HPLinks #14.

* A long new post on Lovecraft’s wife Sonia as a historical researcher. This was her paid role with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, undertaken in 1933, and which temporarily brought Lovecraft and Sonia together again. This scholarly post draws on as-yet unpublished archives.

I found an eBay picture of the Museum’s staff entrance seen in 1950, at the same Brower Park site that Sonia would have known.

* Librivox have released a new ghost and horror collection of public domain audio. Includes free and re-usable readings of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” and “Polaris”, and from the Lovecraft Circle Arthur Leeds’s “The Return of the Undead” and Frank Belknap Long’s “Men Who Walk Upon the Air”. The latter appeared in Weird Tales for May 1925, alongside Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann”. Also available on on Archive.org.

* Now available for purchase and download, the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre full-cast audio adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Temple”.

* Fumito Logica reviews the new Italian graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life and death…

HPL’s anti-humanism was a desperate faith in the absurd, in a silent and indifferent cosmos, while he lived through an era that clung to habit and the superfluous. […] Yet his desperation gave him the ability to transcend his era, while remaining sitting in a cold room in Providence. He used the power of the word to cross the threshold of eternity, entering dimensions that seek to erase every residue of humanity. [The book] is an imaginative and intimate biography, material and evanescent. Taddei insinuates himself into HPL’s flesh, while Lacavalla paints his darkest nightmares without sparing himself.

Also, Italian paper Il Manifesto has an interview with the writer and artist (spoiler alert). Freely available online.

* Heavy Metal magazine’s blog surveys the Lovecraft Art of John Holmes, the British artist who painted the covers for the early 1970s Ballantine paperbacks.

* New on YouTube, Christian Matzke Interview: Creating H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and also with some chat about his Alien Absolution fan-film.

* Newly listed on Amazon UK, the forthcoming book Les Chats d’Ulthar (‘The Cats of Ulthar’) by Gou Tanabe, set for release on 23rd January 2025 in French. Three Lovecraft tales of the Dreamlands are adapted by the Japanese graphic-novel master, “The Other Gods”, “Celephais” and “The Cats of Ulthar”.

* Metaladdicts brings news that the band “The Great Old Ones Release New Single ‘In The Mouth Of Madness'”, this being… “a haunting precursor to their forthcoming [Dreamlands themed] album, Kadath”. The album is due at the end of January 2025.

* Now published, Chaosium’s latest edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight Investigators’ Guide: Mysteries and Frights in the Victorian Age. This is the 2024 edition, presumably expanded and aligned with the latest core RPG game. I see the first edition was published way back in 1986, and that by 2012 there had been three editions. The book is possibly also useful for Mythos writers unfamiliar with the details of the British Isles in this period.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, The Providence Pack for Lovecraft’s Providence, including a wall-map sized reprint of the College Hill plat map. Again, potentially useful for writers as well as RPG players.

* Paywalled in the new gothic studies book Graveyard Gothic (2024), the chapter “Weirding the Gothic graveyard”. This discusses… “how Lovecraft uses the graveyard in “The Tomb” (1922), “Herbert West – ​Reanimator” (1922) and others”. At the end the author sees the later “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) as “reshaping [the graveyard] through the prism of a very modernist artistic and scientific sensibility”.

* A forthcoming 1,100+ page hardcover claiming to be The Complete Fiction, Poetry, and Essays of H.P. Lovecraft. Set for publication in early December 2024 at nearly £50. The publisher is Revive Classics, which shovels public-domain classics into slick hardback covers at high prices… and gets disappointed one or two-star reviews. I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t complete. The legit Collected Essays set from Hippocampus runs to five volumes and some 1,500 pages in small type. The legit collected poetry is around 600 pages in a wide oversized book. There’s no way you could cram all that, plus all the fiction, into just over 1,100 9″ x 6″ pages. Buyer beware.

* New on Archive.org for download, Arthur Machen’s late novel The Green Round (1933).

This was a book read by Lovecraft, early in 1934. He found it meandering but was positive…

Have just read Machen’s new book — The Green Round — his first weird production in 17 years. It is really extremely interesting — with something of that persistent sense of unreal worlds impinging on the real world which many imaginative persons possess. In the casualness & unexplainedness of the phenomena represented, it recalls some of Machen’s queer prefaces to his earlier books”. — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, March 1934.

* And finally, science seemed to become more weirdly Lovecraftian this week. More so than usual, these days. An Oxford University expert speculated that the octopus species will in time take over the world, should humans somehow die off or leave for the stars. Plus our fledgling quantum computers can, it seems, be reliably powered by weird imaginary cats. A scenario that springs to mind, then: a post-human quantum computer powered by an octopus named Cthulhu, who is dreaming about imaginary cats (possibly from Ulthar). This octo-cat-powered computer is keeping ‘alive’ the AI-reconstructed personality of one HPL, while located in a crypt deep under an Earth that is being burned into its final cinder by the last stages of an expanding sun. Add a few time-travelling humans who suddenly arrive in the crypt, and must extract HPL from the tentacular embrace of Cthulhu before the planet burns. This may perhaps be a Lovecraftian RPG scenario of use to some readers. Or possibly just another crap episode of Doctor Who.

— End-quote —

In March 1934 Lovecraft gave tongue-in-cheek advice to his friend Morton, on the possibilities of writing a weird mystery tale for Morton’s mineralogist colleagues…

“… you could have a great mineralogical curator from Paterson [Morton’s museum in New Jersey] murdered by some spy of the American Museum – the latter institution being jealous of having its pebble section surpass’d. Later it could be discover’d that the assassin had left his photograph imprinted on some obscurely sensitive stone (if none exists, invent one!) that yields up its secrets only under a blend of inframauve light from a special fur-lined vacuum tube. Then, when the murderer has explain’d this away by saying he left the image on some other visit, in stalks Old King Brady the Petrological Pinkerton with a radio-active kind of feldspar or sparkill or solidified argon which restores the life-vibrations of the murder’d man. Up sits the great curator on his bier, and points his finger at the dastard from 79th street. “He done it!” “He done it!” But since the victim ain’t dead no more, the murderer is let off on probation — tho’ the American Museum is forced to transfer most of its treasures to the enlarged marble palace at Summer Street and Broadway [at Paterson]. […] For gawd’s sake don’t have puppet [pseudo-comic names] like Sir Stoneham Pyrites, Capt. Magnetite de Magistris, Prof. Boulder B. Traprock, etc., etc. cluttering up your pages! [As for the follow-on serial…] You could vary your locale and incidents magnificently; having unknown minerals found in crypts under aeon-old deserted cities in the African jungle, and all that. Then there are hellish stony secrets filtering down from the forgotten elder world — think of the Eye of Tsathoggua, hinted at in the Livre d’Eibon, and of the carved primal monstrosity in lavender pyro-jadeite caught up in a Kanaka fisherman’s net off the coast of Ponape! God! Suppose the world knew why Curator Konbifhashi Taximeto of the Wiggiwaga Museum in Kyoto committed hara-kiri after examining the fluorescent emanations of this unholy blasphemy through the differential spectroheliograph!”

In an earlier post at Tentaclii I discovered good evidence that Morton’s collection at Paterson excelled in collecting and exhibiting fluorescent — i.e. glow-in-the-dark — minerals. Hence Lovecraft’s emphasis here on the technology of special light + minerals. So far as I can tell, Lovecraft invented the word “inframauve”. Nice name for a swishy fanzine.

Welcome to HPLinks #12.

“Little Bobby Barlow, for all his scant 16 years, can remember a world & a phase of civilisation — the feverish, thoughtless, reckless age of the 1920’s — which is today as dead as Tyre & Babylon!” — Lovecraft letter to Toldridge, March 1935.

* Now published, Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937–1973 (October 2024)…

The story of [the early Lovecraft publisher] Arkham House told in the ephemera is no less than the personal autobiography of the press. Year by year and sometimes month by month, see plans unfold — always to publish more books to keep readers and collectors coming back. In this ‘Pictorial History and Guide for Collectors’ each individually numbered item spotlights a shot of the cover or distinguishing interior feature. In full color. With additional selected information, so that any item can be recognized easily from any other.

* This week John Coulthart blogged on “Richard Taylor’s Lovecraftiana”, Taylor being the artist Derleth tapped for the dust-jackets of various Arkham House books.

* Talking of covers, I’d never until recently seen the cover of this 1983 Polish translation of Lovecraft. The unknown artist has made a pleasingly loose sans-Cthulhu combination of the broken ground of the risen R’lyeh, the mind-bending portal-door found there, and a cosmic sky-vista.

Unlike many cover artists, it appears he had actually read and considered the story he was illustrating…

… everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away…” (“The Call of Cthulhu”).

* New in The European Conservative, the article “Rebuilding R’lyeh: Houellebecq, Lovecraft, and the Meaning of Architecture”. Freely available online.

* A 2023 Brazilian post-graduate thesis, O horror cosmico de H.P. Lovecraft como expressao da barbarie do mundo administrado (‘H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror as an expression of the barbarity of the administered world’). Freely available in PDF here, with an English abstract. The work examines…

relations between the aspects of form and content used by [Lovecraft] and the forms of control and domination of nature marked by technological rationality, barbarism, and fear, characteristic of the living conditions found in the administered [i.e. bureaucratic] society. The main themes [found were] criticism of the occult; of the regression to barbarism in the context of war; the constitution of authoritarianism through patriotism; war neuroses; the disappearance of the intellectual type; the formation of sects and fanaticism; and the notion of imminent threat of the end. [Lovecraft] explores, through fear, the path of regression of society and the submission of its members to disastrous ideas and policies, as well as an attack on narcissism through the exploration of the sublime. In this way his work allows contact with fears that, if brought to consciousness and reflected upon, may reduce their harmful effects on the individual [reader’s psychological] formation process.

* From Spain, the new 2024 multi-author academic book A Traves Del Abysmos: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (‘Traversing the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’).

This chunky book costs a very reasonable 19 Euros from Amazon Spain. Had this been in English it might have been locked away at £120, by a big academic publisher aiming at a few hundred sales to academic libraries. It’s thus cheap enough to cut off the spine, scan to OCR and then auto-translate, if you needed to see it for your thesis etc. I have the contents pages auto-translated to English (the nice font and typesetting is lost), and here’s a translation from the blurb…

[Lovecraft resists] classification or explanation on a purely theoretical level. [He takes us] beyond the limits of what is human, making his literature a privileged threshold from which the most radical issues of philosophical reflection [can] emerge. The unknown relationships of time, space and matter; contact with extratemporal non-entities; the breakdown of existential certainty; the abyssal descents; the antediluvian languages; scientific revelations incompatible with what is human; the dream materialisations. Lovecraft [becomes] an extracosmic magma that flows though and illuminates the intricate network of the tensions running throughout modernity. Lovecraft’s manifestated ideas have permeated contemporary thought, prompting an important segment of thinkers to reflect on the unthinkable, talk about the unnameable and peer into the radical exteriority that surrounds the human world.

* The National Review magazine on “The Call of Lovecraft” ($ paywall). Possibly just another Halloween clickbait re-hash, of no interest to Lovecraftians? It’s difficult to know without seeing all of the article.

* Helios Press has announced a pre-order for a new expanded edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street. 140 pages in hardcover, compared to 70 pages in the previous paperback. I’m uncertain if it will contain the supposedly extant correspondence between HPL and the Eddys said to date “as early as 1918”, the existence of which was claimed many years ago by one of the Eddy descendants (see Joshi’s I Am Providence, page 465). But which was apparently not even shown to Joshi, and has never since been revealed. The blurb for the new edition does claim it will have new… “correspondence between and related to the Eddys and Lovecraft”. But that sounds to me like it could be letters sent ‘between the Eddys’, plus letters ‘related to Lovecraft’ — such as Clifford Eddy’s 1966 letter about Lovecraft (‘Knew Lovecraft’) which was published in The Providence Journal. That 1966 letter was not in the earlier edition. But all this is just my guess, based on the probability that, if we were to get actual new Lovecraft letters to the Eddys, then a lot more fuss would be being made about it in the blurb. I guess we wait and see. The book is due in 2025.

* Les Navigateurs, a new French ‘BD’ graphic novel by Caneva & Lehman. I see some good reviews, and apparently Lehman is a Lovecraftian who has made this book into a ‘Lovecraft in Paris’ tale. At least according to Marianne.net, which describes it as… “Lovecraft meets the waters of the Seine river”.

The preview pages make it look quite gritty-indie. And even less encouraging is the opening multi-page slog through some domestic teen-angst. Yet there is one page which hints the story may become more Lovecraftian later on…

* Veteran European comics publisher Humanoids plans to revive its venerable Metal Hurlant magazine title via a Kickstarter, as an English-language quarterly. The sci-fi comics magazine will aim to be… a “massive 272+page literary experience curated to theme, with all-new content from today’s best and brightest comics creators”, plus rare Moebius reprints. Given the recent big French ‘Lovecraft special’ comics-magazine, the re-launch would likely be Lovecraft-friendly. The crowdfunder is billed as “launching soon”, and currently has over 1,600 followers. Which bodes well.

* Cthulhu is wading over to the British Isles. Chaosium Con is to stage its first Call of Cthulhu RPG convention in the UK. Set for 2025.

* Cthulhu 2025, billed as a “massive” four-day camping and music festival at the start of May, and set to feature… “the best bass music artists in the country”. No nation specified, but I assume the USA and also that there may be a Lovecraft theme of some sort. But there are no further details as yet. Still, it may be of interest to some Lovecraftian creatives seeking an appreciative platform for their large-scale work.

* And finally, my new blog post on the short novel The Greatest Adventure (1929). With a bare-bones plot-summary, and some basic exploration of the unproven and probably-unprovable possibility that Lovecraft read this Antarctica novel before writing “At The Mountains of Madness”.

— End-quote —

“We are not nearly so well equipped for combating a varied environment [i.e. the natural variability of the earth as it moves through the ice-ages etc] as are the articulata; and some climatic revulsion will almost certainly wipe us out some day as the dinosaurs were wiped out — leaving the field free for the rise and dominance of some hardy and persistent insect species — which will in time, no doubt, develop a high specialisation of certain functions of instinct and perception, thus creating a kind of civilisation, albeit one of wholly different perceptions, (when other species view a given object, their ocular [i.e. seen by the eyes] image of it differs — sometimes widely — from ours) emphases, feelings, and goals.” — H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to his friend, the mineralogist and anarchist Morton, 30th October 1929.

HPLinks #10.

     “… it would be damned improbable if there were any real phenomena existing unknown in space and happening to correspond to these error-born myths” [which assume] “such things as gods, immortality, etc.” — Lovecraft on ‘space gods’, to Robert E. Howard on 16th August 1932.

* The Lovecraft Historical Society have another Dark Adventure Radio Theatre recording due, currently available for pre-order. It’s an adaptation of Lovecraft’s wartime submarine-supernatural “The Temple” (1920). Due to surface from the depths on 24th November 2024.

* A new long post from JonBlackWrites on “Yellow Signs: The Decadent Movement and its Influence on Weird Fiction”…

“If one considers the poetry of two of the most celebrated practitioners from each movement, Charles Baudelaire and H.P. Lovecraft, there are lines of their poetry which, ripped out of context, would be almost impossible to identify as the work of one creator or the other.”

* Jordan M. Poss has “Further notes on aliens and the gothic and makes a short but convincing case that UFO lore and the literary gothic have a lot of strands in common. One can see at a glance how much of Lovecraft’s mythos corresponds in much the same way. I don’t recall of any book or article showing a heavy overlap between the post-1950s UFOs-are-aliens crowd and Lovecraft, but perhaps it’s an area worthy of a little historical study. I guess the ‘ancient astronauts’ angle would come closest to overlap (ably dealt with in the book: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, 2005). And, ah yes… there was also that definite early influence of Lovecraft on Terence McKenna, who later became a big name among the mystical-trippy UFO crowd.

* Talking of “ancient astronauts”, Deep Cuts this week takes a deep-dive…

“into the history of one of the most contentious affairs in pulp science fiction in the 1940s, the Shaver Mystery, and its interactions with H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos”.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis has been blogging extensively over the summer, and now on into the autumn with a long new post on Lovecraft’s daughter by marriage. Especially note the long research-heavy posts “Dear Mrs. Greene” Part I and Part II, on Galpin’s letters to Sonia.

* A 2023 Philology degree dissertation “Images of the Living Dead in Lovecraft’s Oeuvre in the Light of the Aesthetic of Ugliness”. Just a firm abstract, in English. One wonders if the author was able to also draw on Lovecraft’s various remarks about his own ugliness and sense of facial disfigurement. But there’s no PDF available.

* Corbeyran’s Classic Fantastic book of comics adaptations of fantasy classics, now 89% funded on French crowdfunding platform Ulule.

* The TransAtlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) now has the Work For Hire book for free download, being a book of essays by Dave Langford… “written for sf, fantasy and horror reference works published long ago from 1996 to 2007. These do not include the Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, both freely available online.” Authors discussed include Rudyard Kipling, Brian Stableford and Colin Wilson, among many others. The Fan Fund helps send British science fiction fans to conventions in the USA, and will welcome a donation if you enjoy the book.

* Last week John Coulthart surveyed the covers for “Lovecraft at Ballantine” in the mid 1970s. The covers are shown and there’s an eyebrow-raising amount of dragons and similar.

It then occurred to me that in 1976 dragons were ‘hot’ (remember Anne McCaffrey and all that best-selling dragon-riders stuff?). Perhaps that’s why a cynical publisher wanted to suggest that Lovecraft wrote about dragons and dragon-like sea-serpents? But if so, Ballantine also made some unfortunate choices in the cheap-looking artwork and questionable graphic-design for the framing. Compare these editions with the vastly better work on the Panther paperback covers, appearing around the same time here in the UK.

* Via Chaosium, watch the panels from this year’s Miskatonic Repository Con, online. Including one on writing Mythos scenarios, and another on how to intertwingle real-world history into your Mythos setting.

* Reviews from R’lyeh has a long new review of the 1920s Gumshoe-based game The Terror Beneath: An Investigative Roleplaying Game of Weird Folk Horror…

There are elements of folk horror here, but also eldritch horror, such that Machen’s work is seen as a precursor to and influence upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The latter is important in The Terror Beneath in several ways. [The setting is not rural Wales, but rather among the] communities of London’s docks and veterans of the Great War [i.e. the First World War]”.

Nice to see a British working-class 1920s setting. The game is currently pre-ordering and is due for publication on 24th October 2024.

* In the Portland Press Herald local newspaper (accessible from the UK, no ‘EU cookies’ nonsense), a new exhibition review titled “Discover a quirky Vermont college that you’ll wish had really existed”. The show offered relics from “St. Amelia’s College of Speculative Timbre”, where among other things…

“Professor Samuel Drexler built odd musical contraptions taken from literary works, such as ‘the Detestable Electrical Machine’ H.P. Lovecraft wrote about”

The “electrical machine” (un-capitalised) is found in Lovecraft’s tale “From Beyond” (1920).

* At DeviantArt, a set of eight finely painted section-illustrations for The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Also, by the same artist, Zoogs.

* Also at DeviantArt, a new Halloween photo-set, as-if from 1970s experiments in Providence which sought to enter the Dreamlands of HPL via ‘cosmic radios’.

* And finally, the National Library of Ireland reports “Hidden Bram Stoker Story Unearthed in Irish Archives”. An amateur researcher has found the lost “Gibbet Hill”…

“in an 1890 Christmas supplement of the Daily Express Dublin Edition. The story was unknown even to Stoker biographers and literary scholars for over 130 years.”

The tale’s setting, Gibbet Hill. A gibbet being where criminals were hanged and then left for display.

Which just shows that there may even still be an unknown Lovecraft item lurking somewhere, perhaps in some amateur journal or old newspaper.

— End-quote —

“Around the All-Hallows period I unearthed a highly picturesque district on the city’s very rim — Fruit Hill, from one point of which I caught a view of almost incredible loveliness which included a twilight-clad descent of walled meadows (with a wood and glimpses of a sunset-litten river at the bottom), dim violet hills against an orange-gold west, a steepled village in a northward valley, and over the rocky eastward ridge a great round Hunter’s Moon preparing to flood the scene with spectral light.” — H.P. Lovecraft, to Richard Ely Morse, 14th November 1933.