HPLinks #68 – Lovecraft in Florida, Borges reconsidered, DOOM, the London Lovecraft Festival, and more…

30 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, New books

* Just released, the long-awaited new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Available in hardback or paperback, and I see the book is already on Amazon UK.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the British fanzine Dagon 17 (April 1987). Among other items, there’s an article by Robert M. Price on Lovecraft’s uses of Theosophy, and another by Will Murray asking “Was there a real Brown Jenkin?”.

* In the latest edition of the journal Revista Helice, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2025-2026), “Que opinaba Borges de Lovecraft?: nueva revision de argumentos” (‘What did Borges think of Lovecraft?: A new review of the arguments’). Freely available online.

* Feuilleton has a long article on “Illustrating Hyperborea”, which surveys the illustrations for the tales of Clark Ashton Smith.

* Grognardia considers Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” (1922).

* An unusual self-published pamphlet in Italian, newly published on Amazon, Tolkien vs Lovecraft: Confronto sul concetto di Morte (‘Tolkien vs Lovecraft: A comparison of their concepts of death’).

* The 2026 Robert E. Howard Awards are open for nominations.

* The Thorgal artist is to have a major new exhibition, opening in France in June 2026. Thorgal is a long-running Norse adventurer character who stars in a series of Belgian BD’s (short graphic-novels in the form of finely-produced oversized books).

* “The Magic Lantern Call Of Cthulhu”, to be presented at the Drayton Arms Theatre in February 2026. On other dates in that month, also a staging of “From Beyond”, and a new “Dunwich Horror Opera”. All part of the London Lovecraft Festival, 6th-22nd February 2026 in London, UK. Tickets on sale 1st January.

* And finally, new on YouTube is All the Lovecraftian references in DOOM: The Dark Ages. Which is the latest blockbuster entry into the DOOM series of videogames, and a game which is said to be very indebted to Lovecraft.

— End-quote —

from “BELLS” (Lovecraft, December 1919).

I hear the bells from yon imposing tower;
The bells of Yuletide o’er a troubled night;
Pealing with mock’ry in a dismal hour
Upon a world upheav’d with greed and fright.
[…]
In fancy yet I view the modest spire;
The peaked roof, cast dark against the moon;
The Gothic windows, glowing with a fire
That lent enchantment to the brazen tune.
Lovely each snow-drap’d hedge beneath the beams
That added silver to the silver there;
Graceful each cot, each lane, and all the streams,
And glad the spirit of the pine-ting’d air.
[…]
But on the scene a hideous blight intrudes;
A lurid nimbus hovers o’er the land;
Demoniac shapes low’r black above the woods,
And by each door malignant shadows stand.
The jester Time stalks darkly thro’ the mead;
Beneath his tread contentment dies away.
Hearts that were light with causeless anguish bleed,
And restless souls proclaim his evil sway.
Conflict and change beset the tott’ring world;
Wild thoughts and fancies fill the common mind;
Confusion on a senile race is hurl’d,
And crime and folly wander unconfin’d.

mead = a field of thick moist meadow-grass

HPLinks #67 – Lovecraft’s artists, “Zann” in China, Icons catalogue, Lovecraft’s arms, and more…

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, New books

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HPLinks #67.

* In the new 2025 edition of the journal Synergies, “”There’s something those fellows catch — beyond life”: Visual Suggestions in Lovecraft’s Narrative” ($ paywall). From Italy, in English, the article is on Lovecraft and fine art and…

highlight[s] the visual roots of Lovecraftian aesthetics, [defining] its main characteristics, tracing them in the works of artists explicitly referenced by Lovecraft, such as Johann Heinrich Fussli, Francisco Goya, Anthony Angarola, Sidney Sime, Gustave Dore, John Martin, his friend Clark Ashton Smith and Nikolaj Roerich. Furthermore, by adopting a reversed perspective, the essay also aims to suggest that Lovecraft’s literary universe can influence the interpretation of the artworks he admired.

Yes, that can be true. When one looks at what happened to the people of the region Roerich so ably painted, it’s a real-life horror-story on a vast scale.

* An interesting obscurity I discovered via Archive.org. Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” as published in the China Mail newspaper (English-language, Hong Kong under British rule), in time for Christmas 1932.

* It’s reported that South America’s 7th H.P. Literary Festival (2025) has been successfully held simultanously in Mexico and in Argentina. The organisers have a Linktree page at Avalon Club de Rol, but unfortunately it appears their Festival information is only online at Instagram. Though perhaps the Argentine wing of the event is that mentioned by S.T. Joshi in his latest blog post (9th December 2025).

* Now available, the contents-list for the sumptuous new ‘Icons of the Fantastic’ exhibition catalogue…

Plate 1. is Hannes Bok’s “Pickman’s Model” (1950). The font and formatting of the online contents-list does not reflect the fine design of the book’s interior.

* From Spain’s Diabolo Ediciones, what looks like a fan-book titled Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft. La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1. (2025)…

In this first volume of We Will Always Have Lovecraft, Fernando Lopez Guisado explores the magnitude of his influence on popular culture, from music to board-games.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post reveals he has collected the work of a regular British contributor to the early Weird Tales magazine, which will appear in early 2026 as The Nameless Mummy and Others.

Arlton Eadie (1886–1935) was one of the relatively few English writers to appear regularly in the American pulp magazines. Some of the stories in my volume first appeared in Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine in Great Britain. Many of his stories have a distinctively English feel to them (one of them, “The Immortal Hand,” involves the resurrection of the hand of William Shakespeare) — which makes me wonder why the devout Anglophile H.P. Lovecraft didn’t find them worthy of note. But I find almost no mentions of Eadie in his surviving correspondence.

I see Eadie’s Weird Tales stories are also available in French translation in three volumes. A little searching just now reveals some outlines of his biography. Real name, Leopold Leonard Eady. Born in the military barracks town of Woolich, Kent, he came of age at the height of the British Empire in 1904. Found working as a men’s tailor in the city of Newcastle, Northumberland in 1914 (Kelly’s Directory of Northumberland, 1914), then Army records show he served in the Northumberland Fusiliers during the First World War. Married an Anna Frances [Eady]. He was a mystery novelist published in hardbacks, as well as a short-story writer. He died in the English seaside resort of Lancing, Sussex in 1935, leaving a modest estate valued at approx. £15,000 (in today’s money), and presumably also his book rights.

* Also due soon is S.T. Joshi’s collection of August Derleth on writing, titled When Imagination Ends: Essays on Speculative Fiction. This will include… “My Twenty Years with Ghosts” (1959), an [unpublished] essay dealing with his publication of weird writers with Arkham House”. Joshi also notes, from a French writer, a forthcoming “profound monograph on R.H. Barlow”.

* Geoliminal has a long illustrated article on “The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales”, with many clippings.

* New on Archive.org, H.P. Lovecraft’s coat of arms & bookplate as good scans.

* And finally, Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys the “Idols of the Cthulhu Mythos” to 1948.

— End-quotes —

“With the insatiable curiosity of early childhood, I used to spend hours poring over the pictures in the back of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary — absorbing a miscellaneous variety of ideas. After familiarising myself with antiquities, mediaeval dress and armour, birds, animals, reptiles, fishes, flags of all nations, heraldry, etc. etc., I lit upon the section devoted to ‘Philosophical and Scientific Instruments’, and was veritably hypnotised with it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Wilfred Blanch Talman of Spring Valley, New-Netherlands. He blowed in Friday morning, & has since been engaged in the noble task of getting Grandpa interested in heraldry. Never before was I so conscious of my humiliating ignorance of a subject of which every armigerous gentleman ought to possess at least a smattering; & I have now resolved to make a study of the subject, employing the famous & standard treatise of Fox-Davies. Friday afternoon Talman took me to the genealogical department of the publick library & shewed me how to look up the arms of various lines which converge in me, & he also was kind enough to draw several different coats of which I have possessed verbal descriptions only. This is a late date at which to rectify my ignorance, but better late than never. […] I’ve always had the [family] description, which I was too ignorant to interpret”. — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1927 (?).

“These damn things [family heraldic shields] seem to vary so much that a guy can never be sure of what’s right. Suppose one had one’s coach-panels and silver plate all fixed up one way, and then along came some evidence that it ought to be t’other way ! It’s a tense and exacting game, kid!” — Lovecraft to Talman, June 1928.

It was indeed an amusing game, and one which in 1927/28 no doubt helped him to recover from the trauma of New York City. But he would later rail against…

“The utter ignorance & sappiness of the snivelling, myth-swallowing, church-going stuffed shirts who go about cackling dead slogans & spreading the heraldic tail-feathers that proclaim them self-conscious members of a close corporation of “best people”! Not that they’re necessarily any more stupid & irrational than the rabble they hate, but that they add to an equal stupidity & irrationality the intolerable assumption of some mystical superiority unbased on personal merit.” — Lovecraft to Catherine L. Moore, October 1936.

HPLinks #66 – Hippocampus at 25, Long awaited, Outer Ones, 3D Lovecraft, and more…

10 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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HPLinks #66.

* Due this month, the new book Twenty-five Years of Hippocampus Press: 2000-2025 (2025)…

This volume chronicles in meticulous detail all the publications of Hippocampus Press since its founding in 2000. Complete tables of contents are provided, and notes on the compilation of the books are provided by the publisher and in-house editor. All in all, this compilation is a complete guide to a pioneering small press in the weird fiction field.

* The forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long is holding its release date in December 2025, according to the current Hippocampus Press website. This date is for the Limited Edition Hardcover, an edition of 500, which appears to still be available for pre-order. It’s not yet known if the Brown University repository will release the scans of the letters simultaneously, or perhaps they may wait until the paperback appears.

* The Italian journal La Civilta Cattolica reviews the long letter Lovecraft wrote to Woodburn Harris, which is now translated into Italian and published as Potrebbe Anche non Esserci piu un Mondo…

the author is unparalleled in the century […] Lovecraft is a merciless pedagogue and an impassioned ideologue, intent on demolishing the three great illusions with which man tries to mitigate his dismay: romantic love, religion, and democracy. He is a racist, a nativist, a champion of the “humanistic man,” an extreme individualist.

* In Leicester University’s undergraduate Journal of Physics Special Topics, the short science paper “The Lack of Colour from Outer Space”…

We find that for photographs taken with a 1930s-style camera, the Outer Ones [in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness”] must have a refractive index that increases with wavelength, controlled by a dispersion coefficient of B = −0.59 µm2.

* A paywalled chapter in a new £90 academic Gothic Studies book, “Fluid Memories of Horror: The presence of water in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart”.

* Now freely available in open-access, the academic book chapter “Domestic Jungles and Murderous Megaflora: Plants in Italian Science Fiction”.

* In Danish, Hvad Maanen Bringer (2025), being a thick book of one-man comics which adapt Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales.

* Nick O’Gorman adapts H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple” as a 40-page comic-book. The Kickstarter has raised the funds, and is still live.

* John Coulthart this week revisits his artwork “H.P.L.”.

* Grognardia’s blog this week considers Lovecraft’s “The Other Gods”.

* This week SpraguedeCampFan has a long article on “Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith”.

* Leading Italian Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi has a new YouTube video talk on “Ungoliant and Cosmic Horror”. Ungoliant being Tolkien’s giant primordial light-eating ur-spider. YouTube can now auto-dub to English.

* New on YouTube, a tribute to Glenn Lord: Robert E. Howard’s Greatest Champion.

* New on CivitAI, a Heavy Metal Magazine Cover LoRA for use with the new Z-Image Turbo. Z-Image has excellent text rendering capabilities. Also of note, a 70’s Painted Art LoRA for Z-Image, which means fantasy and sci-fi paintings rather than David Hockney et al.

* The Internet Archive is running its annual contest for creative short films that use public domain material, especially the 1930 releases due on 1st January 2026. Make a 2-3 minute short film with an equally open soundtrack. The 1930 date suggests obvious linkages with Lovecraft. They offer no rules on AI makeovers of visual materials, but I expect they’ll want to easily discern your use of original footage and images. The deadline is 7th January 2026. To help entrants, here’s my quick survey of what’s (perhaps) entering the public domain in 2026, with a focus on fantasy, science-fiction and horror.

* At the DAZ Store, AB’s Master of Horror is a character pack for use with DAZ’s base Genesis 9 3D figure, which ships with the free DAZ Studio software. The character is not quite Lovecraft, but pretty close. And you could get closer since the latest advanced G9 series of base figures are intended for adaptation, having many sliders for easily tweaking facial features and other anatomy. He would however need suitable HPL-style hair and a 1920 style suit. For which you would have to look to the G8 content, since there’s nothing like that for G9 (I looked). All of which would make the purchase quite expensive — although in such cases the long-time DAZ users know that the trick is to wishlist expensive items and then pick them off during the frequent deep sales.

* And finally, there was once another Lovecraft at Coney Island. New on Archive.org is the Victoria Daily Times (British Columbia, 26th October 1893). The front page for that day relayed an agency report from Coney Island, New York City…

— End-quotes —

“So aviation ain’t come down in price even yet! Why the Pete do they wanna advertise it so much if they’s gonna keep it out of the poor woikingman’s reach! I’ll have to hook a ride on one of these transatlantick planes. If it doesn’t get across, I’ll have just as good a time exploring Atlantis’s weedy pinnacles & barnacled temples.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1928.

“… the rudimentary $3.50 taste [of aeroplane flight] I got at Onset in August [1929, Cape Cod] has given me quite a taste for super-nubian soaring; a taste which I ain’t yet had the opportunity to reindulge. I’d hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddarn useless speeding up of an already over-speeded life! But as devices for the amusement of a gentleman, they’re oke!” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1929.

“I know this has been done to death ever since Arthur Gordon Pym, yet none the less I think I’ll take a whack at it some day. I can imagine an aeroplane party landing on a peak far inland, & finding some glacier-crevasse leading down, down, down to the roofs of a silent & cryptical city of stone whose dimensions are not quite right — or I can imagine a natural (or artificial) phenomenon causing a large-scale melting of the ice …. with revelations better hinted at than told!” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, November 1930.

“It is puerile & silly to fancy that a man living from childhood in an aeroplane age could possibly have even approximately the same basic notions of distance & national isolation as a man living from childhood in an age of horses & galleys, ox-teams & canoes, impassable mountain ranges & unplumbed black forests.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.

“… there have been newspaper accounts of an incredible place in New Mexico — the Navajo country — called ‘The Desert of the Black Blood’. This is a ghoulish and desolate area of broken lava which is rifted by great chasms and which has probably never been penetrated beyond a few miles by any white man — or any living Indian for that matter. Aeroplanes, flying over it, have spied what look like ruins at its very heart; and local legends tell of an ancient and mysterious city whose crumbling walls now harbour carnivorous dragons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, December 1936.

HPLinks #65 – Lovecraft and Hermetism, cosmic theology, zombies, theatre, Necronomicons and more.

01 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #65.

Slightly late this week, to take account of the fact that many Americans will have been away from their computers for Thanksgiving.

* Newly published, the academic Routledge book Graeco-Roman Horror and its Modern Reception: Unleashing Classical Dread (2025). The Introduction notes that Part II of the book…

… concludes with a case study of classical reception in the realm of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and the Hermetic deity Yog-Sothoth, [examining] how the concept of [Greek lettering, word uncapturable by OCR] from the Hermetica and the later motif of the Veil of Isis, once associated with solace after death, are reinterpreted in subsequent traditions. According to these traditions, discovering the true nature of reality is a terrifying experience. [The chapter] argues that Lovecraft inherits this tradition but makes a more ambiguous change to Hermetism, providing positive connotations to the initiatory experience.” This chapter itself claims… “Lovecraft’s use of Hermetism lies at the core of some of his conceptualization of cosmic horror.

* New in French in the major new academic chapter book Theologica Galactica (2025), “Grands Anciens versus Grande Race. A la croisee des horizons teleologiques entre theologie et science-fiction dans l’univers d’H.P. Lovecraft” (‘At the crossroads of teleological horizons between theology and science fiction in the universe of H.P. Lovecraft’)…

… the exploration of the Lovecraftian cosmos offers a teleological literary experience: that of the negation of the values of humanism, values which fundamentally imbued Kant during his lifetime. We propose here a hermeneutic outline: for us it is a question of trying to understand in what way this conflicting dialogue symbolically plays on the one hand the collapse of all theology, through the representation of a systematics of the superhuman, and on the other hand the failure of the dreams of science fiction, this time through the staging of the impotence of the paragon of science and technology in the face of the announcement of an apocalyptic annihilation.

* The forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026) will have the chapter “Children of the Mad Scientist: Lovecraft’s Dr. Munoz and Herbert West’s Zombies”.

* In Italian and newly on YouTube, Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi discusses “The Cats of Ulthar” with Nicola Nannerini. Note that YouTube can now do AI auto-dubbing into English.

* The latest monthly round-up from the German Lovecraftians gives dates for their annual national meet-up, set for “10th to 12th April 2026”. They note that the online version of their Lovecrafter magazine is still looking for a new editor, as is the more Lovecraft-the-man focussed Lovecraft Lore newsletter.

* The German newsletter also notes that… “The Bietzen Theatre Company is bringing “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to the stage as a live radio play in Saarbrucken.” And there’s news that another German theatrical Lovecraft production is now a film, which appears to be set to premiere in early 2026…

On 6th February 2026, the film The Model, a one-man adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” will be shown at the Bottger bookstore in the city of Bonn. This adaptation, originally performed as a theatrical production, was conceived by the artist and writer Thomas Franke. Franke will be present at the screening and will discuss, among other things, the genesis of his work.

* In France, Spectacle Detective Lovecraft a Lyon, which offers details of a stage-play, set for a run in the city of Lyon throughout January 2026.

A black and white detective comedy that mixes suspense, absurd comedy and fantasy. A retro atmosphere inspired by American thrillers from the 40s. By the Cocotte Company [Cocotte Compagnie], and entirely staged in black and white.

The play appears to imagine that Lovecraft had lived, and that during wartime he turned his knowledge and loathing of New York City to profit. Thus in 1943 he works in the city as a private detective, able to be “hired by Veronica to find her husband… and the Necronomicon”. Sounds great. Booking now, and hopefully there will be a filmed version available in due course.

* New on Archive.org, good auction images of a movie-prop Necronomicon.

* The latest SFFAudio Podcast #867 pairs “The Thing On The Roof” by Robert E. Howard and “The Nameless City” by H.P. Lovecraft. Librivox readings, then a 50 minute discussion — which is also summarised in text at the link above.

* The Grognardia blog has an article that considers Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City”, as a lesser transitional tale but one that “anticipates several of Lovecraft’s major later works”.

* Adventures Fantastic blog has an article considering Poul Anderson and the Vagaries of Publishing, musing on how some fine writers are subject to an undeserved posthumous decline into obscurity.

* One way of keeping neglected authors alive is excellent audiobooks of their work. Such as those being made now by Gates of Imagination, which last week released a reading of Robert E. Howard’s “The Footfalls Within”, a Solomon Kane tale. Given the pace of AI, we’re soon going to be able to auto-produce good soundscapes and music to accompany such audiobooks, generated by having the AI auto-analyse the text. Which may further enhance the appeal of older works. Ideally the audiobooks would have a new ‘triple track’ file-format, rather than a hard mixdown, thus enabling the listener to easily ‘turn off’ the accompanying music or soundscape if not required.

* And finally, taking of AI… The excellent new free Z-Image Turbo, released only last week, already has the free DaNecro Necronomicon Sketch Style LoRA ‘plug-in’. This takes advantage of Z-Image’s precision text-rendering to help you generate images of ‘Necronomicon pages’. The CivitAI page omits the information (found in a comment) that the prompt triggers are old hand drawn book or written book.

Sadly CivitAI is not available in the UK except via a good VPN, due to what is effectively government censorship. I read today that Substack is about to go the same way.

— End-quotes —

“Possibly I shall emerge from obscurity some day as the only genuine light poet in amateurdom. Since other amateur bards seem to be unable to achieve success in this medium, I shall perhaps aim for distinction in a field so little occupied, & hitherto neglected by me save for occasional effusions.” — the young Lovecraft has some hopes for his ability with producing “light verse”, if only to glean some fame in the little ‘zines of amateurdom, 1917.

“Poverty and obscurity have their advantages — for they practically guarantee us dead-broke old nonentities against the tragic humiliations and ignominies to which our more materially fortunate contemporaries are constantly exposed.” — Lovecraft to Barlow, 1936.

“Time enough to know the great when our work speaks for itself and spontaneously attracts their notice …. and if it never does that, we are just as well off in our merciful obscurity.” — Lovecraft to Miss Bonner, May 1936.

“Were this prodigious prospect anywhere within the easie reach and knowledge of the town, ‘twou’d be flockt with and noisy revellers on every Sunday and bank-holiday; but obscurity hath effected that unsully’d preservation which design is impotent to achieve, this region being far south of any great road, and north of a district very flat and notable for its want of pleasing scenes. I doubt if ten men in Providence are sensible it is on the globe.” — Lovecraft on the view from just to the left of the farmhouse of Mr. Law, owner of the Dark Swamp. Encountered on Lovecraft’s cross-country quest to find the Dark Swamp.

HPLinks #64 – Lovecrafter 14, Atlas Lovecraft, Lovecraft on Staten Island, NecronomiCon 2026, and more…

21 Friday Nov 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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HPLinks #64.

* The German Lovecraftians have shipped their German-language Lovecrafter annual #14 in print. One of the themes of the twin-themed issue is Fritz Leiber Jr. and his “very special relationship with Lovecraft, particularly notable for his unique intellectual and empathetic quality.” The other theme, judging by the issue’s cover (which recalls 1970s comic-zines), is presumably related to traces of Lovecraft as found in 1965-1985 Marvel and DC comics?

* Currently under embargo, but with an abstract, “Conflicting Visions: H.P. Lovecraft and the Genesis of the Modern Weird Tale” (2025). The central claim appear to be that… “far more so than most Lovecraft scholars have acknowledged. Lovecraft reworked, and improved, material that he read in the pulps, which provided him with a warehouse of ideas and themes.”

* The latest edition of Literal: Latin American Voices considers Lovecraft translations from Bolivia…

… translating Lovecraft came to Colanzi in the middle of a creative crossroads. Jumping into the Providence author’s mind and grappling with his baroque style opened up new possibilities. One thinks of Holderlin, struggling with his German translation of Antigone…

* It’s always good to see a quality magazine being revived. The Pulp Super-Fan brings news that Illustration magazine is back.

* Syfy.com peeps into the French book Atlas Lovecraft and has some interior previews. The October 2025 hardcover is currently listing as “unavailable” on Amazon UK, though I guess there’s bound to be an English edition soon.

* Sprague de Camp Fan takes a long look at Clark Ashton Smith via his biography and the book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers.

* This week the Online Review of Rhode Island History provides some historical context for Lovecraft’s love of old houses. With a long look at the very popular celebration of Old Home Days in Rhode Island, annual events which show that Lovecraft was far from being an isolated enthusiast in such matters.

* New on YouTube, an on-site tour of some sites related to “H.P. Lovecraft’s Visit to Staten Island” (warning: swaying camera will quickly induce sea-sickness).

* Longbox of Darkness opens the box-lid on “Four Tales of the Weird: A Foray into Henry Kuttner’s Greatest Horror Stories”…

The Salem Horror” feels like Kuttner’s most direct homage to Lovecraft, combining New England Gothic atmosphere with Mythos entities. But where Lovecraft would have dwelt on cosmic insignificance and alien geometries, Kuttner keeps the horror grounded in very human terrors: invasion of the creative mind, loss of agency, and the corruption of one’s own work.

* John Coulthart on “The Return of the Crawling Chaos”.

* In France, press coverage of Campus Miskatonic (warning: VPN users are blocked). The weekend event starts this evening in Verdun, and details are at the Campus Miskatonic event website.

* In the USA, dates for NecronomiCon Providence 2026. No programming details yet, but there’s a 1970s-evoking ‘retro-groovy’ poster and the Vendors Hall bookings… “will open in late 2025 / early 2026”.

* A short review of the new indie puzzler-videogame The Dyer Expedition.

* Stuart Gordon’s 1980s movie of Lovecraft’s Re-Animator is having a new… “Dual 4K UHD/Blu-ray Limited Edition release, alongside Standard editions, on 15th December 2025”. Apparently it’s a box-set complete with special features, and a 120-page essay-booklet. I’m no expert on Lovecraftian movies, and I’m not sure if these are new or have been released before.

* I re-visited the seller of the bargain UK books of the Letters, as recently posted about and linked to here on Tentaclii. I’m glad I did, since I found he had added Click & Collect to those listings. Which means I’m pleased to say I’ve bagged the C.L. Moore, the Vernon Shea, and also the Morton volumes of Lovecraft’s letters, at bargain prices. Not dirt-cheap, but bargains compared to the high post-lockdown prices that books now command. The purchases are now on their way to a local pickup-point. I’ve long had the Morton letters in ebook, but it’ll be nice to now have these in print. Many thanks to my Patreon patrons for enabling such purchases.

* And finally, new on Archive.org is a good scan of the 69-page French catalogue for the exhibition Les 6 Voyage De Philippe Druillet.

Picture: Lovecraft in the clutches of night-gaunts, Druillet.

— End-quotes —

“Last summer and this spring I have spent much time exploring the colonial reaches of Staten Island” — Lovecraft to Moe from New York City, June 1925. He was also there in 1924, since a letter of September 1924 mentions an “all-day jaunt to elder regions” of Staten Island. Incidentally, most of the earliest wild western movies were made in New York, on Staten Island, before the industry moved out to Hollywood. Lovecraft’s good friend and fellow Kalem member Everett McNeil had been a professional screenwriter for these westerns. One of the key makers of New York westerns was a firm called KALEM.

Days before writing out the entire plot of “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft fearlessly went on a magnificently extensive solo all-night walk through the city, in defiance of Sonia, ending up on the Staten Island ferry. Quite a walk to take, alone at the dead of night in the less salubrious parts of a large city: “I could go where I darned please and when I darned please […] I set forth on a nocturnal pilgrimage after mine own heart; beginning at Chelsea […] & working south toward Greenwich […] south along Hudson St. to Old New York […] under Brooklyn Bridge [then back] toward The Battery [and as dawn broke, onto] a Staten Island ferry.” — Letters from New York, page 170.

“… truly untainted countryside near New-York — the rolling agrestick reaches of Staten-Island. I saw much more of it than I ever had before, visiting in particular the tangled colonial alleys of Stapleton, the archaick lanes of New-Dorp, and the steep streets of Richmond, which rests in a picturesque valley. In New-Dorp is the antient Britton-Cubberly house, a hoary moss-grown pile now employ’d as a Musaeum; whilst at Richmond are the finest hilltop court-house and valley churchyard that the length and breadth of the island can afford. I shall never forget my sight of Richmond in a glorious sunset, when I stood on a neighbouring hill behind the churchyard and saw the spires and roofs of the drowsy village below tipp’d with a magick and trans-figuring flame.” — Lovecraft’s “Observations on Several Parts of America”, 1928.

HPLinks #63 – HPL in Korea and Mexico, Horrorbabble’s HPL megababble, Roerich, and more.

14 Friday Nov 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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HPLinks #63.

* In the Books pages of The Korea Times newspaper, “Lovecraft’s madness finds new form in three Korean books”. Freely available online..

“Honford Star, one of the leading publishing houses for translated speculative Korean fiction, has released three books filled with daring tales under the Lovecraft Reanimated Project. They pay tribute to the American writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) […] two novellas and a graphic novel”

* Mexico had a large Gothic Fan Fest a few weeks ago, with ‘Poe & Lovecraft’ as the 2025 theme.

* PulpFest 2026, now calling for attendees to “Register for PulpFest 2026”.

* The venerable audiobook maker Horrorbabble has released Lovecraft’s Complete Cthulhu Mythos: Expanded Audiovisual Edition 2025. Free on YouTube.

* The new fundraiser to conserve the Robert E. Howard house for future generations is already now a quarter of the way to its goal, having raised $25k of the required $100k.

* DMR considers the maps for R.E. Howard’s Kull. This is a “part one” post, so more parts are coming.

* Dyerbolical has a new appreciation of the double-bill b-movie Die, Monster, Die!” (1965)… “When H.P. Lovecraft Invaded British Soil and Boris Karloff Became Cosmic Horror’s Last Gentleman”.

* Talking of horror movies I see that the next movie from film director Luc Besson (Fifth Element, Valerian) will be Dracula. It’s missed a Halloween release, but is apparently set for Christmas 2025. Sadly it’s been ‘re-imagined’ as more of a romantic love story than horror, and Besson says he’s not much interested in horror as a genre.

But I guess Besson is lucky to be able to make a film at all, after the huge flop of his $250m spectacular space opera Valerian. Which some may recall for being bloated with cringy ‘love interest’ and unaccountably lumbered with a mumbling and wooden lead-actor. Note however, that there is a fan-edit titled Valerian: No Love Lost Edition, which is said to more or less rescue the film.

* And talking of rising from the dead… popping up on Archive.org is Totem. This was yet another of those 1970s European comics magazine, akin to Heavy Metal. How many of these eurocomic monthly magazines were there? Anyway, the run of Totem is on Archive.org, offering another source of vintage fantasy, horror and sci-fi illustration.

* Rob Hansen’s weighty history THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930-1980 has a new 2024 edition, “corrected and updated”.

* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal Penumbra has published the 2025 edition.

* 70 years on, The Blog Without a Face appreciates Ray Bradbury’s The October Country in “70 Years Buried”.

* A $25 charity fundraiser for the videogames Sinking City Remastered and a bunch of the Sherlock Classics including the Lovecraftian The Awakened. A quality bundle, and the offer has two weeks to run. The charity being helped is the Malala Fund, which supports schooling for girls in cultures which frown on such things.

* Stable Diffusion image-makers may want to know about the new Nicholas Roerich Style for SDXL, available as a free LoRA (i.e. a style-guidance plugin). Readers will recall that Roerich was near the top of the list of Lovecraft’s favorite artists.

* Talking of AI, I find that Stable Audio Open can after all do human vocalisations. I recall that when I first installed it I had tried in some awkward way to get it to output text-to-speech, and had concluded that it had only ingested the non-human field recordings from Freesound. I was wrong. Thus makers of films, games, enhanced audiobooks and suchlike can indeed use this for generating royalty-free human utterance sounds (e.g. “shambling zombie moans horribly”). The 6Gb portable version takes about five minutes to load up on Windows 11, but thereafter does work… so long as you have a decent graphics-card (a NVIDIA 3060 12Gb or better).

* And finally, The Notes & Commonplace Book employed by the late H.P. Lovecraft (1938), in good clean plain-text on Wikisource.

— End-quotes —

“… good old Nick Roerich, whose joint at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street is one of my shrines in the pest zone [New York City]. There is something in his handling of perspective & atmosphere which to me suggests other dimensions & alien orders of being — or at least, the gateways leading to such. Those fantastic carven stones in lonely upland deserts — those ominous, almost sentient, lines of jagged pinnacles — & above all, those curious cubical edifices clinging to precipitous slopes & edging upward to forbidden needle-like peaks!” — Lovecraft to James F. Morton, March 1937.

“Possibly I have mentioned to you at various times my admiration for the work of Nicholas Roerich — the mystical Russian artist who has devoted his life to the study & portrayal of the unknown uplands of Central Asia, with their vague suggestions of cosmic wonder & terror … surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time, & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen.” — Lovecraft to his aunt Lillian D. Clark, 21st/22nd May 1930.

“I live in such worlds of endurable memory & dream & cosmic expansion & escape as my feeble creative powers are able to devise for me — always staving off the suicide-line by illusions of some future ability to get down on paper that quintessence of adventurous expectancy which the sight of a sunset beyond strange towers, or a little farmhouse against a rocky hill, or a rocky monolith in Leng as drawn by Nicholas Roerich, invariably excites within me. I don’t believe, intellectually, that I can ever do it — but it is consoling to imagine that I might, through some accident.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.

HPLinks #62 – Lovecraft the interior designer, new CAS biography, a prop Necronomicon, musical fungi and more…

06 Thursday Nov 2025

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HPLinks #62.

* New from Argentina, “El interiorismo del afuera en H.P. Lovecraft”. Freely available online, in Spanish.

In certain stories [by Lovecraft], it is possible to identify his careful attention to the specialized language associated with fine arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Its precision and abundance, as I propose in this article, is an attempt to bridge the gap between the artifacts and their perception that becomes a description by narrators and characters. The cultivation of this artistic knowledge, which is also expressed in his essayistic and epistolary corpus, allows us to consider Lovecraft as a well-versed interior decorator …

Offering some historical context here is the new exhibition review, “The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home”…

This engaging exhibition told the stories of four men — “bachelors” — who devoted themselves to designing their homes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New England. The exhibition beautifully displayed well-selected objects from the men’s homes and contextualized them with archival materials. An eloquent, witty accompanying book devotes chapters to each of their stories. […] they are situated in late nineteenth-century ‘bachelor culture’, which celebrated unmarried men and homosocial life within carefully crafted, comfortable, highly designed domiciles.”

* In the new edition of the journal Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, “Strange associates: Weird affect, weird fiction and the weird short story”. Freely available online.

… this paper investigates weird fiction’s relationship with the short story, and argues that the short story is perhaps the most ‘natural’ form for the weird.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog reports that he has finished his forthcoming Clark Ashton Smith biography. It weighs in at 164,000 words, so is presumably likely to appear in two volumes. “Will be published in the summer of 2026 by Hippocampus Press”.

* At Law and Liberty magazine, a Halloween article “Poe, Forevermore”. Freely available online.

* “Local librarian nominated for fantasy fiction award”… “The Dagon Collection is an anthology published as a fake 1929 auction catalog of items from a federal raid on the Esoteric Order of Dagon cult.”

* For Halloween, LibriVox offered its latest free audiobook collection Short Ghost and Horror Collection 080. The collection led with Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, closely followed by his “Cool Air”. Also includes tales by August Derleth and the Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.

* In videogames… Games Industry Ecosystem reports the “The producer of the first Diablo [game] has raised $500,000″ from an investment firm… “to develop Innsmouth Mysteries — a cooperative RPG [videogame] with elements of horror and extraction games, whose storyline is inspired by “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

* In comic-books, Pullbox reviews the one-off The Cats of Ulthar, a Tale Reimagined (for children). With interior page images.

* H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025 poster, now available. Plus the streaming dates in December 2025.

* From Australia, a new Lovecraft miniature to buy…

* Archive.org has a new set of screen-captures of Lot #54 – Necronomicon. Being auction images for a sophisticated movie-prop Necronomicon used in the movie Army of Darkness.

* And finally, Fungi music, in which British art-boffins wire up live fungi and have them play musical synths.

— End-quotes —

“I seldom notice what the cover-design of any cheap magazine is. Only once in an age does anything worth a second glance appear. If Wright [editor of Weird Tales] were to use a really effective weird design the bulk of his half-illiterate readers wouldn’t know what it was all about, and would write scornful and ungrammatical letters to the Eyrie.” — Lovecraft to Conover, September 1936.

“Not many of us, even in this age, have any marked leaning toward public pornography; so that we would generally welcome any agency calculated to banish offences against good taste. But when we come to reflect on the problem of enforcement, and perceive how absurdly any censorship places us in the hands of dogmatic and arbitrary officials with Puritan illusions and no true knowledge of life or literary values, we have to acknowledge that absolute liberty is the lesser evil. [Their recent actions show that] censors actually do seek to remove legitimate and essential matter [… And yet] ironically enough, this same censorship blandly tolerates, through legal technicalities, infinite sewers full of frankly and frivolously nasty drivel without the least pretence of aesthetic or intellectual significance.” — Lovecraft in The National Amateur, March 1924.

“I don’t know as it does much good to interfere with the vices & vulgarities of plebeians [through censorship]. The sooner they go to the devil, the sooner they’ll die off, gordam ’em.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1927. Lovecraft deftly anticipates the current state of pornography + birth-rate demography.

“I’ll endorse a censorship [of art and literature only after] the Watch and Ward Society have disposed of the blunders of Eddie Guest and of the designers of houses and public buildings of the 1860-1890 period. There is some ugliness that ought to be abolished by law in the interest of the good life! Down with French roofs and imitation Norman Gothic ….. keep the children from the degrading contamination of scroll-saw porch trimmings and octagonal cupolas and Richardsonian quasi-Romanesque ….. fie on the immortality of cast-iron lawn deer!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1931. The Watch and Ward Society were a notorious pro-censorship group based in Boston, New England. Eddie Guest was probably Edgar Albert Guest, the sentimental popular poet then known as “the People’s Poet”.

HPLinks #61 – unpublished Lovecraft postcards, McNeil’s books, Lovecraft in Florida film, comics, and more…

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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HPLinks #61.

* New on eBay, two postcards from Lovecraft and one from his friend Everett McNeil (then very elderly, on his way to Tacoma and thus weeks from death), all sent to Talman.

i) The card on the left is unpublished, judging by the internal dating: Talman appears to be honeymooning in New York City, “Poor old Mac is going west Oct 20”, and Lovecraft gives Talman his Barnes St. phone number (“DExter 9617”) in anticipation of a visit from the newlyweds.

ii) Also unpublished. Everett McNeil offers the useful information “I have left behind me most of my books”, and we also get the exact Tacoma address he had moved to. No mention of where all his Lovecraft letters (still missing, today) were, though. It sounds to me like he was keeping the rent paid on his New York flat for a few months, just in case of a return, and that the Lovecraft letters were likely there along with the books. But then the flat would have been cleared after his sudden death. Presumably any New York bookdealer and/or family members would have had no idea of the $$$s they were throwing away, as they discarded what would now be perhaps a million dollars worth of letters. Note that this flat was not the Hell’s Kitchen flat where the Kalems met, but a new one he had for a short time due to some unexpected book royalties… “in Astoria at the foot of Ditmars Blvd.”

iii) The 1929 Lovecraft card is partly unpublished. Letters to Wilfred B. Talman only has it (p. 119) as a brief excerpt, as previously printed in The Normal Lovecraft.

* Newly listed on the HPLHS Store, Ken Faig Jr’s new scholarly essay collection More Lovecraftian People and Places (2025).

* We’re still waiting for the long-awaited Lovecraft in Florida (the book), but for now there’s a completed Lovecraft in Florida (the screen documentary)… “Mike T. Lyddon’s new short documentary film Lovecraft in Florida is now in the mix for the 2025 – 2026 film festival season.” This appears to be unrelated to its namesake book, except via the topic.

* A Reddit review of the CD of The Curious Sea Shanties of Innsmouth.

* Freely available online, the “Blood and Insight: Monstrosity in Bloodborne” (2021). Originally in a small journal from the Gothic Studies crowd that appears to now be defunct, with its website dead — Aetemum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. The article has this week popped up again on HCommons.org. The author makes special reference to Lovecraft in videogames.

* Everything Theatre has a theatre review of a recent staging of H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” at the Old Red Lion Theatre, London. The staging had a 1920s setting, and it sounds like the show was a fine success.

* For Halloween DMR Books blog outlines “The Long Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe”.

* Decadent Serpent has a long footnoted essay on “Horror To Some Purpose: H.P. Lovecraft and Colin Wilson”. Freely available online.

* Blavatsky News has a Halloween post on “Blavatsky & H.P. Lovecraft”. Who knew that… “Blavatsky herself penned some intriguing occult tales, published in Theosophical magazines, gathered in [the collection] Nightmare Tales”. Actually, now… there’s an interesting starting hook for an alt-history fiction: the head of the Theosophist Soc. hires Lovecraft as Blavatsky’s ghost-writer circa 1931 (literally her ghost-writer, as she died in 1891), at a price he can’t resist. Then, as he takes a long wished-for trip to Britain on the handsome proceeds, her spirit actually starts to contact him from the great beyond.

* A new “Lovecraft-inspired” one-off 33-page comic-book of the First World War in Europe, “Whispers Beyond the Trench”. Is that an alt-history Lovecraft on the cover, joined up and shipped to France? Only Kickstarter backers get to find out, it seems. Since that’s the only way to get the comic.

* The Weird Tales brand is set to offer a new comics anthology via Kickstarter. Sadly it’s not a set of linked true-life tales and poignant biographical vignettes drawn from the magazine’s rich publishing history. But rather a collection of new horror strips containing, among others, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Skulls in the Stars” novella, plus two Mythos tales by modern writers.

* The Online Review of Rhode Island History this week has a new page of Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916. Photos from the City Hall, not of the City Hall. One of these reveals something I’d never noticed… “In the upper window of the Market House is the Masonic symbol.” Removed, after it became the Board of Trade house. Also interesting to know is that the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Providence served as a substantial membership library, having… “a 4,000-book library with 70 daily and weekly newspapers”. One wonders if similar libraries were part of the attraction of YMCAs, for Lovecraft on his travels?

* Por Por boggles at some of the (other) figures in Penthouse magazine for October 1978… “This October issue of Penthouse had a lengthy article, ‘Science Fiction Fever,’ by journalist Tom Nolan. The article covers the science fiction boom then sweeping the popular culture.” The post reminds today’s readers of the power of print SF publishing in those days, with Penthouse revealing that Starlog magazine was circulating 500,000 copies per issue, and Bantam Books had sold 17 million Ray Bradbury paperbacks.

* The Shadowed Circle has published a “50th Anniversary Edition” of Gangland’s Doom (1974), one of the first non-fiction books on the long-running pulp magazine character The Shadow.

* In Chicago, the large art exhibition Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination, on now at The Art Institute of Chicago.

* And finally… thinking of fleeing the UK, before the tragic Autumn Budget announcements? I see the increasingly popular expat destination of Dubai now has a special museum and cafe to make fantasy fans feel welcome, Legendarium Fantastic Museum Dubai. The slick website alone is impressive, and gives a crisp and colourful view of the themed exhibit rooms.

— End-quotes —

“That metropolis [New York City in 1922, when Lovecraft first saw it and was not yet disenchanted] wouldn’t be much without honest old Mac! And because it is [now] a vision-metropolis; “out of space, out of time”, and without linkage to the mundane, the material, and the perishable; it indeed never need be without him. Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces, and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod [as a] phantom among phantoms…” — Lovecraft fondly recalling his passed-way friend Everett McNeil.

In the notorious Hell’s Kitchen slum, McNeil’s… “little flat [is] an oasis of neatness and wholesomeness with its quaint, homely pictures, rows of simple books, and curious mechanical devices which his ingenuity concocted to aid his work — lap boards, files, etc., etc. [Due to poverty, for many years] He lived on meagre rations of canned soup and crackers,” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 114.

“I recall the first time I saw him — at Dench’s, by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [by the old then-rural Dutch ‘marsh country’ of New York City]. He used to like to go there […] And I recall how he shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination […] and through it all the little white-haired guide plodding along with his simple, idyllic dreams of sunny Wisconsin farm-worlds, and green, beckoning, boy-adventure worlds…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 94. McNeil was a farm-boy from Dunkirk Township, Wisconsin. He upped and walked to New York to seek his fortune, aged 32. He achieved success as a professional writer there from 1906 onwards, got into the movies and then became one of the best-known writers of historical-adventure books for boys. Despite this his publisher Dutton trapped him into a series of what Lovecraft called “vile starvation contracts”.

“And I remember when good old Mac display’d Hell’s Kitchen to Little Belknap and me — a first glimpse for both of us. Morbid nightmare aisles of odorous Abaddon-labyrinths and Phlegethontic shores — accursed hashish-dreams of endless brick walls budging and bursting with viscous abominations and staring insanely with bleared, geometrical patterns of windows — confused rivers of elemental, simian life with half-Nordic faces twisted and grotesque in the evil flare of bonfires set to signal the nameless gods of dark stars — sinister pigeon-breeders on the flat roofs of unclean teocallis, sending out birds of space with blasphemous messages for the black, elder gods of the cosmic void — death and menace behind furtive doors […] fumes of hellish brews concocted in obscene crypts…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 122.

My detailed biography of McNeil is titled Good Old Mac.

HPLinks #60 – new guide to Lovecraft’s Providence, Arcturus, a Jungian Mythos, Icons and more…

22 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH

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HPLinks #60.

S.T. Joshi’s Blog brings news of the English translation of A Guide to Lovecraft’s Providence… “a 131-page booklet with numerous full-colour illustrations of important sites relating to Lovecraft in his native city.” The Amazon blurb reveals it to be the product of… “four tours carefully prepared on the spot, original maps and photos, quotes, biographical, historical, and topographical references to accompany you step by step on the tracks of Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. Available now as a paperback.

* Now officially free on Archive.org, Murray Ewing’s new biography I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay. Author of A Voyage to Arcturus (2025). Also available for purchase in hardback.

* A forthcoming book in French will attempt to answer the question… “How could an obscure ultra-conservative writer, born one hundred and thirty years ago, become omnipresent and central in current pop culture?”, seemingly via a broad 500-page survey of the life and work. L’Oeuvre de Lovecraft: Terreur cosmique et angoisse humaine is due in early December 2025 from Third Editions.

* From Japan, a detailed abstract and outline for “Negative Jungian Psychology: The Abyss of the Unconscious and Monstrous Archetypes” (2025). Suggests that… “archetypes can manifest not only as symbolic patterns such as the Hero or the Mother, but also as monstrous and incomprehensible figures akin to the deities of the Cthulhu Mythos”

* I spotted, too late, a public talk on Lovecraft given at the Swedenborg Library in Chicago on 21st October 2025. Unusual for being from a highly experienced academic folklorist interested in Lovecraft. Some listings suggested a possible new book. However, I now think this was artifact of the event service’s broad-brush tagging of ‘Literary Events – Talks – Debates – Book Launch in Chicago, United States’, and that there is no new book. The speaker was the author of “A last defense against the dark: Folklore, horror, and the uses of tradition in the works of H.P. Lovecraft”, which appeared in the Journal of Folklore Research in 2005. He can be heard talking on the topic on a 2022 podcast “Folklore and Lovecraft with Dr. Tim Evans”, which is freely available online. And if you search for “A last defense against the dark” on Google Scholar you should be able to find it free via a Academic.edu copy (Scholar has a special relationship with them, allowing free download for non-members, so I can’t link it here).

* The latest edition of the scholarly journal Mythlore is mostly Tolkien, but there are also book reviews of Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature; Once Upon a Place: Forests, Caverns & Other Places of Transformation in Myths, Fairy Tales & Film; and Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. Freely available online.

* PulpFest calls for contributions to The Pulpster 35, their magazine/journal for the forthcoming 2026 event.

* In Delaware, the substantial exhibition Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection runs until 9th December 2025. Accompanied by a 200-image catalogue. The show includes original… “rare masterpieces that defined the visual language of beloved classics” in fantasy and science-fiction.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation has put out a call to “Save the REH Museum” in Cross Plains, Texas.

… the hard-working folks of Project Pride in Cross Plains have restored and cared for the House since acquiring it back in the 1980s, their small volunteer army cannot address the extensive repairs that will be needed. Professional restoration is required for this 100+ year old home on the National Historical Register, and it is needed now, before the damage gets worse.

* Also in REH this week, Spraguedecampfan’s blog takes a long look at Robert E. Howard and his School Writings (now published), and on YouTube Gates of Imagination has a new fine free audiobook reading of a Solomon Kane tale, “The Hills of the Dead”.

* In the world of Lovecraft theatre, this week I read that… “The Ada Shakespeare Company will present ‘Tales from the Shadows’, an original stage adaptation of two short stories: “Cool Air” by H.P. Lovecraft and and “The Shadow on the Moor””. In Ada, Oklahoma, from October 23rd through 26th October 2025.

* And finally, in 1920s Lovecraftian gaming, this week there’s news that Asmodee Picks Up Cthulhu: Death May Die…

In a move that has sent ripples across the tabletop community, global gaming giant Asmodee has officially acquired the intellectual property (IP) and games for Cthulhu: Death May Die. This acquisition is more than just a transfer of ownership; it’s a profound inflection point for the popular miniatures game…

— End-quotes —

“Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock” — Lovecraft, in the tale “Polaris”.

“… the refulgent orange-red star Arcturus. This orb is of great size, even as stars are reckoned, being about 100 times larger than our own sun. It is also distinguished for its rapid “proper motion”, it having traversed a distance in the sky equal to twice the apparent diameter of the moon since the days of classical antiquity. This fact reminds us that, although we are accustomed to call the stars “fixed”, they are actually rushing through space at incredibly rapid rates; only their enormous distance giving them that comparatively unchanging aspect which we know. Delicate instruments are able to record the changes in a star’s position during many years; and the spectroscope, whose prismatic image or “spectrum” of an object moves in one direction when the object is receding and in the other direction when it is approaching, enables us to learn that many stars apparently at rest are in reality moving in the line of sight; that is, moving exactly toward or away from us. The rates at which the stars are travelling differ greatly. All are very high, yet the distances involved are such that a period of over 3000 years is necessary for us to perceive any distinct alterations in the figures of the constellations.” — Lovecraft, “June Skies”, writing for a popular New England rural audience, June 1917.

“It does not matter what happens to the [human] race — in the cosmos the existence or non-existence or the earth and its miserable inhabitants is a thing of the most complete indifference. Arcturus would glow just as cheerfully if the whole solar system were wiped out.” — Lovecraft, “Nietzscheism and Realism”, 1921.

“All is chance, accident, and ephemeral illusion — a fly may be greater than Arcturus, and Durfee Hill may surpass Mount Everest — assuming them to be removed from the present planet and differently environed in the continuum of space-time.” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923. An initial musing on the new Theory of Relativity, for which a first scientific proof had only come a month earlier.

“A slight change of angle could turn [Randolph] Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanil itself…” — “Through The Gates of the Silver Key”, Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, finished April 1933. Lovecraft is using ‘plastic’ in the scientific sense of ‘highly malleable and easily moulded’.

HPLinks #59 – movies and more movies, Italian comics, and a footnote killer…

15 Wednesday Oct 2025

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HPLinks #59.

Something of a ‘video and films special issue’, this week. Purely by chance, though I guess it may also be partly because universities and academics are swamped with work due to the start of the new teaching-year.

* PulpFest.com has a page collecting many links to Recordings and Reviews of PulpFest 2025.

* Feuilleton takes an extended look at Innsmouth, Japanese-style. This being the…

Japanese TV [movie] adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which was written and directed by Chiaki Konaka in 1992.

* Also in movies…. new on Reddit is an appreciation of “Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), an underrated Lovecraftian masterpiece”. Looking into it, I learned that the movie was butchered by the studio execs for cinema release, and as of 2025 there’s still no Director’s Cut. You either love or hate the 1983 result, it seems, judging by reviews. Some love it enough that a remake was seriously planned in 2023. Though many reviews by horror buffs are negative, I must warn readers, so don’t blame me if you view and find it unsatisfactory. The early-80s Tangerine Dream soundtrack doesn’t endear it to some. However, a little more digging by me revealed two possible aids to liking the movie: 1) a basic low-res fan-edit on Archive.org which simply splices on the longer and apparently more coherent ending (used for a TV broadcast); and 2) a five-issue mini-series comic of the original novel, with a single-volume hardcover graphic-novel version announced in May 2021 (the latter seems to have sunk without trace, perhaps due to Covid). Amazon UK “knows a’ nurthing” about the comic in any form. The 2005 comic adaptation can however be found on Archive.org, and it may help fill gaps in the extended movie.

* An abstract for the recent Netherlands conference paper “Evil in Cosmic Horror” (2025). Focuses on movies, and specifically Event Horizon (1997).

* More news of theatre/music activity in Germany. New Original Soundtrack For New Lovecraft-Inspired Theater Production in Germany…

Westend Theater Wuppertal invited the music project Dos Asmund to compose music for a new theatre production based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The result is the soundtrack for the play LOVECRAFT. The premiere took place on 11th October 2025. Additional public dates are already being planned.

The resulting album is now on Bandcamp.

* I see the Italian heavy metal singer and comics maker Enrico Teodorani is creating various Lovecraft tribute and Lovecraftian comic-strips. His growing list of horror strips alerts me to 2025 Italian collections such as Le tenebre di Lovecraft, from the Associazione Culturale ESESciFi, and Il libro blasfemo di Cthulhu from Dagon Press (Italy). Several of his strips are in the new Eyrie #32 (2025) which can be had on Amazon, and his blog reports… “Two short comic stories by Enrico Teodorani (one of which is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft) will be published in issue no. 4 of the Bloody Gore Comix anthology”.

* Le tenebre di Lovecraft turns out to be an illustrated 420-page anthology of stories + essays and comics, published in Italy in August 2025.

* A German hardcover edition of Providence: Omnibus: Alan Moore’s Lovecraft-Mythos endlich als hochwertige Gesamtausgabe is listing on Amazon, set for 21st October 2025.

* Also in comics, the creator of Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom now has his new Cats of Ulthar: A Tale Reimagined. A 26-page one-off comic-book published August 2025, apparently aimed at child readers. It…

follows a family of cats on the eve of returning home, where a father recounts to his children the tale of their grandfather, which begins as a bedtime story and becomes a dark memory of captivity, vengeance, and rebirth.

* And finally, something scholarly (phew…). Footnote remover, a new free online service to remove all footnotes and in-text superscript numbers from a PDF file. Perhaps useful if, for instance, you wanted to make a text-to-speech audiobook of an annotated text. Or ingest something like Lovecraft’s letters into an AI.

HPLinks #58 – gothic formulae, Baranger meets Tanabe, the Lovecraft Cult in German, and more…

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #58.

* Les Navigateurs, a new French ‘BD’ graphic novel by Caneva & Lehman, has won the Rene Goscinny Best Writer Award in France. Apparently it’s a graphic novel in which… “Lovecraft meets the waters of the Seine river”.

* Also in France, the Angouleme 2026 comics arts megafest will feature “Francois Baranger meets Gou Tanabe”. Billed as an “exceptional encounter between two masters of H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpieces: Gou Tanabe on one side, and Francois Baranger on the other.” Set for 31st January 2026. Update: the entire festival is now cancelled.

* Gou Tanabe’s 370-page manga adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time has a date for the English edition from Dark Horse, 23rd December 2025.

* The new Routledge Anthology of Global Science Fiction Origins (2025) has “The Machine Man of Ardathia” (1927) by Francis Flagg of Tucson, Arizona, the pseudonym of Henry George Weiss. He was Canadian by birth and moved to America as a boy, but the anthologist pegs him as “Canada”. The introduction to the tale notes his Lovecraft connection…

Flagg engaged in a friendly correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s influence might be apparent in Flagg’s story, “The Blue Dimension” (1928) which tells of a scientist’s invention that allows the user to not only see into other dimensions but, eventually to travel to those other dimensions bodily. An even more direct borrowing from Lovecraft is Flagg’s story, “The Distortion out of Space” (1934), which uses a meteorite impact as its inciting event. The parallels to “The Color Out of Space” are clear and frequent. Flagg placed stories regularly into Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Science Wonder, and other prominent genre magazines.

Lovecraft started corresponding with Flagg in “early 1929” [Joshi, I Am Providence], so the 1928 influence must have come about simply by reading published Lovecraft tales. Lovecraft would not have contributed any outline or advice on re-writing the tale. “The Distortion out of Space” was published in Weird Tales in August 1934, and — given the above — one wonders what Lovecraft made of the close “parallels”.

* Barbadillo reviews the new book Lovecraft, poeta dell’abisso, in Italian. This reveals the book is actually a reprint of a 1979 book, but here with new…

… essays on, among other things, the relationship between the literature of the ‘recluse of Providence’ and esotericism, the Italian translations of his works, and the illustrators of his tales. [Readers also get the] two chapters which were removed from the first edition at the time, concerning the early myths surrounding Lovecraft and his literary legacy.

The review continues, here in translation…

[Lovecraft has a] “philosophical vision centered on a reevaluation of the tragic. This is clearly evident from some of his letters published at the beginning of the book. In them, among other things, one can read: “Since the entire plan of creation is pure chaos […] there is no need to draw a line between reality and illusion. Everything is a mere effect of perspective”. There are no facts, as Nietzsche knew, but interpretations of them. This conception is a-teleological and, on this subject, he notes: “I cannot imagine the scheme of life and cosmic forces in any other way than as a mass of irregular points gathered in directionless spirals”. Even more significantly: “I believe that the cosmos is a purposeless and meaningless set of endless cycles […] consisting only of blind forces operating according to fixed and eternal patterns”. The matter [he] gazes upon is Lucretian, animated; it is not “matter” in the modern sense. He is aware that transcendence exists only in immanence, in physis, and, in it, establishes the magical possibility of the impossible. Lovecraft’s cosmos is a Leopardian one, horrific and astonishing at the same time. His gaze is of a “detached observer” and his inquisitive curiosity is detached from any anthropocentrism […]. His existential and political conservatism must be understood, then, as a response to chaos, an attempt to order, to give “form,” even if momentary, to that which is not ordered.

* From Russia, “The ‘Gothic Plot’ as Outlined in Lovecraft’s Notes” (2024). A short journal article in Russian with English abstract. Freely available online. Examines Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and “Notes on Weird Fiction”, to determine exactly what Lovecraft considered ‘the Gothic Plot’…

the unnatural revival of an “antiquity” which was isolated from progressive society, forgotten and mummified, [was considered] to be the mainstay of the Victorian Gothic. The catalyst for the Gothic plot is usually an mechanistic attempt to assimilate alienated relics. Lovecraft identifies several plot ‘formulas’ for a revival of antiquity which threatens modern civilization: (1) activation of spiritless matter (corpse, “lower” realms of nature, bodily parts and organs, inanimate “facilities”), that ultimately inverts the hierarchy of psyche and physiology; (2) recurrent memories that literally resurrect the historical or biological past; (3) psycho-somatic degeneration and impersonation (which is presented as a local substitution of higher forms for lower, rudimentary ones).

* New details of an article for a forthcoming Edinburgh University Press journal article, “World War Weird: Blackwood and the First World War”.

* “Weird Weather Against the Pathetic Fallacy” of Ruskin (2025), an undergraduate final-year dissertation. Freely available online.

Ruskin’s work calls attention to the literary trope of assigning weather in literature emotion, yet Algernon Blackwood and Shirley Jackson intentionally deviate from the pathetic fallacy and make the weather in their stories weird and eerie by both breaking its connection with humanity and intentionally removing human emotion from the weather and natural settings.

* A new paper in the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research, “Cold Words, Heartless and Miserable: Tolkien’s Approach to Supernatural Horror”. Tolkien’s…

“Fog on the Barrow-downs” is basically a tale of supernatural horror [and] demonstrates that Tolkien, as a horror writer, could innovate and improve on his materials.

* In Current Research in Egyptology 2024: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Symposium, “The Call of Nighted Khem: Tracing Ancient Egypt through Weird Fiction”. The book is free online in open-access.

* A forthcoming Society of Illustrators exhibition, “Something Else Entirely: The Illustration Art of Edward Gorey”.

* New on YouTube, Michael K. Vaughan goes “Revisiting The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”.

* A stage play titled “Lovecraft Cult”, with a premiere on 29th October 2025 and then running on over Halloween. Apparently to be staged ‘in the round’ in an old surgical Dissection Room at the University of Goettingen, Germany…

A group of students interested in cryptomycology has gathered for a lecture, to learn more about the research of their eccentric Professor Dr. von Tannenberg regarding the mysterious fungus “Tenebris”, whose spores he found in an ancient burial chamber.

* And finally, new on Archive.org is a run of the UK’s The Flying Saucer Review (1955-1969). It looks like there are lots of ideas here for writers considering a crossover ‘UFO-logists unwittingly meet the Lovecraft Mythos’ tale or two. Or even a TV sitcom along the same lines (think ‘Detectorists but with UFO hunters, set in the mid 1970s’).

— End-quotes —

[… on seeking Lovecraft and arriving in] Angell Street [you will] see a tiny piazza [i.e. plaza… You will then] discover upon the corner post of the plazza some figures […] the three modest figures — 598! Your journey is indeed o’er, & your pull of the bell will in all probability bring before you the ungainly form & pasty face of the Demon Critick — the Boeotian Ogre — Ludovicus Theobaldus II” — Lovecraft gives instruction on how to reach his home at 598 Angell St, Providence, June 1918.

“Only last night I had another dream — of going back to 598 Angell Street after infinite years. The neighbourhood was deserted and grass-grown, and the houses were half-falling to pieces. The key on my ring fitted the mouldering door of 598, and I stepped in amidst the dust of centuries. Everything was as it was around 1910 — pictures, furniture, books, etc., all in a state of extreme decay. Even objects which have been with me constantly in all later homes were there in their old positions, sharing in the general dissolution and dust-burial. I felt an extreme terror — and when footsteps sounded draggingly from the direction of my room I turned and fled in panic. I would not admit to myself what it was I feared to confront but my fear also had the effect of making me shut my eyes as I raced past the mouldy, nitre-encrusted mirror in the hall. Out into the street I ran — and I noted that none of the ruins were of buildings newer than about 1910. I had covered about half a block — of continuous ruins, with nothing but ruins ahead — when I awaked shivering.” — Lovecraft recounts a dream of his old home, to C.A. Smith, November 1933.

“When, as a youth of twenty, I laid in these ochraceous pads [pads for writing, purchased in bulk in 1910] did I ever think a grey-headed old has-been of almost forty-five would be scrawling on ’em in the virtually fabulous future of year of 1935? 1935 ….. even today it has an unreal, far-ahead sound! Can I be living in a year whose numeral seems as fantastically remote as 2000 or 2500 or 5000? Where have all the intervening twelvemonths gone to? Even 1910 is fantastic enough to one whose sense of existence is somehow curiously oriented to 1903. And can it be that the world of 1910 will in turn give place to something as different as 1910 is from 1450?” — Lovecraft to Morton, on a sense of ‘living beyond one’s time’, April 1935.

HPLinks #57 – 16mm Lovecraft’s pals doc revived, graphic novel about Lovecraft’s cat, new article by Lovecraft’s uncle, and more…

30 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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HPLinks #57.

* Here in the UK, Edinburgh Napier University newly posts some details of what sounds like an important H.P. Lovecraft Documentary Project which is well underway and about to launch a crowdfunder…

Restoration of archival 16mm footage shot by Sean Martin in 1989/90 about writer H.P. Lovecraft, featuring unique footage of Lovecraft’s then surviving friends and colleagues. Work-in-progress cut was screened at the Lovecraft Centenary Conference at Brown University in 1990. Project received ENU research funding in 2024 to digitise footage. This has now been completed (90 mins of material digitised), and a crowdfunder is being launched in autumn 2025 to raise monies needed to digitise the remaining footage. Industry contacts are in place to assist with restoration and additional postproduction.

* Another ‘Lovecraft as character’ graphic novel, from Argentina, which Deep Cuts usefully reviews this week…

… a story about a boy [Lovecraft] and his cat. It is not a historical work that delves into the nuances of the cultural forces that went into such names, [but rather for those who] want a heartwarming fantasy about Lovecraft and his beloved pet, which has gained a kind of literary immortality.

I found a review from Harartia magazine in Argentina, which concluded the book was… “essential reading for both lovers of horror literature and for those who seek stories that, in their apparent simplicity, hide a moving depth.”

Sounds good. I certainly hadn’t spotted it here, and the news is very welcome. It was published in Argentinia by Jano Comics in 2023, and runs to 103 pages. There’s no sign of it on Amazon or eBay. The closest I can get to a possible store source is AleComics in Buenos Aires, which appears to be selling it locally by mail-order.

* Talking of cats, Grognardia this week considers “The Cats of Ulthar” and points out that… “in its conception of a higher, more mysterious order” of justice, it “stands in marked contrast to the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft’s later, more famous works”. In this sense it shares, I’d add, something with his “The Street”.

* I found a real-life ‘horror story’ from Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark (d. 1915), writing in 1876. Friend’s Review reprinted his survey article in the Sanitarian, on a horrible pig parasite which also infects and quickly kills humans. Eeek!

* The latest Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast tackles the two ‘most Lovecraftian’ tales of Borges, “There Are More Things” and “The Book of Sand”. It seems the podcast’s Patreons also get a bonus interview with Andrew Leman of the HPLHS.

* A new book chapter on “The Visual Realization of Fantastic Worlds in Book Cover Design”. Now free and open-access, as part of the book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (2024). This is No. 4 of a German publisher’s The Middle Ages and Popular Culture series, but the text is in English.

* Just published (according to Amazon’s date and reviews, though shipping seems uncertain), the popular culture history book Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries. This comprehensively surveys movies and TV series / specials… “positioned as documentaries, that began with Chariots of the Gods (1970) and ended with The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981)”.

* The Hippocampus Press website now has “December” as the shipping date for the forthcoming A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

* In the related world of R.E. Howard, another fine free audiobook reading from Gates of Imagination, Robert E. Howard’s substantial Solomon Kane tale “The Moon of Skulls”, first published in Weird Tales over two issues in summer 1930. A few years ago Jeffro’s Space Gaming blog was reading through Kane and found that with this tale Kane became… “even more heroic, more imposing, more inspiring, and more awesome than his preceding tales could indicate.” The new reading of “The Moon of Skulls” runs over two hours. There may be frequent ads if you just listen on YouTube, thus an .MP3 download will be far more enjoyable.

* Open Letters Review reviews a new graphic adaptation of “The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard. One of my favorite Conan tales, and here paired with art by Valentin Secher. Not really a graphic novel, by the looks of the samples. More of a sumptiously illustrated tale that might work well if paired with an English audiobook reading. At least, it would if you’re someone who doesn’t already have their own very clear visualisation of this classic ‘young Conan the thief’ tale.

The review states the 2022… “Bragelonne original was nearly 11-by-15 inches” and that the new small Titan printing in English is very inferior by comparison. Bragelonne has a page which reveals the French title was Conan illustre : La Tour de l’Elephant, and a title search reveals that Amazon FR and Amazon UK have the same two copies left in stock. Personally, the art really doesn’t fit how I’ve always visualised the tale (too brightly lit, too cliched) or Conan (too old, too steroid-pumped), so the book is not for me. But some collectors may want a big French copy of the book, before they sell out.

* I’m pleased to hear about the second issue of the revived Heavy Metal comics magazine, and the vibes coming from a few trusted HM connoisseurs feel good. My look at the contents-list reveals a new strip by HM veteran Enki Bilal, and even a revival of “The Bus” strip. A reasonable $30 gets you a one year digital subscription to the new quarterly, though sadly it’s a “subscription starts with the current issue” sub. Those only now discovering the HM revival may well want a “start me with issue one” sub, which doesn’t appear to be on offer.

* From Poland, a 2025 B.A. dissertation abstract for “Digital character sheets in RPGs, exemplified by the Call of Cthulhu system”. Not available in full-text. Examines…

… character sheets in role-playing games (RPGs). It also presents the design and implementation of the web application SheetKeep which serves as a virtual character sheet. […] Discusses the history and theory of such, and then] formulates the application’s design requirements. The outcome of this analysis is an application that enables users to create and manage character sheets for the Call of Cthulhu system within their own campaigns.

* And finally, a free HMS Challenger Botanic illustrations LoRA for use as a ‘style plugin’ with Illustrious. Based on scans of Ernst Haeckel’s book, presumably. Lovecraft’s uncle lyrically explains the historical context…

What beauties, what wonders, then, are found miles beneath the sea? The great steamship, the Challenger, sent out for a four years’ cruise by the English Government, has now returned. It has brought back with it the story so long concealed in these darksome and almost fathomless depths; the story of that great and strange and hitherto unknown country stretching for 140,000,000 square miles beneath the dark blue waves.” (Lovecraft’s uncle, Franklin Chase Clark, 1878).

Lovecraft knew and was strongly influenced by Haeckel’s anthropology and philosophy, but if he knew Haeckel as an artist of bizzare marine biology is unknown. The LoRA’s demo images are poor, but I was able to easily generate satisfactory ‘pages’ such as this…

— End-quotes —

“As for sea-food — it is simply intensely repulsive to me. […] From earliest infancy every sort of fish, mollusc, or crustacean has been like an emetic to me.” — Lovecraft on his disgust at the smell of fish out of water, to R.E. Howard, November 1932.

“Miami did not produce much of an impression [but I] sailed out over a neighbouring coral reef in a glass-bottomed boat which allowed one to see the picturesque tropical marine fauna & flora of the ocean floor.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, July 1931.

The Miami boat… “gave splendid views of the exotic tropical flora and fauna of the ocean floor — grasses, sponges, corals, fishes, sea-urchins, crinoids, etc. A diver went down and brought up a bucket full of sea-urchins for distribution among the passengers, but I restored mine to its native element because I had no means of preserving it.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1931.

“Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, written 1934-35.

“[… The madman said] “It is amphibious, you know — you saw the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm deep sea. It can’t stand up in there — too tall — has to sit or crouch.” […] The madman was bidding him hear the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door — and now, God help him, he did hear it! […] Phobic paralysis held him immobile and half-conscious, with wild images racing phantasmagorically through his helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There was a padding or shuffling, as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was approaching. …” — Lovecraft, “The Horror in the Museum” (written 1933).

Tentaclii

~ News & scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft

Category Archives: HPLinks

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HPLinks #59 – movies and more movies, Italian comics, and a footnote killer…

HPLinks #58 – gothic formulae, Baranger meets Tanabe, the Lovecraft Cult in German, and more…

HPLinks #57 – 16mm Lovecraft’s pals doc revived, graphic novel about Lovecraft’s cat, new article by Lovecraft’s uncle, and more…