader that the universe is uninhabitable. My case rests on a belief that Lovecraft’s arguments for this provocative claim could not be made through philosophy alone — the structure of his thought closely resembles that of a theologian. I locate in his work a rich, albeit unwitting, correspondence with philosophers and theologians of history such as Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Lowith.

* New in Russian, a close examination of three Russian translations of “The Thing on the Doorstep”. Freely available online, and in HTML — which means auto-translation should be trivial.

* Newly published, a new issue of the open-access scholarly Journal of Gods and Monsters. A special issue on The Exorcist movie, and includes a review of Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed (2023).

* Five years in the making, and shipping this week, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters. Also includes surveys of modern “Monstrous Angels”, plus “Demons and Monsters of Mesopotamia”, and “Ghosts of Mesopotamia”, which means ancient Babylon and the Babylonian Empire.

* Librivox has just released a new unabridged reading of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Free and also Public Domain — which means you can freely re-use and re-mix. A little high and fast for me, but a good ‘full controls’ media player such as AIMP would sort that out.

* I found a good vintage picture, new to me, of the colonial-era Old State House, Providence, aka the ‘Rhode Island State House’ or ‘Colony House’ or ‘Independence Hall’. On Benefit Street, but not to be confused with the Old Court House also on Benefit Street. Lovecraft knew this College Hill landmark. For instance Lovecraft was one of the antiquarian guests present there when a lavish period-costume reconstruction was staged in 1936, part of the tercentenary celebrations. He had included the place, in passing, in his novel Dexter Ward.

“In 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist. […] Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick one — still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street — was built in 1761. […] He replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire…” — Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

* The Online Review of Rhode Island History has a new summer-time article on the “Exodus to the Shore: Resorts for Ordinary People”. The article offers some deep background context for Lovecraft’s own access to and enjoyment of the coastline.

* Talking of summer holidays, the Howard Days events in sizzling Texas have spurred a good deal of R.E. Howard activity, including online. I’ll hope to have a round-up of the Howard Days 2025 links in my next HPLinks. In the meanwhile, enjoy DMR’s new review of the biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* Pulpfest trails DocCon, the Doc Savage convention to be held in early August in Pittsburgh. Along the way, this long article usefully reveals that the… “We Are Doc Savage: A Documentary on Fandom — a feature-length documentary two years in production, that explores the history of Doc Savage fandom — [is] now available on DVD.”

* The 2025 conference poster “Resurrected Criminals, Time-Loops, and Faustian Bargains: The Speculative Edge of 1940s Film Noir” is freely available online, and finds that some of the approaches of 1940s noir… “draw from the narrative traditions of Weird Tales and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith”

* New on YouTube, a long tour of the Lovecraftian in Bethesda’s chart-topping post-apocalyptic Fallout videogames… “The Fallout franchise has long maintained a Lovecraftian subplot, which I often call ‘The Dunwich Mystery'”.

* New from the University of Alicante, Spain, the book Vt pictura poesis: Literatura y arte en Amarica Latina y Espana (2025). Includes the chapter “A traves del polvo de plata: Visiones de la ciudad imaginaria en Ruben Dario y H.P. Lovecraft”. (‘Through silver dust: Views of the imaginary city in Ruben Dario and H.P. Lovecraft’). The chunky 722-page book is freely available online as a PDF, via the University repository.

* The Austrian educational studies journal Medienimpulse reviews The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, in its translated form as Der letzte Tag des Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and finds the graphic novel could be used in the classroom. The review is freely available online.

* Officially free to download, the new book Approaching Xero: The SF Prehistory of Comics Fandom (2025). Donations are welcome, and will go into a long-running British fan-fund.

* And finally, what might be a second edition of the book How to Draw Cosmic Monsters: Create Scenes from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, which Amazon UK now has as set to be published 2nd September 2025. I spotted this some years ago. Either it was never published until now, or the September release will be a second edition / reprint.

— End-quotes —

“… we went out on the flat roof and saw the thing in all its unlimited and unglassed magnificence. It was something mightier than the dreams of old-world legend — a constellation of infernal majesty — a poem in Babylonian fire! Added to the weird lights are the weird sounds of the port, where the traffick of all the world comes to a focus. Fog-horns, ships’ bells, the creak of distant windlasses — visions of far shores of India, where bright-plumed birds are roused to song by the incense of strange garden-girt pagodas, and gaudy-robed camel-drivers barter before sandal-wood taverns with deep-voiced sailors having the sea’s mystery in their eyes. Silks and spices, curiously-wrought ornaments of Bengal gold, and gods and elephants strangely carven in jade and carnelian.” — Lovecraft sees New York City at dusk from across the river, standing on Hart Crane’s rooftop, in 1924.

“The older part of this necropolis is on a hill, and as we wander’d among the hoary slate head-stones we feasted our eyes on many a gigantick elm or incredibly antient house. […] Edgar reveal’d an imagination of high quality, and upon one occasion call’d my attention to the inimitably Babylonian effect of a certain granite memorial of pyramidal outline, as glimps’d thro’ distant trees against the iridescent sunset.” — Lovecraft enjoys Amesbury in the company of the young boy Edgar Jacobs Davis, May 1923.

“Whether a renaissance of monarchy and beauty will restore our Western civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for even the fascist sentiment to check, none may yet say; but in the present moment of cynical world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead, we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty. And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given its due among groping mortals — the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious, the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art — the type of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry — the bland, grave, competent, and patrician cat.” — Lovecraft, part of his talk “Cats & Dogs”.

The latter seems to place the origin of the domesticated and venerable cat even further back than Egypt, being ultimately “Babylonian” in Lovecraft’s eyes. Possibly Lovecraft was thinking of the only mention of cats in the Bible, where the author notes with distain that cats are allowed to sit on the idols of Babylonia (Baruch 6:22) — from the context, these must have been semi-domesticated ‘temple cats’.

HPLinks #42 – Florida, Lovecraft’s Last Day as animated series(?), NYC Lovecraft Festival, Arcade postcard and more…

20 Friday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #42.

I’m pleased to say I’ve survived installing the latest version of Windows 11. Not many do survive, it seems, judging by the dire headlines in the techie news outlets. But this was a special ‘superlite’ installer — no bloat, no Microsoft account, no adverts, no ‘apps’, no ‘your hardware is insufficient’, no forced updates, etc. And it’s the version after Microsoft’s many problems of the last nine months have (hopefully) been fixed. There were many roadblocks, but they were pushed through. It’s all faster and snappier than Windows 7, and even looks like Windows 7 (install Open Shell + StartAllBack, and change the wallpaper). Many bits of freeware now have better versions, or replacements if they no longer work (e.g. Text Cleaner becomes UnWrap 2.1, the old Explorer++ becomes the native Explorer + QTTabBar for persistent tabs). I’m still getting peripheral software installed, presets re-loaded, my Lovecraft caches indexed for keyword-search, and various small shoggoths are continually being encountered and squished… but another weekend and it’ll be done. Due to this intense activity, here is another shorter-than-usual weekly HPLinks, and with a postcard instead of the usual quotes. Thank you for your patience.

* Wormwoodiana has news of the new book Borderlands and Otherworlds (2025)…

“The essays discuss in particular supernatural fiction of the Nineteen Twenties, occult thrillers of the Thirties, and the English Fantastic in the Forties and Fifties.”

* New at the Cabinet Obscura blog, “Three “Weird Tales” Writers in Florida, 1933-34”.

* The French ‘BD’ (short graphic novel) Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft (‘The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’) is reportedly to have an official English translation. It appeared in French at Halloween 2023.

This graphic-novel is also to have what might be an animated screen adaptation(?) in the hands of a substantial commercial studio… “BOOM! Studios Adapts The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft“. Hence the English translation, presumably. Unless the English translation is to appear as a series of ‘adapted’ floppy spinner-rack comic-books? It’s all rather unclear.

* Broadway World reports Radiotheatre to stage 14th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Festival, 23rd-27th July 2025 in Greenwich Village, New York City…

Now in its 22nd Season, the multi-award winning, critically acclaimed Radiotheatre brings a true American theatrical tradition to the stage….the live spoken word drama…only with 21st century technology to make it a truly unique experience. For their 14th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Festival, Radiotheatre presents “The Whisperer in Darkness” live including a great cast, original orchestral score, fantastic projections, and cinematic sound design.

* A new German podcast on YouTube has the editors discussing their essay collection Kulturelle Spiegelungen zwischen H. P. Lovecraft und Deutschland (a new book on Lovecraft and Germany). In German, but don’t forget that YouTube now has all sorts of new-fangled AI auto-translate.

* The R.E.H. Foundation has announced the 2025 Robert E. Howard Awards Winners, and I see there’s also now an online “What’s Up with REH?” panel recording from the Howard Days 2025 event.

* New on Archive.org, R.E. Howard’s poetry collection Singers In The Shadows, as a scan of the 1977 edition.

* Also new on Archive.org to download as a PDF, Lin Carter’s Dunsany paperback collection Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), as a good clear scan.

* Newly for sale at Honest Abe’s Pulp & Paper Emporium, “Dagon” in The Vagrant (1919), and the rather less expensive The Arkham Sampler Volume 1 Number 3 (special ‘Lovecraft photos issue’, 1985).

* And finally, new on eBay is this fine postcard of The Arcade in Providence, with a flanking store. Seen here in its 1900s prime, the Arcade was a key place in Lovecraft’s childhood. I recall he continued visiting after childhood, in order to have his hair cut. Note the tall ‘Lovecraft-alike man’ lurking between the columns, whom the colourist has done her best to make inconspicuous in the picture.

HPLinks #41 – Derleth’s portraits of the Kalems, Madness sketch, Ethnos article, Crumb, and more Doom…

10 Tuesday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #41.

A slightly smaller HPLinks this week, because I’m set to install Windows 11. Then there’s all the work that follows on from such a gigantic move to a new OS. Eeek! Don’t worry, though, it’s a ‘superlite’ version of the installer ISO with absolutely no bloat, junk, sign-in, apps, ads, privacy-invasion, forced updates, hardware requirements or other Microsoftie nonsense. Just the OS, and a fast stripped-down one at that. Being installed to a new SSD drive too. This seems the best way to go as Windows 10 dies and Windows 7 can no longer support local AI installs. I seriously considered the Linux OS for two weeks, but in the end… too much trouble to fathom/learn all its arcane ways, and also seemingly far too easy to break the OS just by trying out some new software. Thus I was pleased to discover the now-mature Windows 11 ‘lite’ and ‘superlite’ installers, in which the horror of 11 not just ‘suppressed a bit’ but actively ripped out. After install, my task will then be to make Windows 11 look as much like faithful ol’ Windows 7 as possible. I may be some time.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s making available the out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft’s Favourite Horror Stories, Volume 1 under his own Sarnath POD and ebook imprint. He adds… “I will reprint volume 2 of this series in a month or so.” He also gives Derleth’s description of the people present at a September 1938 post-Lovecraft Kalem meeting, via Derleth’s newly transcribed journal for 1938. One example…

Arthur Leeds, an aging man betraying all the marks of faded gentility, with tired eyes, a well-trimmed moustache, iron grey hair standing out against his dark skin, an odd little old-fashioned wing collar contrasting his black coat, his neatly combed hair with the aspect of wetness and cleanliness.

It looks like this is the first time these descriptions have seen print. See Joshi’s post for more such vivid descriptions of the Kalems, in a long quote. Joshi adds, re: Lovecraft and Kalem mentions by Derleth… “I will eagerly await the examination of the journal of 1939 (which David E. Schultz has already transcribed)”.

* New at Project Gutenberg this week, Arkham House: The First 20 Years 1939-1959 in what appears to be plaintext free of OCR errors.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, their Mountains of Madness Sketch Replica…

* Currently on eBay, a catalogue for a 1979 ‘Lovecraft art’ exhibition in France.

* New in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (June 2025), “Cthulhu Anthropology: H.P. Lovecraft and the Discipline of Difference”. Freely available online. The first half of the article is largely a mix of academic obeisance and ‘Lovecraft for beginners’, but the second half (starting at “The Other as Danger? Lovecraft in Anthropology”) has some meat. Though the author is regrettably unaware of the specific non-Boas currents in anthropology which Lovecraft was tapping into, other than making one glancing and unelaborated mention of James Frazer…

Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ plays a major role [in The Call of Cthulhu]

This may be news to S.T. Joshi, who states in his book on Lovecraft’s philosophical thinking and intellectual influences that…

I cannot see that Lovecraft was much influenced by Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, for all the frequent citations of it in his stories” (H.P. Lovecraft, The Decline of the West, p. 24)

Here is Lovecraft stating the matter for himself…

I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as [Sir Edward Burnett] Tylor, [Sir John] Lubbock, [Sir James] Frazer, [Jean de] Quatrefages [de Breau], [Margaret] Murray, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn, [Sir Arthur] Keith, [Marcellin] Boule, [Grafton] G. Elliot Smith, and so on.” — Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness.

All British, except for an American and two Frenchmen. The one American was a very prominent eugenicist who had studied at Cambridge University in England. One of the Frenchmen was a member of the Royal Society of London. The Anglophile Lovecraft was evidently looking largely to Britain for his reading on such matters, and the British despised the American anthropologists. In 1919 Lovecraft had also read deeply in the anthropology of religion, as the field then stood, and this evidently formed many of his enduring ideas. Jean de Quatrefages seems to have been essentially a biologist, and was the first to suggest that new races might be formed by inter-breeding. Marcellin Boule gave us the view of the ancient Neanderthal type as likely to have been brutish, hairy and ape-like.

* A new in-depth biography of another key American outsider creative, Robert Crumb, may be of interest to Tentaclii readers.

Also, note that some 170-pages of Crumb’s serious / biographical / historical comics are set to be newly collected as Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979 – 2004. So far as I know, he never did anything related to Lovecraft, but I welcome being corrected on that point.

* In Amsterdam at the Black Cat Library on 21st June 2025, a Soiree Lovecraft event with lecture. Seemingly to launch a new novel, which at a guess may feature Lovecraft the man? Booking now.

* And finally, a video of “All the Lovecraftian references in Doom: The Dark Ages”. In Spanish, but YouTube now has AI auto-dubbing into English.

— End-quotes —

[As a creative writer] “I am a paradox anyway — for there have been periods when astronomy, geography, physics, chemistry, & anthropology meant more to me than any form of pure literature or aesthetics.” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, December 1929.

“An abridgement of Frazer’s Golden Bough is valuable as a compendium of odd folk-beliefs” — Lovecraft’s “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (1936). With the faint implication that was all it was good for.

“I believe a Georgian doorway has more real significance for an ordinary American than an Inca masque or Italian primitive has. In order to make the Inca or Renaissance object of equal significance — equal relationship, that is, to the actual experience & tradition stream of the beholder — one would have to take exhaustive & specialised courses in Peruvian anthropology & cinquecento art & life. It is childish to imagine that the layman can have any real knowledge whatsoever of the life & feelings of the various cultures represented by museum objects, so that the illusion of reaching the heart of the past through such symbols is sheer moonshine. The little aesthete who raves over Etruscan vases & Minoan goldsmith work is really — apart from the element of abstract art appreciation — doing nothing more than playing around in the sand with pretty pebbles for which he invents vapid little stories. He is not half as close to a knowledge of the real thought & feeling of ancient Etruria or Crete as is the historian & archaeologist, whom he tends to despise as a dull, prosy old soul. [And in some more leftist-minded people such as Long,] certain theories of life & art [also] makes you dangerously liable to overlap into the zones of frivolous mock-under understanding & merely derivative experience, without your fully realising the transition.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.

HPLinks #40 – early fanzines, mad Jung, Meeplesmith, Doom and more…

04 Wednesday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #40.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of the Lovecraft fanzine The Acolyte #4 from 1943, with a number of Lovecraft articles.

* Also new there, scans of the early fanzines Dream Quest #1, along with #2 and #5. These being from the late 1940s. General, but with an obvious continuing interest in Lovecraft.

* Talking of the 1940s and 50s, I spotted this in the catalogue description of an archive of personal papers that is now seemingly up for sale from Mark Funke Books…

… fanzines publishing anything at all by Lovecraft carry clearance from us.” [seller’s quote from a 18th March 1957 letter from John Stanton at Arkham House, sent to Boyd Raeburn].

* Translated from a Spanish review in Contrastes Vol. XXX, No. 1 (2025), in which the reviewer compares Jung’s mad delvings to those depicted by Lovecraft…

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV. The Black Books: Notebooks of Transformation in 7 volumes. Buenos Aires: El Hilo de Ariadna, 2024. The publication of The Black Books represents a fundamental event for understanding the thought of Carl Gustav Jung. […] the English edition of these previously unpublished notebooks appeared in 2021 under the direction of Sonu Shamdasani […]. This [new Spanish version] is a colossal, private, and numinous work, in which Jung, on several occasions, seems to lose control of his own psychic experience. Published in facsimile format, it allows consultation of the original manuscript, which adds an additional layer of depth to the reading.

At first glance, The Black Books can be compared to the work of Jung’s contemporary, H.P. Lovecraft. Jung’s descriptions of the “primordial” beast striking similarities to the stories of the writer of Providence. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is not very different from Jung’s archetypal visions, such as Atmavictu or Abraxas, that emerge in these texts. However, the distance between the two authors is significant: while Lovecraft cleaves to a materialistic and pessimistic vision of the cosmos, Jung opens up to the numinous dimension as a source of psychic and spiritual transformation.

* Be aware that Amazon shows the cover for the limited-edition ‘early Bird’ edition of the Druillet-Lovecraft book, which came with a slip-pocket and an additional set of prints as cards. What they actually ship is just the standard Druillet-Lovecraft book (Nov 2024) without such extras. At present the standard book is also currently still available direct from publisher Galerie Barbier in France, though I can’t help thinking that won’t last forever and it will probably sell out in due course. The sumptuous 288-page book has Demons et Merveilles (1976) reprinted in full, all the Necronomicon pages, the covers Druillet designed for Lovecraft’s books, plus additional “rare or unpublished paintings and sketches”.

Standard edition

* Nyarlathotep and Other Tales of Cosmic Dread (June 2025), a new album by David Thrussell & Flint Glass. No idea about the music, but the physical version has a pleasing look. Artwork possibly generative, but also possibly by ‘stefan alt’ who is credited with the design…

* Encountered at honest Abe’s used book emporium, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in French in 1975…

* Last noticed here in September 2024, Meeplesmith’s “Lovecraft’s Monsters” appears since then to have added new lines in its paintable miniatures. Including what is effectively a shoggoth…

* The big headline-grabbing videogame Doom: The Dark Ages is now available, and it appears to be a critical and sales hit even before its first patch.

Many are noting the very strong Lovecraft influences in the new game. A small sampling…

     – “like Lovecraft was on the writing team”
     – “really good during the Lovecraft part of the game”
     – “adds a Lovecraftian style to Doom, mixing green hues, water, and tentacles to the usual mix”
     – “appears to be heavily influenced by the Cthulhu mythos”

Apparently there are also many spoilers to be had in the game’s early reviews and YouTube videos, so it’s perhaps best not to delve too deeply there before playing.

If it’s moddable, there may be some interesting ‘even more Lovecraftian’ fan-mods in due course.

* Adventures Fantastic has a review of the new Robert E. Howard biography. And I see there’s another new free and excellent audiobook reading of an REH ‘El Borak’ tale, this time “Son of the White Wolf”. Download as an .MP3 file, to avoid the ads.

* A useful guide to REH adaptations, a new (nearly) Complete Chronology of The Savage Sword of Conan. This publication being Marvel’s Conan magazine which offered around 50 pages of b&w story per issue, in an oversized magazine with quality artwork and (mostly) complete-in-this-issue storytelling. In this new list and guide, the magazine’s issues are carefully and newly sorted by Conan’s age (or apparent age) in each tale. (Note that Marvel’s Savage Sword is not to be confused with their equally long-running monthly Conan the Barbarian title, which was sold on the spinner-racks among the superhero and funnies comics. These monthlies were recently bundled by Darkhorse into over thirty reprint volumes, titled The Chronicles of Conan).

* One for ticket-baggers to watch, 30th Anniversary H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland in October. Can’t be long now…

details will be revealed in summer 2025, and the first deluxe and VIP tickets will go on sale in our annual Kickstarter fundraiser (tentatively planned for June/July)

* And finally, in Providence… the local newspaper reports Lovecraft’s real “Shunned House” sells for $1.8M (Archive.is link, to let readers outside America bypass the EU-triggered censorship).

— End-quotes —

* “Vermont did not form the end of my visiting; since W. Paul Cook, on his second trip up, repeated the process of kidnapping a helpless old gentleman and bore me away for a week’s visit to Athol, where I had the honour of seeing him send to press, with his own hands, the sheets of my story The Shunned House, which when published will form my first cloth-bound book, (albeit only a thin affair of sixty pages, with a brief preface by my Belknap-grandchild).” — Lovecraft to Zelia Bishop, July 1928. (The project fell through, and the sheets passed through various hands).

* From “The House” (Lovecraft’s poem on the real Shunned House, July 1919).

The rank grasses are waving
     On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories sav’ring
    Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
    Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
    When the red sun has set

* Lovecraft’s own rough sketches of the real Shunned House in Providence…

HPLinks #39 – join the Esoteric Order, Lovecraft’s Dark Enlightenment, sculpting Lovecraft, Dunwich revived, Mayfair magazine, and more…

25 Sunday May 2025

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HPLinks #39.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a new acolyte to join his very own secret Esoteric Order. He also notes the ‘zine…

Nightlands no. 3 (Autumn 2024), containing my article ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Art’ (an article I wrote years ago as liner notes for an album that never appeared)

* In German, a philosophy journal article whose fragmented title might best translate into English as ‘The Dark Enlightenment of H.P. Lovecraft’, from Weimarer Beitrrge No. 68 (2022, freely available online 2025)…

… he develops an atheistic-materialistic philosophy not only in his literature, but also in essays and especially his extensive correspondence, which can be understood as a “dark enlightenment”. What Adorno and Horkheimer do in their dialectics of the Enlightenment, based on de Sade and Nietzsche also applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, for Lovecraft. His work unfolds an “intransigent criticism of practical reason” and its agent, the too “self-evident subject”. [Only by understanding the] basic positions of Lovecraft’s philosophy, as developed in essays and letters, does his poetics of form [become clear and] open us up to the full understanding of his literature. His works also provide directional concepts for the philosophy and philology of ‘the eerie’. […] Against this background [I engage in] a reading of his “The Color Out of Space” (1927)

* From Russia, “Preserving the Author’s Style in Translating The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“ (April 2025). A short conference paper, freely available online. Partly in English.

* Deep Cuts considers the very late “Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975), by Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman.

* “Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft” via 3D digital sculpting and texturing. A link from a few years back, but I don’t think I’ve linked to this ‘making of’ page before. Only to the results.

* New on Archive.org, a pack of three Historic Males SD 1.5 LoRAs including Lovecraft. These are free character add-ons for generating images with Stable Diffusion 1.5. Historical personage add-ons having been last week removed from CivitAI (the main Stable Diffusion download website) along with living celebrities. I guess CivitAI didn’t have either the manpower or the cultural savvy to know if a celeb was dead or alive, and thus they junked the lot.

Tip: you may want to put “Spock” in the negative prompt, if the LoRA wants to veer towards Star Trek’s Captain Spock. That seems to restore Lovecraft’s face. The above is an Img2Img style transform + the LoRA, starting from a Bondware Poser 13 render.

* Feuilleton has lengthy comments on the ‘history of Lovecraft in comics’ academic paper (linked to in my previous HPLinks). Reading this history has spurred him to finish his own unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror… “This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish”.

* The Alan Moore World blog has “Lovecraft was an American William Blake”…

In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge.” (Moore, 1993).

Sadly, it appears that his Yuggoth Cultures was left in a London taxi-cab and thus lost. Not sure how the book overlaps with Moore’s comic-book series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, but I’ll take it on trust that Alan Moore World knows that the published comics and the lost book are different things.

* I missed noticing this event, but managed to snag the poster at a small size. A ‘Lovecraft festival’ on the videogame service Steam, which has now been-and-gone.

But from this I was able to track down the larger and more appealing artwork (same artist, no artist credited) that the poster was partly made from…

* Bounding Into Comics reviews the new Re-Animator movie 4K UHD set, and itemises the many additional extras newly packaged with the movie.

* The publisher Dark Horse is preparing to ship a ‘special hardcover’ edition of Richard Corben’s “Lovecraft and backwoods terror” graphic-novel Rat God. 184 pages with “remastered lettering”. Unfortunately it’s also being coloured, having originally been in greyscale. Due in the autumn of 2025…

Terrible things stalk the forests outside Arkham in this chilling original tale from comics master Richard Corben.

* Viking (an offshoot of Penguin Books, last I heard) is reported in the book trade as being set to publish Penguin Weird Fiction later in 2025… “an anthology of stories featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others”. The advance notice makes it sounds like the stories feature these authors as characters, but I suspect it’s not that interesting. Just another cash-in reprint, I expect.

* New on Archive.org, a set of Mayfair magazine (for several decades a leading mass-market British equivalent to the U.S. Playboy), which search shows had in its February 1970 issue a reprint of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”. George Underwood was the artist…

* Another new batch of short SF/fantasy readings at LibriVox. This time around there are four by Lovecraft’s one-time protege Henry Kuttner, all public domain. Also, I didn’t realise any stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley had slipped into the public domain. But at least one of her stories must have, since she’s in this collection.

* And finally, a reminder to those who may be visiting Providence this summer, that I have a free Lovecraft’s Providence Map online.

— End-quotes —

“”Polaris” is rather interesting in that I wrote it in 1918, BEFORE I had ever read a word of Lord Dunsany’s. Some find it hard to believe this, but I can give not only assurance but absolute proof that it is so.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“As to the charge of modernism against me because of my predilection for Poe & Dunsany, why, Sir, I refute it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner December 1919 (he instead hails his predecessors in the 18th century gothic, discovered and read in his childhood attic).

“When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of “The Gods of the Mountain”, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean”, “The City of Never”, “The Fall of Babbulkund”, “In the Land of Time”, and “Idle Days on the Yann”.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“… a few weird [stage] dramas such as Dunsany’s ‘Gods of the Mountain’ & ‘Night at an Inn’ have demonstrated how a natural expert can weave horror, dread, & mounting tension with skilfully managed dialogue.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, March 1935.

“I infinitely prefer Dunsany to Cabell — he was a genuine magic & freshness which the weary sophisticate seems to lack” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, August 1926.

“Imaginative artists have been few, and always unappreciated. [William] Blake is woefully undervalued. Poe would never have been understood had not the French taken the pains to exalt and interpret him. Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise.” (Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, January 1921).