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HPLinks #24 – Wayne June, audiobooks, Angouleme, The Haunted Forest, cats and more…

05 Wednesday Feb 2025

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HPLinks #24.

* Rest in peace, Wayne June (1954-2025), the man who read Lovecraft’s tales so expertly in the form of the Dark Worlds audiobook series and “The Shadow Out of Time”.

* New to me, an unabridged vintage recording of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Freely available on YouTube, as a six-hour reading. Read by David Palmer, though his voice is remarkably similar to the outstanding ‘Books for the Blind’ Lovecraft reader Gordon Gould. If a bit more wistful, perhaps. The Online Catalog of recordings for Books for the Blind etc reveals Ward was issued on tape way back in 1982.

* Just released, the LibriVox Short Horror Collection #77, this time containing a feast of R.E. Howard, Derleth, Lovecraft, Whitehead, and Wandrei. All recordings are issued as public-domain audio readings.

* Conan Chronology has a new and fascinating side-by-side look at exactly how the Comics Code censorship operated on the page in the U.S., followed by a long look at “How Conan Conquered the Comics Code”. Yes, Marvel’s Conan adaptations and adapters led the charge for the de-censorship of U.S. news-stand comic-books.

* “U.S. Govt: AI-assisted Works Can Get Copyright with Enough Human Creativity”. Good to know that such common sense is now official, at least in the eyes of the U.S. copyright office. So just because something used AI in some part, don’t assume it’s therefore freely redistributable.

* The new open-access journal, Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media hails from Denmark, and is published in English under Creative Commons Attribution. The journal has so far published three issues.

* In the latest edition of the Spanish journal Theory Now, an open-access review of the book A traves del abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024) (‘Into the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’).

* New from Iceland in English, the 2024 Masters dissertation “Adapt and Die: Ecocriticism and the Lovecraftian Sublime in Rainworld, Outer Wilds, Frostpunk, and Factorio”. Freely available online.

* A delayed Masters dissertation from Norway in English, on “Lovecraftian Horror and the Role of Truth”. It will be freely accessible from 20th November 2025.

* Just finished a few days ago, the giant Angouleme comics-arts event in France. This saw major exhibitions on…

   — The Lovecraft adaptations of Gou Tanabe, now standing at twelve book-length adaptations. [ Radio France one-hour special ] [ In-gallery video and video short (loop) ] [ Printed catalogue currently available, but very likely to sell out ]

   — The “cult Vikings series” of comics, Vinland Saga. [ In-gallery video, a bit wobbly but not sea-sickness inducing ]

   — ‘The City in Science-Fiction Comics’, with selected works from 150 artists including Moebius, Druillet, Bilal, Frederik Peeters and Francois Schuiten. The focus was on “BD” comics format, common in continental Europe. Rather than on the comics of the USA, Britain or Japan. [ There doesn’t seem to be a catalogue ]

   — A survey of BD comics adapting fairy tales for young children. [ Again, no catalogue ]

Incidentally, the UK’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival now has dates — 26th-28th September 2025. This is now the UK’s only potential challenger to France’s giant Angouleme event in the future, after the regrettable lockdown-demise of Shrewsbury’s ambitious comic arts festival.

* Issued in France in French, at the end of January 2025, Gou Tanabe’s adaptation of “The Cats of Ulthar”, as Les chats d’Ulthar. The book is as yet unknown to Amazon UK.

* In Spain in February 2025, the 2nd ‘Ferroviaria Fantastica’, and this year the event has a Lovecraft theme throughout. The title translates as ‘Fastastic Railways’, but sadly it does not appear to be a festival of Lovecraftian scale-model electric railway layouts (now there’s an idea for a railroad-builder videogame). Seems more of a general regional one-day festival of the fantastic, with talks and creative workshops?

* Also in Spain, a regional gallery show ‘The Cthulhu Mythos’, with a substantial set of online gallery pictures.

* I’m pleased to see that Murray Ewing is slowly reviewing the novels of British novelist John Gordon at his blog. Who knew that there were many more novels, after the children’s classic The Giant Under the Snow? Not me, until now. Ewing’s latest review is of The Edge of the World (1983). The thought strikes me that a full-cast / full-FX unabridged audio reading of The Giant Under the Snow would be quite something.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he brings news that the summer 2025 issue of the weird poetry journal Spectral Realms will contain the poem “The Haunted Forest”, liked by Lovecraft and compared by him to Poe. Thought lost, the poem has now been re-discovered in the January 1915 edition of Outward Bound.

* The German Lovecraftians now have dates for their major annual RPG convention anRUFung 2025, now set for 17th to 20th July 2025. They also report that the dedicated Lovecraftian Miskatonic Theatre, a real theatre in Hamburg’s Harburg district, has successfully crowdfunded $15,000 to replace all its stolen gear. It’s reported that this specialist ‘horror theatre’ has so far put on stage its adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

* Marzaat unearths a substantial Lovecraft Mythos tale by John Brunner. Who knew? Marzaat’s blog post is however one to read after reading the tale itself, since we get a complete plot synopsis and plot spoilers. The tale itself is found in Weird Tales v55 #31 1992, and in Robert M. Price’s themed anthology The Necronomicon (Chaosium, 1996). A review of the Price collection called the Brunner tale the… “gem of the collection”.

* Due in early 2025 from Chaosium, a new $50 hardback edition of the Keeper’s Guide for the RPG Cthulhu by Gaslight, intended for the game masters who run RPG game sessions. New cover art by Loic Muzy. The book may also be of use to writers using the setting of late Victorian Britain and the nation’s wider British Empire.

* Elsewhere, I’ve reached seven years of producing my regular 20/20 : Tracking Optimism links newsletter, which tracks causes for rational optimism about the future, and notes substantial debunkings of doom-mongers and alarmists. 20/20 is definitely not one for those inclined toward gloom and doom. I’ve also reached issue #275 of my regular Tolkien Gleanings links newsletter, which tracks interesting Tolkien scholarship and other Middle-earth and mediaeval-fantasy related items that catch my eye. Again, not one for those who are allergic to elves and hobbits and the like. But some readers of Tentaclii may be interested.

* And finally, news just in: the cats of Ulthar reported to have withdrawn from their emergency military alliance with the cats of Scotland! (aka: The Scottish government will not, as was widely mooted in the media, ban the keeping of pet cats in Scotland).

— End-quote —

Lovecraft on northern Scotland…

“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. The races entering into the composition of the Gaels must have been largely Nordic, with a touch perhaps of Alpine (Slav) & Mediterranean. Whence, then, came this peculiar physiognomy?” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“The cult [of witchcraft] does not seem to have crossed into Britain till late in the 15th or early in the 16th century; and it there found its chief seat in Scotland.” — Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, October 1930.

“… how much I enjoyed The House of the Isles, which swept my imagination along with a kind of feudal pageantry all the more potent because it was real family history, & written by one of the characters of the pageant itself, as it were. […] It is certainly a vivid & dramatic chronicle [of the feudal clans of Scotland], & gripped my imagination strongly enough to send me more than once to histories & reference works for parallel background-material & scenic colour. […] The long pedigree [i.e. ancestral line, detailed in the book] is certainly a matter of the keenest interest — both the actually historic portion, which may be taken as extending back to the generations just preceding Somerled, & the earlier parts in which legendary & oral tradition blend gracefully into an increasing twilight of poetic narrative. […] I am very grateful for the loan of The House of the Isles, & would be glad to see the subsequent volume some time if it be of convenient mailing proportions. [… Of course] In actual detail, the period of romantic mediaevalism contained repellent amounts of crudeness. There is little doubt but that neither Somerled nor Bandoin Ui Niall could write his own name, & both probably ate half-cooked meat with unassisted hands, wiping their greasy fingers on their garments. But taken in its entirety, with all its proud, violent feelings & ruthlessly energetic deeds, it has the inestimable quality of typifying concretely & dramatically those basic thoughts, feelings, attitudes, & motive-patterns from which the whole fabric of Aryan life has flowered, & which have characterised the experience of the race during the longest part of its history. It is a symbol of the utmost potency, & has a natural hold on the deepest hidden psychological processes of the European personality. The ending of a stream of experience based upon the approximately similar conditions which have always surrounded us hitherto, & have thus become the indispensable background & reference-points of our habitual thoughts & feelings, is tremendously to be regretted. It is a tragedy because it deprives us of that reservoir of precedent which has so much to do with our sense of the value & significance of things — throwing us back to the beginning, as it were, & placing before us the task of founding a whole new tradition based on the newer conditions of living.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, February 1929.

Wayne June (1954-2025)

31 Friday Jan 2025

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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Red Hook Studios and others have confirmed that Wayne June — for many ‘the voice of Lovecraft’ — has recently passed away. June’s signature weighty voice is heard on many of the finest audiobook readings of Lovecraft’s tales. In these, he has left us a great legacy.

June also billed himself as “audio producer, drummer, singer”. Born in 1954, he began performing with a rock band when aged 15, and he continued to play with a wide variety of 1970s and 80s live and studio bands on a paying basis. He later spent seven years touring every U.S. state, and also internationally, with his guitar hero Johnny Winter. June was the drummer on Winter’s acclaimed album I’m a Bluesman (2004).

Establishing himself as a professional voice artist circa 1998, he was able to draw on his extensive studio experience. But he also trained his voice to audiobook perfection with lessons at Edge Studios in New York, by volunteering for many and varied recordings at Recording for the Blind (RFB&D), and by taking acting classes. His voiceover and audiobook business appears to have been based in Shelton, Connecticut (near New Haven and a little north-east of New York City).

Having grown up reading horror, science-fiction and Lovecraft paperbacks, it was natural that he would want to professionally record such material in readings. His breakthrough narrations were of Lovecraft (the extensive Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft series), three volumes of Poe and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (for his own AudioBookCase venture), and many others (for AudioRealms and others). In recent years he was best known as the narrator (‘The Ancestor’) of the popular Darkest Dungeon videogames (2016-, Red Hook Studios), an extensive performance and a core part of the game’s experience.

A relatively recent horror fandom podcast interview with him is still online, Final Guys #70 – Wayne June Interview (2018).

Doubtless someone with the required skills will be compiling a comprehensive Wayne June discography in due course. Possibly some ‘lost’ recordings will also be uncovered. For instance, he talked of recording Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but (if recorded) this is apparently unreleased.

Four more LORAs, and a CivitAI block tool for UBlock

30 Thursday Jan 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

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A few more recent LORAs, which are kind of ‘style-steering add-ons’ used with MODELS based on Stable Diffusion 1.5. All free. Local AI image generation will ideally require a PC with at least an NVIDIA 3060 12Gb graphics-card.

Not many, as Lovecraft-ish LORAs have been few and far between over Christmas and New Year, what with all the many distractions of those weeks. These are the only worthy ones I’ve spotted, since my last such posting back in 8th December.

18th century men LORA for Rococo clothing, makeup, wigs, from Lovecraft’s beloved 18th century. For use with a MODEL which ‘knows’ what Lovecraft looks like, such as Photon.

Neo Noir v1.0 LORA. Dark film noir with modern slightly CG vibe in the demos, but obviously also able to do more of a ‘1940s publicity shot’ look. Appears to know clothing.

FantasyMapCreator LORA. Doesn’t appear to have gained many users, but some may want to test it.

And a new updated 1.2 version of Realms of the Dead LORA, and some new pictures (prompts included) show what can be done with it in terms of generating images of Ancient Egyptian passageways…

Incidentally, for those doing their own browsing of CivitAI, the key repository of LORAs, here is how to blank unwanted items in the search results. In UBlock Origin’s Filters list, add your tailored variant of this and save the list…

civitai.com##a[href*=”keyword”]

As the page of search results loads, this blocks the image in each target panel — but not the panel itself. It blocks the image only when it finds keyword in the panel’s href (its Web link), so replace keyword with whatever you need. This block thus squishes unwanted ’empire builders’ who are out to build a series of LORAs — all with the same brand-name. Their endless production of new LORAs can feel a lot like spam. Now you can cosmetically filter them out of results, by name.

HPLinks #23 – REH letters, Loved Dead, geometries of terror, Arkham grows, pyramids, pixels and more…

29 Wednesday Jan 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, New books, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #23.

* Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf has a long and detailed review of A Means to Freedom, the two-volume edition of the letters of Lovecraft and REH. With footnotes, even.

* The latest SFFaudio Podcast #823 is “The Loved Dead” by C.M. Eddy and H.P. Lovecraft. With discussion and a full reading by Jim Moon. The story is now public domain at last, due to the recent lapse of copyright.

* A November 2024 group interview in a literary magazine, with the Italian Lovecraftians, or at least those who congregate on the Lovecraft channel of the Telegram social-media service. Freely available, in Italian.

* In Italy in November 2024, a third conference / talk-series on “Geometries of Terror: The rhetorical space in the weird literature”. I see a 66-page publication from the event, freely available in Italian as a flipbook. Several Lovecraft items are seen on the contents page. This, however, turns out to be a free extract from the forthcoming 316-page printed book of the conference proceedings (all three of them?) which is set for February 2025.

* Also in Italy, what appears to be a Kindle edition of an Italian translation of the Rodionoff / Breccia graphic novel Lovecraft. Due February 2025.

* In French with an English abstract, “Esthetique de l’horreur et influence des motifs lovecraftiens dans le cinema de Stuart Gordon et Brian Yuzna: (2024). (‘The aesthetics of horror and the influence of Lovecraftian patterns in the cinema of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available for download.

* Here in the UK the London Lovecraft Festival website has now updated, and has the February 2025 details.

* Antihero magazine reviews the new “Monumental Journey Through Lovecraftian Horror and Black Metal Majesty”. This being the new album Kadath by the band The Great Old Ones. The review finds it…

an intricate and absorbing black metal masterpiece that honors Lovecraft’s vision while pushing their sound to new heights. This is not just an album; it’s an experience — a deep dive into a world of cosmic horror and surreal beauty.

* A new Lovecraftian picture series, “The Arkham Growths”. All are under Creative Commons Attribution, should you wish to re-use them.

a series of glass-plate pictures from the late 1920s. The weird plants were grown from seeds collected by an expedition from Miskatonic University into a blighted district located “west of Arkham” in the late 1920s. The plants were found to be bioluminescent, and these ten low-light images are now the only surviving relics of the Miskatonic investigation.

* Apparently set for publication in English in July 2025, the Tanabe manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. The English cover has been released…

* Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Comics Omnibus Vol. 6 is due to be published on 6th August 2025. It should weigh in at over 1,000 pages. Reprinting the Savage Sword of Conan magazine-format comic #73-87 from the early 1980s, plus a 1977 special.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Forrest J. Ackerman’s The Frankenscience Monster, a book length collections of essays on and tributes to the early horror-movie star Boris Karloff.

* Isaac Asimov’s Invention & Discovery Cards… “all 1,477 entries from Asimov’s encyclopedia are now represented as illustrated cards” and these are presented in an interactive adjustable web display/timeline.

* New, the pixellated 1990’s Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Adventure Shadow of the Comet – “Remastered”…

Shadow of the Comet is a great game, but it’s also quite a broken one. So in this special edit I’ve addressed its most glaring issues to make it a more entertaining experience. It required thousands of edits and an entirely new custom subtitle track. […] The video [a three-hour playthrough of the fixed game, on YouTube] also includes the bonus ‘Lovecraft Museum’ at the end. The Museum features lots of cool cosmic horror relics including the Necronomicon.

* From the Public Domain Film Contest 2025, the short film “Road Trip”, which (among others) samples from “The Dunwich Horror” and the Lovecraft-fave philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

* Found, another picture of the location of ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop on Weybosset in Providence. See my contribution to The Lovecraft Annual 2023 for details of the man and his shop, well known to Lovecraft and many of the Lovecraft Circle.

* And finally, a new survey of “Pyramids on the Cover of Weird Tales“.

— End-quotes —

“It was not like any city of earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires, and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus; towers, spires and pyramids that no man could fashion, but that bloomed flower-like and delicate …” — May 1922, Lovecraft to Moe. On his first sight of the evening lights of New York City coming up, seen from across the river.

“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’s revised vision of New York City, in the short tale “He”.

He would also encounter evocative pyramid-shapes in graveyards…

After briefly greeting such of the family — mother and sister — as were present, I departed with Edgar for the ancient shades of Amesbury […] “We alighted at the ancient graveyard” [where we] “marvell’d in the sombre pines and willows, slabs and monuments. 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 to Galpin, 1st May 1923. On visiting the schoolboy Edgar Jacobs Davis in Merrimac.

HPLinks #22 – the key 1919 Vagrant, the uninhabitable universe, a Lovecraft rock opera, and more…

22 Wednesday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #22.

* The Drayton Arms theatre in London has officially announced the London Lovecraft Festival, for 16th-17th February 2025. The Drayton also has Web pages for the stage shows, which are booking now.

* Newly for sale, Lovecraft’s seminal “Dagon” as published in The Vagrant, November 1919. Said to be in near-fine condition.

* L’antique Sentier introduces Newburyport, a real-world model for Innsmouth, to French readers.

* From the University of North Carolina, the Masters dissertation “Popular Purity: Change Over Time in the Racial Views of H.P Lovecraft, and the Spectrum of Racial Ideas as Promoted by Popular Culture: 1917-1936” (2023). Freely available for download.

* At Stanford, the B.A. final dissertation “Lovecraft and the Question of an Uninhabitable Universe”. Winner of the university’s DLCL Award (2020). Now freely available for download.

* At McQuarie University, Australia, the PhD thesis Out of time/Out of control: speculative modernism and the limits of thought (2024), on Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. Freely available for download.

* Forthcoming, an academic book collection on the topic of movie ‘creature features’. With a submission deadline of 10th March 2025, the editor is seeking…

… close readings of films led by creatures and monsters in the 21st century. Classic [older] films will be welcome if analyzed through new, contemporary theories to show how their purpose/meaning has changed over time.

* In Spanish, the YouTube recording of a 2023 Madrid conference on Geologia en la literatura fantastica y de terror (‘Geology in fantasy and horror literature’).

* Also in Spanish, MetalTrip reviews…

A new rock opera, ‘Legado De Una Tragedia: Lovecraft’, which brings together theatre and symphonic metal music. The result is a horror rock-opera full of the best heavy metal. Each song is based on one of Lovecraft’s most iconic stories.

* The Void reviews Kadath, the new Lovecraft-centred metal album by the Lovecraftian band The Great One Ones. Hardforce also has a review in French.

* On the south coast of the UK, Falmouth University will stage a three-day conference on Haunted Modernities, 16th-18th July 2025. Deadline for submissions: 17th March 2025. The conference seems to be casting the net wide, but will focus around…

… haunted modernities and spectral futures of all sorts. Looking back to the past as a haunted space and forward to the ‘spectres’ of the future, we want the ‘Haunted Modernities’ conference to be indicative of wide open spaces and fruitful intersections in scholarship and practice. Whether work is hyper-local, global, or interstellar we welcome imaginative, creative, ethical, and diverse discussions from all disciplines and subject areas. As well as traditional papers, creative practice work is also invited in whatever form — written, film, audio, performance, exhibitions etc.

* New on Librivox, a public-domain reading of the English translation of Hesse’s Steppenwolf. 1929, in first English translation, which I assume is the translation used here due to the 1929 U.S. copyright expiration date. So far as I know, Lovecraft never encountered the translation.

* A forthcoming book, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, will be a transcribed collection of interviews with science-fiction and fantasy authors, drawn from Richard Wolinsky’s Probabilities radio show. His half-hour interviewees included Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury and many more. The book is due from Tachyon in August 2025. No Amazon listing as yet.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the 1990s Sheffield horror-punkzine Gibbering Madness #6. This has a fannish look at punk rockers in horror movies, with the article naming about 18 such movies. Also of note is the punkzine Scrawl #3 from Belfast, though only for a 7″-single review which mentions in passing that…

Rudimentary Peni are quite rightly recognised as pioneering and influential in the realm of anarcho punk and are possibly one of the most deranged bands ever. […] The late eighties saw [their album] Cacophony, which was a musically inventive yet immensely bizarre tribute to the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

* Blinks notes a new broadcast TV travel documentary which (though otherwise tiresome) gives… “a number of interesting scenes showing both the inside and outside of Dunsany Castle”, plus some snatches of discussion with the current Lord Dunsany.

* And finally, new on eBay at a sensible price, ‘Stereo View of the Head of the Providence River’, which appears to show the ‘Old Brick Row’ which Lovecraft tried to save.

— End-quote —

“Good old Providence — there is no other town quite like it! [Until 1929 and the loss of the Old Brick Row, it still had the coherent] ancient waterfront with slant-roofed brick warehouses and lanes of gambrel-roofed shops and pillared taverns […] Then, too, from most points’ along the [College] hill crest there is a breath-taking view of the outspread roofs and spires and domes of the westward-stretching lower town — a view reaching even to the dim violet hills of the country beyond the country whence many of my ancestors came. At sunset this vista is past description — the marble dome of the State House, the Gothic tower of St. Patrick’s, and the distant spires of Federal Hill against the flaming, mysterious west — and then the cryptic twilight, with the violet of the far hills creeping eastward to engulf the whole drowsy valley, and little specks of light leaping out one by one till the expanded sea of roofs is one titanic constellation […] And even more magical now that we have tall buildings to light up and suggest enchanted cliff cities of Dunsanian mystery.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffman Price, February 1933.

HPLinks #21 – Spectral Realms, Spanish Lovecraftians, Madness on the London stage, Azoth 1918-1921, and more…

15 Wednesday Jan 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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HPLinks #21.

* New on the Hippocampus Press website, the annual weird poetry journal Spectral Realms No. 22. There are a few ‘classic reprint’ poems as well, including… “a rare poem from Weird Tales by pulpmeister E. Hoffmann Price”.

* In Spanish, a new open-access journal article in the latest Signa: Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Semiotica. This focuses on discussion of two… “spearheads of genre fiction in our country: Emilio Bueso and Guillem Lopez, [who adapt] the Lovecraftian model to their own distinctive styles and obsessions”. Freely available online.

* In English in the latest edition of the Hungarian journal Patchwork, Escape from Innsmouth and The Shadow over Innsmouth: The Role of The Reader and Player in Postmodern Multimedial Narratives. Freely available online.

* The latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast hosts, as a guest, the author of the new book Ripples From Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes and True Detective (2024).

* French blog L’Antique Sentier translates part of the letter from H.P. Lovecraft to Helen V. Sully, 5th March 1935.

* Another 2025 London Lovecraft Festival theatre listing, for At The Mountains Of Madness at the Drayton Arms Theatre, 16th February 2025. Booking now. As yet, no sign of a 2025 programme at the official Festival website.

* Spraguedecampfan has a detailed review of Planets and Dimensions by Clark Ashton Smith. As I blogged last week, a scan of this 1970s book collection of CAS’s essays is now free on Archive.org.

* New from Scriblus, an 8,000-word article on “The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (1969-74): An Introduction”.

* Frontier Partisans trails the forthcoming “comprehensive and meticulously curated” 646-page new edition of the Western Tales Of Robert E. Howard. Due from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press in February 2025.

* Modern Age magazine suggests “It’s Time for a Walter Scott Revival”… “He’s known for his swashbuckling tales but offers much more.”

* Free on Archive.org, Azoth: The Occult Magazine of America (1918-1921). Of possible interest to Mythos writers seeking deep background on the immediate post-war period, which were also the years in which Lovecraft started to write stories again.

* Inverse reconsiders Underwater, a submarine horror box-office flop of a movie. Has major spoilers.

“Five years ago, Underwater did what many Lovecraft adaptations couldn’t. […] The film isn’t adapting any particular [Lovecraft] story, but a dedicated watch reveals details that are intentionally [Lovecraft] lore-consistent”.

* And finally, Beth Murray was a photographer who made a fine set of 1940s views of Providence, which I collected in a blog post a while ago now. Later I found one more from the set, which was later issued as postcards. I’ve now found another card not seen before, showing the Seekonk River near Red Bridge. Small size, but clear enough to suggest that it was still very much a working river when Lovecraft was alive. The river was strongly tidal and salty.

Red Bridge on the Seekonk, Providence, in the 1940s.

— End-quote —

Lovecraft at the Red Bridge: “I was standing on the East Providence shore of the Seekonk River, about three quarters of a mile south of the foot of Angell Street, at some unearthly nocturnal hour. The tide was flowing out horribly — exposing parts of the river-bed never before exposed to human sight. Many persons lined the banks, looking at the receding waters & occasionally glancing at the sky. Suddenly a blinding flare — reddish in hue — appeared high in the southwestern sky; & something descended to earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence shore near the Red Bridge — about an eighth of a mile south on Angell Street. The watchers on the banks screamed in horror — “It has come — It has come at last!” — & fled away into the deserted streets. But I ran toward the bridge instead of away; for I was more curious than afraid. When I reached it I saw hordes of terror-stricken people in hastily donned clothing fleeing across from the Providence side as from a city accursed by the gods. There were pedestrians, many of them falling by the way, & vehicles of all sorts. Electric cars [tram-cars] — the old small cars unused in Providence for six years — were running in close procession — eastward away from the city on both of the double tracks. Their motormen were frantic, & small collisions were numerous. By this time the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus. Suddenly a glare appeared in the West, & I saw the dominant landmark of the Providence horizon — the dome of the Central Congregational Church, silhouetted weirdly against a background of red. And then, silently, that dome abruptly caved in & fell out of sight in a thousand fragments. And from the fleeing populace arose such a cry as only the damn’d utter — & I waked up …” — Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, May 1920.

Fix your Amazon WishLists

10 Friday Jan 2025

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Many readers will have a number of Amazon WishLists, probably with substantial user comments appended. But now some useless tea-boy at Amazon has tinkered with your WishList comments, making them very tiny and also hiding more than the first line of text. So here’s a useful free UserScript for your Web browser, Amazon Wishlist item user-comments / user-notes – fix. This should fix the problem. Requires TamperMonkey or similar, to run UserScripts on Web pages.

HPLinks #20 – Lovecraft’s copy of Landmarks of New York, rustic Derleth, Ancient Egypt, future-oracles, and more

09 Thursday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #20.

Not much to glean this week, which I guess is due to the usual ‘slump’ over Christmas / New Year. And most of the items below are only tangentially related to ‘Lovecraft himself’.

* Up for sale, what appears to be Lovecraft’s copy of the book Landmarks of New York (1923), with bookplate and signature date for May 1928. Which suggests this was a memory-jogger of the New York of 1922, rather than a pocket-guide used at that time or in the later New York Years. The seller notes… “This title does not appear in Lovecraft’s Library nor any of Lovecraft’s published letters”. Not on Archive.org, so we can’t be sure it’s actually New York City. It might be ‘upstate’ New York.

Also at Honest Abe’s site, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in Czech. A uniform set titled Volani Cthulhu, with variant dustjacket colours for each volume. Here we seen the green one, which shows off the artwork to best effect.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a joint mini-review of “three interesting H.P. Lovecraft-related items”. The Starry Wisdom Library, The Dagon Collection, and the map-set H.P. Lovecraft and His Environs.

* Beyond Lovecraft: A Companion is the mooted title for an academic book collection now being assembled. Will apparently have chapters discussing various recent adaptations and (details are scant, so I’m guessing) possibly even those ersatz ‘barely-adaptations that use the Lovecraft name’? (Perhaps we need a name for such cruft, these days? ‘Lovecruft’?)

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Planets And Dimensions, a 1973 book which collected… “the most important non-fiction prose of Clark Ashton Smith”. Includes tributes to Lovecraft.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and among other matters he brings news of the publication of various new August Derleth books, among which the complete Gus Elker farm/rural humourous stories in two volumes. Buck in the Bottoms: Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls and Wild Plums: More Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls. Of these, Joshi writes…

David E. Schultz […] did yeoman’s work in unearthing both uncollected and unpublished stories that had gone unnoticed by Peter Ruber, whose compilation Country Matters (1996) purported to include all the Gus Elker stories.

I wonder if Derleth ever sometimes thought of himself as following Lovecraft in this? After all, the master had once penned the comic tale “Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl”, about the daughter of a Vermont backwoods bootlegger.

* Nominations now open for the 2025 Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.

* In Portugal until February 2025, a substantial retrospective exhibition of the comics work of Liam Sharp. Science-fiction, fantasy, and some Conan.

* Newly officially free on the Poe Society website, the book Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986).

* The latest edition of the open-access journal Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt is a special on Ancient Egypt in science-fiction and related modern pop culture. Also note the new book Alternative Egyptology: Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt (2024), which is available free-to-read online at the publisher website.

* Talking of ancient Egypt, I spotted an interview with the author of the new novel Tomb of the Black Pharaoh. This is part of his Danforth: Eldrich Tales of WWII series, which fuses… “Lovecraftian horror, Egyptian myth & WWII-era espionage”. Sounds fun.

* And finally, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a new exhibition on “Oracles, Omens and Answers”, showcasing the material and mental cultures involved in supposed ‘divination of the future’ prior to the advent of science-fiction. Has an accompanying book. A timely show, given that our fast-evolving ‘AI oracles’ may soon offer us various forms of precognition. Or, appear to do so. Related: Wormwoodiana has a new post this week on The Tarot in England.

— End-quotes —

“It must be understood that the real developments of the future are utterly beyond prediction, since wholly unseen or wrongly appraised factors may swing matters in totally unexpected directions.” — Lovecraft, in his essay “Some Repetitions on the Times”.

“So far as future history is concerned, I’m damned if I know what lies ahead. […] Nobody knows what factors will pop up to prove the decisive ones. What will the next war bring — and leave? […] How fatal will be the decadence or collapse toward which both western and eastern cultures seem to be moving? Will the modified behaviour-patterns, created by the lapse of certain traditional beliefs, produce unforeseen results? [Thankfully] The northern and western countries seem to have a knack of readjusting their government, economics, and society to meet changing needs without explosive disaster, and if they can be left free to evolve without encroachment, they probably have quite a future.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“The past is real — it is all there is. The present is only a trivial and momentary boundary-line — whilst the future, though wholly determinate, is too essentially unknown and landmarkless to possess any hold upon our sense of concrete aesthetic imagery. It is, too, liable to involve shifts and contrasts repugnant to our emotions and fancy; since we cannot study it as a unified whole and become accustomed to its internal variations as we can study and grow accustomed to the vary’d past. […] it seems to me all one can do at present is to fight the future as best he can.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

“… anyone’s emotional attitude toward the future is essentially a matter of chance and of taste. [Those involved in] the impersonal and objective matter of calculating what the future is likely to be [will of course draw on the] different emotions [that] give different individuals different habits of perception, appraisal, and reasoning-habits which importantly affect all conclusions save those depending on the very simplest, clearest, and most concrete data. One really ought to think of the future apart from all likes, dislikes, and personal perspectives. He would then see a transformation [that is even now] in process; likely to invalidate most of our present standards, thought-habits, and pleasure-sources, and to substitute another set of these things which — though no doubt satisfying to those born under its aegis — will call forth less of the varied pleasure and thought-potentialities of mankind than the systems of the past and present have called forth. He needn’t call this a tragedy if he doesn’t wish to — for of course he will not live to reap its worst effects, while his great-grandchildren will be too steeped in the newer order to miss any other.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

A quickie ‘greatest hits’ for Star Trek (TOS)

04 Saturday Jan 2025

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A few readers may be interested in my recent revisiting of Star Trek (Original Series, Kirk and Spock etc). My viewing was only a sampling of the best, as I didn’t want to slog through it all. I also avoided those ‘make the characters act out-of-character’ and ‘time travel to the Earth in the past’ episodes that you tend to get in long TV sci-fi series. Anyway, here’s my final list for a quickie Enterprise-focused ‘greatest hits’ tour of the Original Series (fans call it ‘TOS’), plus the follow-on cinema movies. You should be able to get through it in three or four evenings.

__Series 1__

1×10 The Corbomite Maneuver

1×14 Balance of Terror

1×22 Space Seed (Origin of Khan, useful as backstory for the later movie)

1×25 The Devil in the Dark

1×26 Errand of Mercy (Klingon Empire)

__Series 2__

2×01 Amok Time

2×10 Journey to Babel

2×15 The Trouble With Tribbles (not as good as I recall it, but fun)

__Series 3__

3×02 The Enterprise Incident

3×07 Day of the Dove (Kang)

3×09 The Tholian Web

3×16 The Mark of Gideon

THEN –> 1st Movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Director’s Edition, aka Director’s Cut) which has a creaky start but is much better after the first 30 minutes. Then Wrath of Khan and finally The Search for Spock.

HPLinks #19 – hard and Long, Joshi’s Recognition reviewed, a Fanhistory Project webinar series, dreaming cats, and more…

02 Thursday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #19.

* Newly listed for discounted pre-order, a 500-copy hardcover edition of A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. Due to ship in early spring 2025 (“March”), and it can’t ship outside the USA.

* In English in the latest edition of the Hungarian open-access journal Patchwork, “Subjectivity and Cosmic Ambiguity in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City””.

* The latest edition of the new open-access journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale has a review of Joshi’s The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown (2021).

* In the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Il richiamo degli abissi: una ripresa del Glauco ovidiano in H.P. Lovecraft” (‘The Call of the Deep: a revival of Ovidian Glaucus in H.P. Lovecraft’). Presents, in Italian, the idea that Ovid’s… “Metamorphoses, [specifically the] episode of Glaucus, was an important source of inspiration for the short story The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

* A special new Lovecraft issue of the French journal EaN… “Cthulhu waits no longer. Lovecraft is more relevant than ever: this is perhaps what explains the contemporary interest in his surprisingly modern work.” EaN appears to be open-access.

* In the latest issue of the French journal Otrante ($ paywall) “Relecture juridique de la nouvelle Le molosse d’H.P. Lovecraft” (‘A legal rereading of the short story The Hound by H.P. Lovecraft’).

* The current Weird Tales IP owners recently had a 100-page ‘Cosmic Horror’ special issue (#367), which I think I missed hearing about. But usefully, last week the Tellers of Weird Tales blog perused this issue, finding that… “the contributors to this issue are mostly movie, television, and comic book people” rather than writers. He also suspects that most of the unsigned pictures, of which there are apparently many, were generated by AI models. Which I’ve no objection to myself… provided AI images are done well, generated by someone who knows what they’re doing, and tickled a bit with Photoshop before release. Tellers of Weird Tales also has another post taking a deeper look at the Cosmic Horror issue.

* FanHistory Project Zoom Sessions. This is an online webinar series with the holders and curators of science-fiction fandom university collections. Set to run from January through April 2025.

* A few years back the Chinese communist authorities took a sudden and unexpected interest in science-fiction fans and communities. What seemed somewhat benign at the time now looks different, as a new paper reveals the “unexpected intensification” of censorship which followed, and how “government censorship caused once-thriving fanfiction communities to break apart”.

* Propnomicon posts the scenario setup for The Miskatonic University Sahara Expedition 2025. A real-world LARP in the deserts of North Africa.

* An early indication of the return of the London Lovecraft Festival in February 2025. A listing for “A Night Beneath The Elder Sign” at The Drayton Arms Theatre, London, on 16th February 2025. Lovecraft’s “Celephais, a tale from the Dreamlands, told in shadow puppet style” with “electronic soundtrack performed live”. Plus a “dramatic retelling of From Beyond”.

* Metal Temple interviews the band The Great Old Ones… “Lovecraft may be the sixth member of the band. It’s always music first, but Lovecraft is part of the band, you know?”

* And finally, the English edition of the leftist El Pais asks “How do cats dream?”.

— End-quote —

“My dream of the black cat city was very fragmentary. The place was built of stone & clung to the side of a cliff like some of the towns drawn by Sime for Dunsany’s stories. There are towns more or less like it in Spain. The place seemed to have been built by & for human beings aeons ago, but its present feline inhabitants had evidently lived there for ages. [I beheld] the cats moving about in a rational & orderly manner, evidently in the performance of definite duties.” — Lovecraft to Lumley, June 1936.

HPLinks #18 – Lovecraft and relativity, Lovecraft’s political evolution in Spanish, a Canton discovery, and more…

19 Thursday Dec 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #18.

* A new Wormwoodania post, “Remembering Scott Connors”, the Clark Ashton Smith and weird fiction scholar who has recently passed away. Related is last week’s news that S.T. Joshi intends to spend 2025 writing the long-awaited Clark Ashton Smith biography, a book Connors had apparently started but was unable to bring to publication.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog surveys 2024’s accomplishments in producing valuable new data and scholarship about Lovecraft’s wife.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine for Winter 1992, with the lead article being the memoir “H.P. Lovecraft Meets Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser” by Fritz Leiber.

* The Fossils website has a new “scan of the article “The Phenomenon of H.P.L., a ten-page biography of H.P. Lovecraft by Helen V. Wesson originally published in The Fossil for July 1957.”

* Now free on YouTube, S.T. Joshi’s presentation “Lovecraft and the Physicists: Coming to Terms with Relativity and Indeterminacy”, given at the recent ‘Lovecraft et les sciences’ conference in France. Two hours, but the length is partly due to the lack of an AI insta-translator. Thus there are many pauses needed for manual translation.

* A third Lovecraft book of translated letters for Spanish readers, El Terror de la Razon. Cartas III (2024), new from publisher Aristas Martinez. The blurb reveals that the first section flows around the idea of… “‘The Terror of Reason’, his ideas about humanity and the cosmos that he disseminated in his most famous stories [and fashioned into] visionary thought that would later inspire a new generation of posthumanist philosophers”. Then the second part of the book focuses on the evolution of the man’s political ideas and ideals, in his own words. I’d hope there are copious footnotes enabling younger readers with no personal experience of the 20th century to (for instance) distinguish national socialism from soviet socialism, and to know what a ‘blackshirt’ was, etc. e.g. when he signs off “Yrs for the blackshirt march on Washington” — Lovecraft to Galpin, July 1934.

* New from Brazil in open-access, a Spanish-language journal article with the translated title ‘Gods, Monsters, Aliens: Lovecraft and the Post-Human’.

* The free bundle of Lovecraft tales, specially set up for deep textual analysis with a computer, is now available as lovecraftr version 1.2 (December 2024).

* Further to my July 2024 post on “that Canton madhouse”, Tentaclii reader Luke has written to say that he’s spotted a possible state institution at Canton (this being the Canton to be seen from a tall railway viaduct, when on the rail route from Providence to Boston). This was the ‘Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children’, later the ‘Massachusetts Hospital School’. Opened in 1907 and continuing to the present day, located on an 160-acre slope going down to meet the large local lake then called ‘Reservoir Pond’. Lovecraft had written “I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse”. Yet this real place was not a “madhouse”, but rather an institutional residential hospital with vocational training (farm work, craft workshops etc) for ages 2 to 20. This possibility is certainly worth considering. But, so far as I can see, the location and relatively low-rise appearance (compared to the vast castle-like state madhouses of the time) suggests it may not have made much of an impression on passing rail travellers, even if it could have been seen from a train window…

Note that Luke plausibly observes that the use of “poor little cousin” indicates that the Innsmouth-tainted cousin may have been sent away when a child. He was “little” but then “I had not seen him in four years”, and then a few more years pass before the rescue plan. All of which suggests a boy of perhaps 12 or 13 at the time of the rescue. A boy who would not yet have been transferred to an adult institution. Thus, to find the key state institution for “deformed” children at the real Canton is certainly intriguing.

* A new Skull Session podcast interview with Will Murray… “Will Murray and I discuss his long and varied career writing for Marvel Comics and magazines” and the influence of Lovecraft.

* It’s official, there will be a “4k restoration” version of the Re-Animator movie, complete with bubbling vats of newly-brewed extras. Likely to appear in early April 2025, and to ship with a 150-page book. The much-loved 1985 comedy movie adapted Lovecraft’s Home Brew magazine shocker-serial “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

* In Denmark in August 2025, a three-day conference on ‘Otherworldly Entertainment’…

Today, videogames continue to be one of the biggest platforms for horror, magic, gothic, and occult entertainment, even outperforming cinema and television. Despite [this deep reach into] broad audiences, [the topic] remains severely understudied.

* A paying Lovecraft-related job for a “Dark and mysterious painterly illustrator” wanted for the early stages of a commercial project. Predictably it’s a ‘rush job’ and over Christmas and New Year too. But the offer looks quite serious and there should be just enough time. Sadly the application is by a “super detailed and borderline complicated form” (‘exit stage-left: half the creatives in the room, screaming…’, etc).

* Tartarus Press on the T. Lobsang Rampa books. I recall these being prominent on home bookshelves, as a young child. Not my own shelves, as I never read the Rampa books. But it’s fascinating to learn now that the supposed mystical Tibetan lama who peeped out at me from the book-cases as a child, was… “in fact the son of a plumber from Plympton in Devon [southern England] called Cyril Hoskin”. He became a sometime fitter of corsets, sometime photographer, in the dreary greyness of post-war London. After his first 1956/57 best-seller…

with each subsequent book, Rampa casually shared his knowledge of astral travel, civilisations on Venus, UFOs, etc. One of his books was even meant to have been dictated to him by his cat.

The newspaper expose didn’t matter. He just went into full character for the rest of his life, claimed ‘reincarnation’ and much else… and credulous readers still lapped it up. Tartarus is now seeking anyone who can help with the research for a new full biography of this strange and strangely popular Englishman.

* Islands magazine recommends a visit to an “Underrated Literary Gem Filled With Rare Finds In Rhode Island”. This being the John Hay Library in Providence. Along with the huge Lovecraft collection, evidently the visitor can find there what sounds like one of the world’s finest collections of miniature toy soldiers, and for the especially ghoulish… four books bound in human skin.

* And finally, at the Grolier in New York City, “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works”. Their exhibition runs until 15th February 2024. The Necronomicon is, regrettably, represented by a rather naff plastic ‘joke’ case (supposedly holding ye dreadfull tome).

— End-quotes —

“Hope ya kin get your Black Cat file [i.e. a complete ‘reference file’ run of a past magazine]. I used to buy that reg’lar-like, and recall the swell weird stuff it had.” — Lovecraft to Morton, 23rd February 1936.

“I have been re-reading [your new story] “Marsh-Mad” — & the more I analyse it the better I like it! I shall make every effort to get this in the official organ [but, if not then it] is far too good to waste on any but a first-rate paper! Try it on the Black Cat.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 29th August 1918.

“Once again I’ve followed a Mortonian [Morton] tip, as I did when sending “Dagon” to the Black Cat and “The Tomb” to the Black Mask and have slipped Weird Tales five of my hell-beaters” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923.

We know Lovecraft began to “notice” the magazine Black Cat in 1904, but I know of no scholars able to pinpoint the exact date at which he ceased to buy or read the title.