HPLinks #50.
* A new PhD thesis, sadly under embargo, Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025). There is, however, a lengthy abstract.
* A new Masters dissertation, “Fear, Cosmic Horror and the Sublime in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction” (2025). Freely available online. Examines Lovecraft’s personal and societal… “fears and how they had an impact on his writing, how said fears created the genre of cosmic horror” and the relation to ‘the sublime’.
* A recent Masters dissertation, “H.P. Lovecraft: Prophet of the Elder Gods: Investigating his Influence over the 20th and 21st Century Occult and Religious Worlds” (2024). Not freely online, but it appears to provide a survey of the various… “researchers, occultists, and occult organizations that seek to venerate or utilize Lovecraftian entities in occult practice and worship.”
* An official announcement from the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, the HPLFF Returns to Providence 22nd-24th August 2025. More than 30 films, plus Q&As and talks.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he writes…
I am in receipt of an extraordinary project, The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, compiled by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. In addition to a two-volume edition of Lovecraft’s complete fiction (which uses my corrected texts), there is a supplementary volume, A Reader’s Guide to Selected Works by H. P. Lovecraft — a most appealing and heavily illustrated work containing much information on […] key works. Every devotee of Lovecraft will want to secure this major undertaking.
GameSpot’s review of the same also spots among the collectables… “a diploma from Miskatonic University [and the University’s] Undergraduate Course Book, presented as a small booklet”.
* There’s an update on the New England Folklore Bestiary. They report expanding entries at a healthy rate, and a suitable illustrator has now joined the project.
* Feuilleton surveys Akihiro Yamada’s Lovecraftiana.
* In France, “Lovecraft honoured at the 7th Cinematographic Meeting of Charolais Brionnais”. This appears to be a local newspaper puff for a cinema sub-event at the Lovecraft event featured in my last HPLinks.
* In Hamburg, Germany, tickets are now on sale for a series of stage performances of “Dreams in the Witch House”.
* New on Archive.org, a 1987 small magazine translation of Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” into Romanian.
* New on Archive.org, Sam Moskowitz on “The Prophetic Edgar Allan Poe”, from the Christmas 1958 edition of Satellite magazine…
… his greatest contribution to the advancement of the genre was the precept that every departure from norm must be logically explained scientifically. This made it easy for the reader to attain a willing suspension-of-disbelief and accept the unusual. The greatest names in the history of the field owe a profound debt to his method: “that everything must be scientifically logical”
* Also new on Archive.org, “Lovecraft meets Lovelock”. A thoughtful five-page section in the book Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)…
Mixing the horror of Lovecraft with the romantic rationalism of Lovelock produces a volatile concoction.
* Free RPG Day (who knew?) this year gave away Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure, a scenario for the Arkham Horror Roleplaying Game. Having bagged his freebie, Rlyeh Reviews offers an experienced gamer’s in-depth review.
* Kay Talks Games celebrates “The Fantastic Narration of Wayne June”, though appreciating June’s voice-work on the Darkest Dungeon games rather than the Lovecraft tales.
* Have you spotted any stolen Steve Ditko original comic-art boards? There’s now a chunky $20,000 reward.
* And finally, “J.J. Abrams films Ghostwriter in Providence, RI”. Ghostwriter is apparently set to be a blockbuster “retro” (i.e. set in the 1980s) sci-fi/mystery movie… “about an author who finds that the mythical world he imagined is real”. Sounds familiar, and the filming locations on Benefit Street, Wickenden Street and Hope Street all strongly suggest a possible Lovecraft-the-man wrinkle in the movie.
— End-quotes —
“What depths of mental poverty and aesthetic paralysis yawn in the simple fact that hordes of people, each supposedly endowed with individual perceptive faculties and a responsive imagination, vary not a whit in their stolid, incurious reactions to the world’s wonders, and glimpse not a vision beyond the bare, material, geometrical outlines of the scene before them. One patient herd; one conglomerate mind; one universal coma! [… yet with free expression, such as that enabled by amateur journalism, we may taste a little of the … ] golden antiquity of freedom, beauty, intensity, and individuality. From one grey world the artist escapes to a colourful cosmos of hundreds of brilliant worlds — for does not an awakened imagination shatter all barriers and empower the mind to shape the impressions it receives?” — Lovecraft’s Presidential message to fellow amateur journalists, in the National Amateur of July 1923.
“I’m not the only one to see a really serious problem ahead for the sensitive aesthete who would keep alive amidst the ruins of the traditional civilisation. In fact, an attitude of alarm, pain, disgust, retreat, and defensive strategy is so general among virtually all modern men of creative interests, that I’m sometimes tempted to keep quiet for fear my personal feeling may be mistaken for affected imitativeness!” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.
“I’ve learned from experience that this kind of negligence [in correspondence] is extremely common [such as Cook’s case, in 1930]. He was so utterly shot to pieces that he left Athol and all his responsibilities behind, giving no address and allowing his mail to pile up […] I’ve noticed that other nervous people — including some of the finest characters alive — react the same way under stress. When crowded and harassed to the limit […] they save their equilibrium through a temporary gesture of complete repudiation […] Then, when things calm down a bit, they belatedly drop notes and try to pick up the threads again. While this is irritating (& sometimes disastrous) enough to those who write them, one can’t afford to confuse such cases of desperation with pure callousness or malevolence.” — Lovecraft to Hyman Bradofsky, November 1936.
