14 Sunday Sep 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraft as character
In an alternative timeline, Lovecraft not only ‘got the cover’ of Weird Tales, he was the cover. As fantastic tales of his alter-ego Randolph Carter became as popular as those of Seabury Quinn did in our timeline…
SDXL + LoRAs inc. my new Lovecraft character LoRA. I find that SDXL can sometimes generate somewhat reasonable text if placed in inverted commas in the prompt and prompted for a vintage magazine or poster, e.g. “Weird Tales”. Who knew?
03 Wednesday Sep 2025
Posted in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #53.
* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal has a new issue listed, Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism, No. 6 (Autumn 2025). Among others…
Mario Sanchez Gumiel contributes a profound analysis of the Spanish writer Pompeu Gener, whose work shows analogies with Lovecraft, Machen, and other leading weird writers. John C. Tibbetts supplies a broad overview of the weird work of English writer Saki (H.H. Munro)
* S.T. Joshi’s Blog also announces a new volume of his essays, Aspects of the Weird Tale (2025), featuring among others… “several new essays on Lovecraft [and] a long essay on the weird work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. Available now as a budget Amazon ebook, and on receiving the 10% free sample I also see an essay on the rural/city divide in Dunsany, and that the Lovecraft essays are on Lovecraft’s Egyptian mummies, poetry about Lovecraft, Arthur S. Koki on Lovecraft, “Mountains” (unknown focus), Lovecraft and Weird Art, and Lovecraft in Audio.
* Also on Amazon, the latest Lovecraft Annual No. 19 (2025) is now listed there and appears to be shipping. No sign of its fellow annual journal The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies since 2023, so far as I can find.
* New in English in a Turkish open-access journal, the substantial “Translating Violence and Horror in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos: A Comparative Study of English & Turkish Versions” (2025).
* From Charles University in Prague, a dissertation in English offering a “Literary Comparison of Beowulf and R.E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian” (2024). Freely available online.
* A stop-motion short advert, publicising a new Conan action-figure toy… “features the new Conan figure in battle with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu”. No link here, as Animation Magazine blocks all VPN users in an obnoxious manner.
* My Tolkien Gleanings newsletter is now available at a new URL. Tracking and linking news of Tolkien scholarship, though only occasionally noting items concerning The Silmarillion and the invented languages. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds etc.
* Free and available now, my distillation of Lovecraft for NovelForge AI, the $50 novel-writing software. The packages should work with the trial version of this Windows software, which so far as I know never expires.
* The Tolkien and Fantasy blog has a new post “Correcting the ‘Facts’ about A. Merritt’s Autobiographical Writings”. As you’ll recall, Merritt was admired by Lovecraft and idolized by the early readers of Weird Tales magazine.
* New on Archive.org, a run of the British edition of Astounding magazine. Looks like it’s 1943-1955, and perhaps not a complete run for those years.
* How high will it go? A copy of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters Vol. 1 (1911-1924) in fine condition, on eBay with six days to go.
* A new issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion.
* London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (2025).
* New to me, the forthcoming table-trembler The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026). Setting a new record in jaw-dropping academic book pricing, at £550 ($740), albeit for a brain-eating 1,900 pages. One hopes that the editor has read the recent essay in the Lovecraft Annual, which very persuasively demonstrates that Lovecraft created the modern zombie and states that the master’s standing as “the font of the modern zombie is unchallengeable” (Lovecraft Annual 2020). Lovecraft is, however, not mentioned in the book’s blurb.
* The risk of Californian wildfires, and concerns about his old age, are reportedly leading movie-maker Guillermo del Toro to auction off part of his magnificent collection. The auction is being held soon via Heritage Auctions, and one hopes there will be a fabulous free PDF catalogue. TheoFantastique has the details and links. I’m uncertain if del Toro’s life-size H.P. Lovecraft sculpture will be under the hammer. Possibly not, I would guess.
* And talking of large amounts of vintage pop culture, free at CivitAI is a new generator of Scooby-Doo backgrounds for use with SDXL image-generation models. Spooky old-school 1970s Scooby Doo-style animation backdrops galore, freely re-usable… just add your own prompts.
* Grognardia’s blog reports that he’s been so taken by Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales of late that he’s… “now devoting myself to the development of an Old School Essentials-derived Dreamlands RPG, Dream-Quest.” Not AI, I assume. I would love a well-made text-based Dreamlands adventure as a solo role-play that was run and managed by an AI. With the player untroubled by fussy-dusty stats and rules, which would nevertheless still be whirring away in the background. Nothing like that is currently available, so far as I know.
* And finally, Pickman’s Hidden Atelier is a new YouTube channel that will aim to review only Lovecraftian videogames. And fairly obscure ones, by the look of it — first up is a 1991 Sega Mega Drive title.
— End-quotes —
“I studied Old London intensively years ago, & could ramble guideless around it from Hampstead Heath to the Elephant & Castle!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933. (Mooted in a letter as the basis for an unwritten Lovecraft story starting in Old London and ending in Roman horrors elsewhere).
“In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.” — Lovecraft, opening lines of “The Descendent” (fragment).
“The [post]card from antique Londinium [London] duly came, & filled me with envy at your opportunity to behold civilisation’s capital, if only for a single full day. If I were in Europe, I would devote not less than 2 or 3 weeks to London — & might not get outside of Britain at all. The British Museum card surely reveals one of my (or Klarkash-Ton’s or Sonny Belknap’s) extra-human monsters in disguise — indeed, I am positive that this entity reached Java as a relique of sunken Mu, or of the still more monstrous & fabulous R’lyeh! Thanks!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1932.
The most likely Java deity image in the current British Museum collection, which would also make for a postcard, would be this fine drawing of an elephant-god sculpture…
“Coming early to London, I saw as a Child many of the celebrated Men of King William’s Reign, including the lamented Mr. Dryden, who sat much at the Tables of Will’s Coffee-House. With Mr. Addison and Dr. Swift I later became very well acquainted, and was an even more familiar Friend to Mr. Pope, whom I knew and respected till the Day of his Death.” — Lovecraft uses his own childhood attic encounter with the 18th century wits, in his “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”.
“I share most emphatically your regret at the distance between 278 Grove & 598 Angell, & wish we both lived in Old London, within walking distance of Will’s & of each other’s homes.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, December 1918. “Will’s” coffee-house was a key London gathering place of 18th century wits and poets.
01 Monday Sep 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works, Unnamable
As promised, I’ve released my free Lovecraft dictionary and assistant. This is a free add-on for installing into the creative-writing software NovelForge AI 3.x. The add-on enables the writer to be guided by words and examples from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, as they write.
The ‘made by one man’ software NovelForge can be had from Medichance, and is for Windows only. Last time I looked the free trial version does not expire and is only very lightly crippled, such as not allowing the creation of a new dictionary and assistant. I have the paid version of the software ($50, one-time purchase), so was able to use it to make these Lovecraft add-ons. Thus, if you’re on Windows then you can install the free trial and enjoy this free Lovecraft add-on in perpetuity.
NovelForge does support your local LLM AIs and also free cloud AIs, but this Lovecraft dictionary (thesaurus) and assistant are not AI. More of a unique ‘half-way house’ towards AI, guiding you toward the tone and style of Lovecraft… but not actually writing it for you.
The assistant add-on may also be useful for scholars, since it can instantly display all of Lovecraft’s sentences which use a word you just typed…
… though it won’t tell you which story they come from.
Download, unzip and then…
1) Place Lovecraft.ast and Lovecraft.jpg in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Documents\NovelForge\Assistants
2) Place Lovecraft.dic and Lovecraft.jpg in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Documents\NovelForge\Dictionaries
Then load NovelForge and use the user interface to load both add-ons.
Sadly NovelForge has no ‘dark mode’, which will be a deal-breaker for many writers. But Windowtop can force that. Not ideal, but it’ll do until NovelForge does ‘dark’ natively.
Lovecraft’s letters, poetry, essays, and ghost-writing have not been ingested. I may in time create dictionaries and assistants for those as well. For instance I have the Morton letters in .TXT format. Those were downloaded from Amazon as a .AZW3 local backup of a purchased Kindle ebook, before they stopped that. But I would first need to find an AI text processor that can identify and auto-remove all the footnotes, since that’s not something I’m going to do by hand.
23 Saturday Aug 2025
Posted in AI
A first proper experiment with ‘modern, 2025’ AI writing, using Msty for Windows (not Msty Studio) as the desktop host. The Drummer’s new local Cydonia-24B-v4 Q2-K model proved the best and it also has very reasonable speed in its lightweight Q2 GGUF form, running on a basic entry-level 3060 12Gb graphics card.
I requested a story about a frog, a rocketship and a library, written in the style of Nabokov. A tough test, I thought.
Here’s the 30% re-written and slightly expanded result, blended with a few little ‘nice touches’ spotted in results had from the lesser models Gemma 3 12b and Mistral Instruct 7B.
An Encounter With The Unnatural:
Walking briskly through his high and labyrinthine aisles, the Unnatural History librarian wore his usual frown. He felt it was depressing to see so many dust motes dancing lazily, down the long light shafts that fell across his gloomy paths. Dust smacked of decay. Suddenly he adjusted his round spectacles and gasped. In all his time in this section he had passed many strange items left by the borrowers — potted fungi from the outer Solar System with some very peculiar growth patterns; student watercolor renderings of imaginary animals yet to be created by genetic engineering, a silvery packet of black seeds with a label that would send them plunging into the clouds of Venus — but nothing quite like what he now found where the aisles of ‘Classical Natural History’ shaded over into ‘Antique Philosophy’.
It was a tiny specimen of what appeared to be the Common Frog of Old Earth, Rana temporaria, its emerald hide standing out quite remarkably even in the dim light, and perched upon the silvery cone of a strangely detailed miniature rocketship. The frog made no damp and sudden movement that might show curiosity about its discovery. Its eyes blinked not at the observer’s presence. It was unaware that it had, for a moment, brilliantly excelled all the library’s surrealist poems. Not by words, but by such an unlikely proximity and stillness.
The librarian was an elderly man of Old Mars and thus a grandchild of colonists averse to the poetic. Yet he felt it his duty to wonder about the temporal history of this curious conjunction. Perhaps the creature had arrived with its tiny ship or perhaps — his prosy mind rejected this thought as absurd yet delightful — the tiny frog was itself the pilot. Some astronaut from a water planet, come to seek knowledge beyond his own amphibian ponds? Certainly the rocketship seemed to pulse faintly beneath the clinging frog, like a heart beating and as if newly arrived from destinations and light-years undreamed.
Deciding the matter to be far too curious and detailed to be some student prank, the librarian gently lifted both clinging frog and rocketship, walked some distance and placed them on a table exactly equidistant between ‘Old Earth Science Fiction’ and ‘Classical Natural Philosophy’. Then, with a swirl of his cloak, he continuing on his vigilant way. The frog, oblivious to its own absurdity, merely flicked out its tongue, tasting a few dust motes from the library’s honeyed light shafts. A few young library patrons passed it occasionally, without noticing.
Kind of reminds me of a strange 12-page standalone comic-strip that one might have once encountered in the pages of some old 1980s Heavy Metal magazine, illustrated by Caza.
20 Wednesday Aug 2025
Posted in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
HPLinks #51.
* Eusebeia – a mystical Lovecraftian short film… 3DVF has it that… “the film evokes a universe worthy of Lovecraft”. Freely available on YouTube.
* Dates have been announced for the NecronomiCon Providence 2026, 13th-16th August 2026. No further details or trailer-poster, as yet.
* My Lovecraft LoRA for SDXL and ComfyUI, now freely available in time for Lovecraft’s Birthday. My next HPLinks will hopefully have more links to birthday goodies from others.
* The 2025 birthday has been used as a means of re-promoting the Italian essay collection Yog-Sothothery (October 2024), and the new promo usefully has a few details of what’s inside.
Seven essays in Italian in total, including…
– a survey of places in New York City frequented by Lovecraft
– an examination of the scientific details in “At The Mountains of Madness”
– a study of mass-media ‘adaptations’ of Lovecraft and their distortion by leftist politics
Also announced is a spin-off from the book…
The Yog-Sothothery project is a multimedia project inspired by Lovecraft’s imagination, evoking the profound symbiosis between Providence author and and his dark myths. It will be articulated through events, audiovisual productions and interactive content that will be presented in the coming months in Rome and L’Aquila, on the occasion of two symbolic anniversaries. 100 years of “The Call of Cthulhu” (set in 1925), and 50 years of the publisher Chaosium. Among the promoters and supporters of the project include L’Aquila Reborn, Rome Creative Hub, People and Territories, Lightson, Mokona’s, Studio Comunico, Rome Film Academy.
* Live on YouTube later today, the R.E. Howard Foundation on “Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft: Opinionated Pen Pals”.
* Newly released, the book Lovecraft’s Calculator: Physics, Paradox, and a Scientific Guide to Cosmic Horror…
This book doesn’t describe cosmic horror. It proves it. Using real equations, peer-reviewed papers, and a narrator who has clearly been awake too long reading arXiv at 3 a.m., Lovecraft’s Calculator drags you down the spiral staircase of reality, one unsettling scientific fact at a time. You’ll explore vacuum decay, black holes, dark energy, Boltzmann brains, and the nauseating possibility that the universe itself is a malfunctioning simulation with no tech support.
There’s an affordable Kindle ebook edition. How much it actually references Lovecraft’s work and his 1900s-1930s scientific context is unknown.
* In the latest edition of the journal Zeitschrift fur Katalanistik, the Catalan article which translates as “Ofelia Dracs and the reception of H.P. Lovecraft in Catalan literature”. Freely available online.
* From Poland in English, and published in the latest issue of a Malaysian open-access journal, “Which hollow is Witches’ Hollow? : an empirical study on translating toponyms”…
It was decided that the proper name for the study should be Witches’ Hollow — a toponym from a short story that was first published in a collection of weird fiction tales, “The Watchers Out of Time”, by August Derleth. […] it takes place in the cult world of Cthulhu Mythos, inspired by Lovecraft’s works and notes he left, and stylized as Lovecraftian, but not authored by Lovecraft.
* On DeviantArt, Red-Vanguard has new illustrations for The Horror at Martin’s Beach, The Black Bratt of Dunwich, and The Dunwich Horror, in the sort of artistic style one imagines Lovecraft might have had is he had been published on the covers of the ‘slicks’ rather than inside the ‘pulps’. Red-Vanguard also has earlier works for “The Lurking Fear” and others.
* Grognardia blogs on Lovecraft’s awe…
What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense — sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious.
* Another new blog essay from Grognardia is “Of Periwigs and Pallid Masks”, which co-incides nicely with my now completed and very enjoyable re-reading of Dexter Ward…
[What fascinated the Anglophile Lovecraft was that time when] Boston remained loyal to the [British] Crown, when the [American] frontier still loomed dark and unknown, and when superstition and science existed in uneasy proximity. […] To the best of my knowledge, Chaosium has never released a full supplement set in 17th- or 18th-century British North America. […] The early 18th century was a period when science, superstition, and theology all vied for dominance in the human mind. A figure like Emanuel Swedenborg, for example, could be taken seriously not only as a scientist and engineer but also as a visionary who conversed with spirits. That intellectual ambiguity suits the Mythos perfectly.
* And finally, ‘Oh noes, we iz expozed… burn th periwigs, guyz!’ New on YouTube, the documentary Inside America’s Insane Lovecraft-Obsessed Fraternity.
— End-quotes —
“I’ve never attempted long hair [i.e. in the decadent manner] because I always think of myself in a periwig rather than following the post-1775 fashion of wearing my own hair. The common thing in periwig days was to clip or even shave the head — so I worry along with close haircuts and imagine my wig hanging on a wig-block or the bedpost.” — Lovecraft to Virgil Finlay, October 1936.
[My] “dream-self has come to represent me so perfectly that in waking hours I sometimes feel odd for lack of my three-cornered hat, powdered periwig, satin small-clothes, silver sword, and buckled shoes.” — Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, January 1933.
“… one June day in 1917 I was walking through Swan Point Cemetery with my aunt and saw a crumbling tombstone with a skull and crossbones dimly traced upon its slaty surface; the date, 1711, still plainly visible. It set me thinking. Here was a link with my favourite aera of periwigs — the body of a man who had worn a full-bottom’d wig and had perhaps read the original sheets of The Spectator. Here lay a man who had lived in Mr. Addison’s day, and who might easily have seen Mr. Dryden had he been in the right part of London at the right time! Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me? I looked long at that grave, and the night after I returned home I began my first story [of my adult life]” — Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920.
[Lovecraft recalls being a boy who had discovered Alden’s] THE READER [… This old book] was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence [for it] reflected in all its completeness the Georgian rhetorical tradition of Addison, Pope, and Johnson, which had survived unimpaired in America even after the Romantic Movement had begun to modify it in England. This, I felt by instinct, was the key to the speech and manners and mental world of that old periwigged, knee-breeched Providence whose ancient lanes still climbed the hill […] Little by little I hammered every rule and precept and example into my receptive system, till in a month or so I was beginning to write coherent verse in the ancient style” […] “At the same time I was reading the 17th and 18th century poetical translations of the classics and the old Queen Anne essayists as fast as I could, so that periwigged Georgianism was absorbing me as utterly as if I had been actually born in its midst.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.
20 Wednesday Aug 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft! My present this year is a ‘Lovecraft’s likeness’ add-on for guiding AI image generation. Specifically, my Lovecraft SDXL character LoRA. Included is a workflow that also does automatic facefix at a higher resolution, useful for when he’s in the middle-distance of an image. As you can see below, a middle-distance Lovecraft (that looks at bit more like William Burroughs) becomes more Lovecraft-like and especially so around the eyes. Not perfect, but better.
The middle-distance fix-up is achieved by an ‘automatic facefix’, which re-renders the face at a higher resolution then seamlessly patches it in. My supplied workflow gives you the auto-facefix plus a Controlnet which can process using either MistoLine (extract lineart as a guide to the image generation) or OpenPose (extract a posed figure as a guide). Above you see an old Sherlock Holmes film-still guiding the image via a MistoLine Controlnet, along with the Lovecraft LoRA. The head is angled, to show that angles are possible. Emotions can also be prompted for.
Note that making the workflow functional will require the host software ComfyUI, plus several ‘custom nodes’ and models. The ComfyUI workflow has the details of these. Of course one also requires a good NVIDIA graphics card in the PC, with a 3060 12Gb being generally regarded as the base entry-level.
Change the image-generation prompt to do things like having 18th century clothes and settings…
Include hpl in the prompt to trigger the LoRA into action.
Enjoy!
24 Thursday Jul 2025
Posted in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
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.
12 Saturday Jul 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
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.
02 Wednesday Jul 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works
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.
30 Monday Jun 2025
Posted in AI, Lovecraftian arts
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.
25 Sunday May 2025
Posted in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
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).
09 Wednesday Apr 2025
Posted in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts
HPLinks #33.
* New from the HPLHS, Two Hearts That Beat As One is Sonia’s autobiography…
Businesswoman, milliner, writer, publisher, patroness — known to many as the woman who was married to famed ‘weird fiction’ writer H.P. Lovecraft — Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis was a woman of many names because she lived a rich and fascinating life. Scholar and editor Monica Wasserman, working with Helios House Press, is delighted to be publishing a beautiful case-bound hardcover edition of Sonia’s autobiography.
* Also new from the HPLHS, a set of HPLHS Vintage Prop Maps, including what appears to be a newly-made one showing the unexplored parts of the world at the start of the 1930s.
* Inklings-Jahrbuch 41: Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic, being the proceedings of a 2023 Symposium in Magdeburg, Germany. Now newly and freely available online. Includes, among others, “Death as a Character and Its Philosophical Depiction in Children’s Books” and “Immortality and Digital Rebirth in Science Fiction”.
* New in the open-access education journal Writing in Practice #9, the long article “Maps to Arkham: Lovecraft, Landscape and Visual Poetry”. Discusses creatively approaching Lovecraft via Situationist methods of walking in a city…
… his walking habits still embody a radical response to place and his negotiation of urban commercialism, coupled with a sense of alienation from the normal life of that environment, has fed into some of the fragmented visuals in ‘Maps to Arkham’. The sense of failure and the city are bound up in his fiction, much of which revolves around nightmarishly huge and hostile urban environments
* New on the Kitbash store, a Lovecraft Kit of 3D models of buildings, which you can then use royalty-free to assemble custom scenes for use with 3D digital artwork or games. A hefty price, but Kitbash are known for quality and they sometimes give away complete kits free — so it might be worth checking their store at Halloween 2025 for a freebie or two.
This Kit brings eerie New England streets to life, with shadowy apartments, a looming city hall, a forgotten library filled with forbidden tomes, and a museum hiding unspeakable artifacts. A solitary lighthouse stands against the dark, its beam barely piercing an endless mist. From dimly lit taverns to cursed houses, every corner whispers madness.
* Free on Itch.io from 2024, “a re-skinning of Cairn RPG, so that it takes place in a 1920s Lovecraft inspired world”. In a 71-page A5 PDF illustrated booklet for RPG gamers, which gives Cairn a comprehensive makeover. The adapted Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike source, Cairn RPG is new to me but appears to be a streamlined game with very compact rules and thus suitable for absolute beginners. It has a strong fan-base and is popular because free/easy/fun. The description for its ‘Seven Silver Spheres’ introductory fantasy-forest adventure gives a flavour of a typical setting. I see the free ‘Barrow Delver’ is the game’s solo play ‘oracle’ and the free Cairn: Pocket Edition is a two-page at-a-glance wall-chart for the rules. There appears to be no AI-powered version of all this, at present, so you’ll need pens, paper and various gaming dice.
* Thomas Phinney’s Cristoforo font, free in .OTF format and free for any re-use. Be warned, however, that I think that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ done in this typeface would probably infringe a key Chaosium trademark. The font is a revival of Hermann Ihlenburg’s Victorian era typeface Columbus.
* Amazon UK is now listing the English translation of Gou Tanabe’s 194-page manga-style graphic novel of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. Due on 1st July 2025, from publisher Dark Horse.
* In Italy, the first issue of the new VersiPellis: rivista di miscellanea a tema fantastico e weird (February 2025) has, among others, the article “Lovecraft and Theosophy: an unconscious inspiration?”, and…
an editorial which makes it clear the desire to build a project that is not a simple container of stories or articles, but a meeting point between enthusiasts and scholars of the fantastic.
“23 pages of comics”. The editors are not averse to considering AI-assisted comics for publication, which may interest some.
* And finally, H.P. Lovecraft Ghibli edition, created with the new type of image generating AI. This works more like a Photoshop filter, in terms of being faithful to the input image, and need only a mimimal prompt for style rather than content. The image itself is not amazing, but works as a demo for the ‘style overlay’ technology behind it. This method of using existing images will change a lot of things in the creative world, once it’s open sourced and can easily be run locally on a PC. Currently, it’s only available as part of ChatGPT 4o.
— End-quotes —
“A drawing of myself by myself would have to be something like the accompanying enormity — which succeeds marvellously in looking like nobody I ever saw in or out of the mirror. I might get a job drawing portraits for Wonder Stories.” — Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, August 1931. Lovecraft includes a rough pen-sketch of his side profile.
“I have a curious and anomalous sense of kinship with the hawk-nosed, broad-templed Roman physiognomy. […] All other non-Nordic physiognomies repel me violently but the Roman features […] as displayed in the realistic portrait statuary of the republican age [of Ancient Rome], produce in me a profound feeling of stirred memories and quasi-identity. I have the curious subconscious feeling not only that people around me once looked like that, but that I once looked like that. Which is rather amusing in view of the fact that I am actually the utter reverse of Roman in appearance — tall, chalk-white, and of a characteristic and unmistakable Nordic English physiognomy.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, December 1933.
“It is said that the Belgian stratospherist Prof. Piccard cuts his own hair — but when I look at the result in newspaper portraits I feel I am the greater artist!” — Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933. In later years Lovecraft cut his own hair with clippers, to save money.
