HPLinks #4.
* French publisher Gallimard is to publish a huge table-trembling single-volume slab of Lovecraft’s tales in French. Recits (‘Tales’) is due shortly before Halloween 2024, and has 29 new translations in 1,408-pages. I’m told the La Pleiade imprint being used is highly prestigious in France.
* A new Polish edition of Lovecraft’s selected letters, Lovecraft Listy Wybrane 1906-1927 (‘Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1906-1927’). Due for publication in a 544-page hardback by Vesper, on 13th September 2024. The book’s cover doesn’t inspire, but I dug up the publisher’s page and this reassured me. At the end of the blurb found there, one reads that…
The letters were selected and translated by Mateusz Kopacz. He is a Lovecraft expert and translator of, among others, the major Lovecraft biography by S.T. Joshi.
* Edgar Pera’s new feature-length film Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), now on the film festival circuit. It’s getting a lot of flak from the AI-haters, it seems, as he used Stable Diffusion to make the movie.
i) The Trailer.
ii) An ICS review… “avatars of Pessoa and Lovecraft speak to one another … Pera introduces two thematic threads that both Pessoa and Lovecraft believed to be the foundation of humanity – fear and madness – and explores how they both influence artistic expression”.
iii) A Cineuropa review of Telepathic Letters… “The film seamlessly shifts between documentary and portmanteau horror, and its multifaceted formalism could also be seen as a video-art piece – a collage of bizarre, unsettling and otherworldly imagery”.
iv) The Hollywood Reporter had an interview with Edgar Pera about the new film, in English. ($ possible paywall, but I had the whole interview).
… while preparing The Nothingness Club, about Pessoa’s heteronyms, I found many more invisible links between them. Now I have tons of their books, [where I have] written in the margins “Link Lovecraft” or “Link Pessoa.” And since we were already preparing then The Spiral of Fear, a Lovecraft feature, I thought that making a film about them might be a good way to make Pessoa and Lovecraft readers meet.” (Pera)
v) A long interview on Telepathic Letters in the open-access journal Rotura, with choice screenshots. In Portuguese.
vi) The Portuguese newspaper Espresso has what might be a new profile-interview with Pera, but it’s behind a $ paywall.
* Postscripts to Darkness has a new long article on “”The dread contemplation of infinity”: Some Thoughts on George M. Gould and Cosmic Horror Before Lovecraft”. Continued in the follow-on long post “Lovecraft, Lucretius, and Leonard’s Locomotive-God: Further Thoughts on Cosmic Horror”. The latter essay…
further explores Lovecraft’s developing conception of cosmic horror by focusing on another of Lovecraft’s under-recognized contemporary influences; namely, the American professor, poet, memoirist, and translator, William Ellery Leonard.
* Centauri Dreams tunes in to “The ‘Freakish Radio Writings’ of 1924”. In August 1924 the earth seemed to be receiving radio messages from a fast-approaching Mars, at least according to credulous press reports. It was actually bona-fide research that…
was serious SETI for its day. A dirigible was launched from the U.S. Naval Observatory carrying radio equipment for these observations, with the capability of relaying its signals back to a laboratory on the ground. A military cryptographer was brought in to monitor […] any signals from [the closely approaching] Mars as detected by the airship
Very likely to have been a point of discussion with Lovecraft at the Kalem Club, I would imagine. And even today it may be a real-life hook on which some Mythos writers could hang a 1920s story.
* Congratulations to all involved with The Fossil, journal of the historians of amateur journalism. It has now reached issue 400 (July 2024). The issue is freely available online in PDF, and includes… “Past Editors Ken Faig, Jr. (2024-2012) and Don Peyer (1996-1997) recalling their years editing The Fossil, and Monica Wasserman describing the involvement of Sonia Greene Lovecraft in amateur journalism.” Plus a note about the mysterious listing of a “H.P. Lovecraft in the 1917 Los Angeles City Directory”. Another real-life hook which may interest some Mythos writers, I’d suggest.
* Wormwoodiana reviews the new book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy…
Anyone interested in how a modern literary estate was usurped can learn from the vitriol and scheming profusely detailed in this book. […] Derleth comes across as scheming, duplicitous, and extremely petty. The evidence is all here.
* Deep Cuts has a new long article on the scholarly Mexican work of Lovecraft’s young friend Barlow, “Deeper Cut: R.H. Barlow & the Codex Huitzilopochtli”.
* An article in the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Exotika e Outer Ones”, sees a connection between a 1927 lecture heard by Lovecraft, given by Sir James Rennell Rodd on classical antiquity, and the story “The Whisperer in Darkeness”. In Italian, with English abstract.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of the French journal Revue Roumaine for April 1966. In a review of a volume of the poetry of Emil Botta, one finds…
For in Emil Botta’s poetry there is nothing more striking than this feeling of perpetual flight towards a ‘beyond’ that the poet tries to evoke. Botta’s poetry is an attempt to fly over a territory, completely unknown, in a strange and sad universe above a “no man’s land” located between life and death. Let us note a striking resemblance, although devoid of any material possibility of filiation, between Botta’s lyrical adventures and the dreams of another great dreamer of our time, Lovecraft. There are almost disturbing correspondences here that seem to suggest a coherence of their dream universe. But while Lovecraft is a narrator whose descents into the depths of dreams are pregnant with dark events, Botta’s poetry pilots brief, violent, exhausting plunges into this obscure empire of shadows.
* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.
* DMR has new review of Tom Sutton’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” Portfolio (1978). An item new to me, and with impressive penmanship judging by the scans shown…
See also the 2023 Dark Worlds Quarterly article “The Lovecraftian Tom Sutton at Charlton Comics”. I think I actually had a couple of his Charlton issues in my collection, back in the day. Long lost, now. But I see that a 148-page collection of the best of Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things (Charlton) was issued in 2015, and still appears to be available in a $90 hardback in the USA.
* Said to be newly available on a streaming movie service in the USA, the HPLHS movie adaptations The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. Though they seem to be region-locked, and thus are not yet available for me in the UK…
* The religious multi-author online magazine Protestia reports “Oldest Baptist Church in America Hosts Cthulhu For Horror-Themed NecronomiCon”, with some interior pictures of the event. Reports ‘with a frown’ and a wry tone, I note. But that modest reaction in itself shows how far we’ve come, from the foaming-at-the-mouth of the 1980s evangelical ‘satanic panic’.
* Mysteries of Montreal has a short overview of the NecronomiCon 2024 RPG gaming-related panel discussions which he attended, and some criticisms.
* RPG maker Chaosium’s Fall and Winter Releases list for 2024. Includes a new Investigator’s Guide for Cthulhu by Gaslight (the Lovecraftian RPG set in late Victorian / early Edwardian Britain, as I recall). I imagine this may interest both Mythos and Sherlock Holmes writers, as well as the intended audience of RPG players. Also due from Chaosium before Christmas is At The Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, which looks amusing.
* And finally, an online museum dedicated to the various felines Famous On th InterWebz. Lovecraft’s cat not yet among them.
