HPLinks #36.

* A new Radio France podcast on Lovecraft, celebrating his publication in the highly prestigious Plaiades book series.

* A new article on “La influencia de Lovecraft en la ciencia ficcion por R.R. Lopez”. (‘The influence of Lovecraft on the science fiction of R.R. Lopez’). Freely available online. In HTML, so easily auto-translated.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated again. He notes he did a new podcast interview, now on YouTube. Also, that Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” is now translated into Hebrew and published, which sounds good. I presume it wasn’t translated before?

* New on YouTube, “The Space-Eaters” by Lovecraft’s good friend and fellow writer Frank Belknap Long. Presented as a 75-minute audiobook, with a suitable reader. Adverts, if you just press ‘play’ and view as a video. But no adverts, if you download it with Mediahuman YouTube to MP3 or similar freeware.

* Movie-industry trade paper Deadline reports “‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ Movie Remake In Works”. Sadly, it only hopes to be a “contemporary reimagining” of Lovecraft’s shocker serial, rather than a period piece. But it sounds like it has both talent and ‘cancel-culture resistant’ finance and it’ll happen…

… production and finance shingle [i.e. independent wholly-owned movie-financing outfit] Woodlake Entertainment is fully financing the project. Multi-Emmy-nominated artist- and producer Jeffrey Lewis and Keith Previte will produce for Woodlake, with the Lovecraft adaptation the first in series of elevated genre pics the company plans to develop and finance.

* In the Norwegian folklore journal Folkminner, “Ett groteskt och gigantiskt fettberg – om uppkomsten av monster i London”, on the latest real-life variant of a ‘London sewer-monster’. In Norwegian, but easily translated from an HTML page. Freely available online.

* Wormwoodania gets “‘Steeped in Antiquity and Fantasy’: Some Esoteric Seventies Music”. Specifically, of the British earth-mysteries / gothic / fantasy sort, digging out highly obscure bands which were issuing music from the late 60s / early 70s… “Fantastic literature pervades the ideas and images of many of the bands.”

* Nothing of note in the latest monthly update from the German Lovecraftians, but I see elsewhere that Gou Tanabe’s graphic-novel of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” is making its appearance in a 224-page German translation soon, as Die Katzen von Ulthar along with other tales from the Dreamlands. Set for a 1st July 2025 release.

* The sumptuous new Illustrator’s Quarterly #45 book-a-zine reportedly includes… “a Gallery of Doc Savage artists: pulp illustrator Baumhofer, James Bama, Ken Barr, Bob Larkin, Boris Vallejo, and Alex Ross.”

* A book title that’s new to me, on the history of the pulp-and-paperback industry — Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback (2024). Appears to be a well-researched academic book.

* The Politically Incorrect Guides series has just published the Politically Incorrect Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy. 216 pages (reported as “243 pages” in Kindle ebook format). I’m not sure how deep it goes, given what are likely to be fairly short-and-sharp chapters. I think I’d want to see an author index before I shell out £15, and there’s no index to be had via Google Books.

* My regular Tolkien Gleanings reaches posting #300. The latest Tolkien links, with a strong emphasis on noting the latest scholarship and insightful fan blog-posts. No blather about movies, TV, fan-awards or cos-play events.

* And finally, be sure to make the Elder Sign and pass by, if you encounter the new ‘Arkham House Publishers’ outfit at arkhamhousepublishers.com. Apparently hailing from Sauk City, but unconnected to Derleth or his estate. Not only will this vanity press ‘publish’ any book you pay to have published, but they can also have their AI-fuelled shoggoths-on-typewriters write it for you. I’m not against AI assistants, you understand, but using the press name seems rather underhand and could mislead both writers and book-buyers.

— End-quotes —

“By 1899 my poetical outbursts had become quite numerous, one collection [at age eleven] being still in my mother’s possession. It is a book made of cheap pad paper, bound with pins, & is entitled “Poemata Minora”. It contains an ode to the moon, regrets on the passing away of the pagan religion, musings on the downfall of Rome, & such like things!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1916.

“The visible world is my circus and prompt-book, but I don’t take it very seriously and don’t give much of a damn what becomes of it. To me the most important thing — and the most primarily interesting thing — is opportunity to think and dream and express myself as I please.” … “As for a book of my stuff — I don’t think it’s worth bothering very energetically about.” — Lovecraft to Moe, and Lovecraft to Derleth, both March 1923.

HPLinks #32.

* The German Lovecraftians report that the Miskatonic Theatre in Hamburg-Harburg “was completely destroyed in a fire on 9th March 2025”. This was billed as the only dedicated “horror theatre” in the world and one which had “staged many Lovecraft works”… .

Local news reports confirm the fire, and state that “The theatre was fully ablaze” when the fire brigades arrived. Four people suffered minor injuries, and a cat was bravely rescued from the second floor. The theatre had been previously targeted for the wholesale burglary of all gear and valuables, which the players had nevertheless recovered from. But, in the theatrical spirit of ‘the show must go on’, after the fire the… “last four performances of the theatre’s current play ‘The Whisperer in Darkness'” were moved to “a centrally located alternative location in Hamburg”. A subsequent ongoing crowdfunder has so far raised over $17,000 U.S., and the players plan to continue their “Lovecraftian repertoire in radio play format”. Donations are still welcome via GoFundme.

* Helios House Press is offering a new book version of the Lovecraft/Sonia stage collaboration Alcestis: A Play. New scans of this have also recently been added to the online Brown Digital Repository, and can be perused there for free.

* The latest Cormac McCarthy Journal compares the author with Lovecraft, in the article “Hinterland Horror: Geographical Extremity as Revelation in Blood Meridian and At the Mountains of Madness“ ($ paywall).

* This week The Pulp Super-Fan likes what he finds in a selection of issues of The Lovecraft Annual scholarly journal.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s recently been in Providence doing research, and in new books he notes the arrival of the second volume of Blackwood stories. I see from the Hippocampus Press website that the next two volumes are due soon, and I’d guess they’re likely to arrive on the doorstep before midsummer at the latest…

A Descent into Egypt and Others: Collected Short Fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Volume 4 — May

The Wendigo and Others: Collected Short Fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Volume 3 — May

* A new public-domain LibriVox recording of “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming” by R.E. Howard.

* The latest H.P. Podcast ponders Asperger’s Syndrome & Lovecraft’s Universe.

* A sumptuous new Moebius paperback may interest Tentaclii readers. Due in April 2025 (delayed from January 2025), in an unusual format. In Arzak: Destination Tassili — Corpus Final, the words are in French but… all are removed from the artwork and placed on the facing page, thus leaving the artwork to shine alone. At the back of the 248-page book there’s also a pure wordless b&w version of the posthumous sequel (Moebius died half-way through creating it). Note that…

This is the first publication of any part of Tome 2 [i.e. the sequel, in 29 finished pages] in any form.

* The hit Lovecraftian videogame The Sinking City is being remastered in Unreal Engine 5, which is the latest version of the advanced ‘industry standard’ game-engine. For PC and also for other platforms. All owners of the original will get a free upgrade to The Sinking City Remastered when released.

* DOOM expert Nathan has kindly added four more Lovecraft DOOM II game expansion WADS (i.e. fan-created extra game-levels and makeover mods), in a comment on my “Lovecraft in DOOM II” post. He also annotates the titles with descriptions and comments.

* I don’t normally note the various new Lovecraftian anthologies here, but I’ll make an exception for Into the Cthulhu-Universe: Lovecraftian Horrors in Other Literary Realities (April 2025). This has stories from a clutch of ‘name’ Mythos authors, who take the Mythos into other well-known “literary landscapes” (Tom Sawyer, John Carter of Mars, Alice in Wonderland etc).

* New in hardback and Kindle ebook, London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (2025). Lovecraft made a very close and extended study of ‘olde London’ at one point, for his own amusement, but sadly this mental time-travel was never used in fictional form.

* And finally, Lovecraft’s travel writing began 100 years ago in April 1925…

perhaps we should look back a few years, to his whirlwind one-day visit to Washington, D.C., on 11–12 April 1925 for the true commencement of his travel writing

This from S.T. Joshi, noting that we know that… “Lovecraft prepared at least one carbon copy” of an unusual and very long close-typed letter dated 21st April, to his aunt. Presumably to circulate among other colleagues. Thus April 1925 is the date at which his circulated travel writing began.

— End-quotes —

“I studied Old London intensively years ago, & could ramble guideless around it from Hampstead Heath to the Elephant & Castle!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.

From Lovecraft’s early 1916 poem which imagines a decrepid bookshop in Old London, filled with the mouldering relics of the 18th century wits…

Where crumbling tomes upon the groaning shelves
Cast their lost centuries about ourselves.
Mine be the pleasure of the grimy stand
Where age-old volumes sleep on ev’ry hand.

[…]

What shades scholastic thro’ the twilight flit
Where Knapton’s sagging folios loosely sit!
The skull-capp’d dealer, crouching on his stool,
O’er the vague past can claim a wizard’s rule:
On his seam’d face the myriad wrinkles play,
And subtly link him to the yesterday.

[…]

Hail! sportive Rochester, bestir thy feet,
And mince in fancy o’er the cobbled street!
House after house appear in gabled rows,
And the dim room Old London’s spirit shews!
Upon the floor, in Sol’s enfeebled blaze,
The coal-black puss with youthful ardour plays;
Yet what more ancient symbol may we scan
Than puss, the age-long satellite of Man?
Egyptian days a feline worship knew,
And Roman consuls heard the plaintive mew:
The glossy mite can win a scholar’s glance,
Whilst sages pause to watch a kitten prance.

Outside the creaking door a nation boils,
And Progress crushes Learning in its coils.
The blessed Past in mad confusion fades,
And Commerce blasts Retirement’s quiet shades.
Unnumber’d noises, in demoniac choir,
Wake the curs’d Pit, and stir the seething fire.
A million passengers, in hast’ning heat,
Jostle their fellows, and disturb the street.

“18th century England probably averages as high as any combination of time and place for a person of my particular psychology. I would have lived as a country squire of liberal tastes, visited London occasionally, fought on the government side in 1715 and 1745, and been a Tory [conservative] in politics.” — Lovecraft speculating about his place in the society of 18th century England, had he lived in that period. To Robert E. Howard, September 1931.

“In Hyde Park [Corner in London] I beheld the nightly swarm of amateur orators whose soap-box eloquence provides so ample a safety-valve for social and governmental discontent. Around these hoarse and excited expounders of political, religious, ethical, economic, philosophic, and divers other doctrines there gathers regularly a hungry, ragged, argumentative horde such as Hogarth would have loved to draw. Each ardent prophet has his own private solution for his country’s ills and those of the world in general, and no two will commonly be found to offer anything like the same panacea. All, however, have their respective (if sometimes less than respectful) audiences, with whom they usually share a complete ignorance of the problems they discuss. No limit is placed on their radicalism of utterance, since it is a traditional British belief that free speech affords the safest possible vent for disturbed emotions and bewildered brains.” — Sonia’s London travelogue, in “European Glimpses” (December 1932), a travelogue heavily revised by Lovecraft and probably also enhanced in its opinions on English culture.

HPLinks #26.

* Now available digitally, for academics with access behind the JSTOR paywall, the full-text of the journal Lovecraft Annual for 2024. With a long article by yours truly, but don’t let that put you off.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he draws attention to the first volume of the series Relatos Macabros (Aurora Dorada). This being new translations of Lovecraft tales into Spanish, presented as a… “distinctive bilingual edition (using my corrected texts)”.

* Joshi also notes that one can currently buy the now-gentrified Shunned House at 135 Benefit Street, Providence. Yours for a mere $1.8m. Which should not be beyond a large crowdfunding campaign, should some local worthies wish to make it into the city’s first Lovecraft Museum.

* A new post in French (but easily auto-translated) from L’Antique Sentier, an illustrated post on Sarah Symonds, the antiquarian-artist who Lovecraft met in Salem. I wrote about Lovecraft’s visit to see this bas-relief maker on Tentaclii back in 2019. Regrettably, an image of her plaque of the Marblehead town ‘roofscape’ (purchased by Lovecraft) has yet to surface online.

* The new issue of the mostly-French journal Fantasy Art and Studies #17 (winter 2024) takes the theme of ‘Fantasy Flora’. Free to read online, as a Web flip-book — which regrettably means that articles can’t be easily auto-translated.

* The open-access Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies had a 2023 special issue (Vol. 45, No. 1) on the fantastic and science-fiction.

* Set for release in April 2025, a short 200-page book from a DePaul University neuroscientist on Horror on the Brain: The Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction.

* Grab your purchased Amazon ebooks while you can… as transferable file downloads. Amazon will turn off of this feature by 26th February 2025.

* In London, the major historical show ‘Tarot — Origins & Afterlives’ on tarot cards. This is the inaugural exhibition for the new £14.5m Kythera Gallery, at the Warburg Institute (London’s museum of cultural history). Runs until 30th April 2025. Free, but booking is required for time-limited entry tickets. Likely to be a popular draw, as the weather warms, so book ahead.

* For the first time in English, publisher Humanoids is to publish a 500-page sci-fi comic-book epic created by Caza, whose fine graphic work some may recall for the glory days of Heavy Metal magazine. The new single-volume ‘restored + English language’ edition of Arkadi and the Lost Titan is due March 2025. The publisher notes that the idea of producing a quality reprint of this was…

stuck in purgatory for decades [but now] the original negative films have been salvaged and are currently undergoing a scanning and digitization process, allowing the release of this magnum opus in its entirety.

Originally published as Le monde d’Arkadi, in French BD volumes from 1989-2004. The artwork style sometimes reminds me of Moebius, and sometimes Druillet. The sensibility is that of the then ‘newly-liberated from censorship’ 1980s Euro-comics.

* Also possibly of interest to readers, a new book from the UK on Female Detectives in Early Crime Fiction, 1841-1920 (September 2024). Said to be an “extensive survey” of instances, in a chunky 410 pages. Also note the forthcoming “Speculative Detectives’ special issue of the open-access Studies in the Fantastic (for which the call deadline has passed), which I would imagine will highlight some of the more recent female detectives who encounter the fantastical.

* New on Archive.org, The Spectatorial Vol. III (2015), which includes an article on Lovecraft and Innsmouth, “Becoming the Monster”. The upload made me aware of the Journal Archive of this University of Toronto journal offering… “works of speculative fiction, poetry, academic essays, graphic fiction, and artwork by the University of Toronto community and other speculative fiction enthusiasts.”

* A brief new blog post suggests the classic novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a source for Lovecraft’s ideas on evolution/degeneration…

Lovecraft’s theory of evolution […] reveals a fear on his part that degeneration is a stronger force than development; that human beings can more easily devolve than they can evolve. Lovecraft’s theory derives, in part, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a book that Lovecraft was very familiar with. Mr. Hyde is described by numerous characters in the novel as “deformed” or “degenerate.” When Jekyll transforms into Hyde, this can be interpreted as a devolution from a higher form of life into a lower one.

Well, perhaps… though degeneration ideas were common in the British and French research and thought of the late Victorian / Edwardian era, and in a different and more familial way via the North American anti-liquor and eugenic health movement. Lovecraft was familiar with both strands of thought. Add to this his sustained teenage dalliance with the French literary decadents, with their focus on the devolving of minds and bodies in sex, disease, drink, drugs and death. One might also note that ‘decaying degeneration’ over several generations and ‘devolving de-evolution’ (of a creature’s lineage to an earlier state in its evolution) are different things, not to be confused. The former can happen (e.g. the sorry results of repeated cousin marriage and incest over several generations), while the latter is biologically impossible (though it makes for a good comic-book plot).

As for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lovecraft had it in his library as a cheap Everyman edition, but we don’t know the date of this edition nor when he read it. One would have expected his grandfather to have had such a classic in his library, and for Lovecraft to have read it as a lad… and thereafter cherished his grandfather’s book. But it seems not. Of course, various ideas on ‘generational degeneration’ and even ‘backwards evolution’ could equally have come partly from his uncle’s late-Victorian medical library.

* And finally, what appears to be a new(?) 2025 Italian translation by metal guitarist Fabrizio Pinna, of Lovecraft’s notes on writing interplanetary science-fiction. Freely available online.

— End-quotes —

“… this isn’t to say that poets and artists are less important than men of science, for in hard fact we must admit that truth is nothing of any intrinsic importance. It doesn’t matter a hang whether we know anything about anything or not, so long as we can be contented. If we can happily do it, we might just as well believe in Santa Claus, God, a green-cheese moon, fairies, witches, good and evil, unicorns, ghosts, immortality, the Arabian Nights, a flat earth, etc., etc., as learn the real facts about the universe and its streams and patterns of eternal and alternatingly evolving and devolving energy.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, September 1929.

“No planet lasts for ever. Its sun expires sooner or later, & eventually the very material substance of its system — & galaxy — & universe — disintegrates into its constituent electrons & leaves only an ’empty’ field of force (out of which another universe is later born).” — Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, April 1935.

“Disintegration of all matter to electrons and finally empty space [is, so far as we know] assured [by scientific laws]. Case of acceleration — man passes into space” — Lovecraft, No.36 in the Commonplace Book, possibly circa 1919?

[Science will never] “be able to kill the feeling of wonder in the human spirit. The mystery of the black outer gulfs, and of the deepest cognitive processes within us, must always remain unplumbed — and against these imagination must always frantically pound.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, December 1936.

“That’s why I light out for the fifth dimension and the galaxies beyond the rim of Einsteinian space-time — to escape the concentrated ennui to which all phases of objective life ultimately boil down.” — Lovecraft to Moe, January 1931.