HPLinks #54.
* The latest The Vermilion reviews a new Italian book whose title translates as H.P Lovecraft: Poet of the abyss (2025). Not on Amazon UK, or even Amazon Italy.
The review is in English but seems to have been auto-translated from the Italian into English. Thus I’ve clarified it in this quote…
… an exhaustive manual [of Lovecraft], full of information of all kinds, suitable for readings of different intensity, and with a narrative that includes biographical details and curious anecdotes, together with an in-depth analysis of the entire work and exploring the literary, philosophical and esoteric connections of its production. The book does not neglect a critical and attentive look at the vast secondary literature …
* I seem to have missed noting a ‘zine release. Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu #115 was published back in summer 2023, and I see it can still be had as a digital ebook. Mostly fiction, but there’s also an interview with Richard A. Lupoff, and an essay comparing “At the Mountains of Madness” with the 1933 novel which was later made as the ‘finding Shangri-la in the mountains’ movie Lost Horizon.
* The HPLHS has announced their new edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street, being the 1961 book of Eddy memories of their knowing Lovecraft in the Providence of the 1920s. The new $65 edition is described as a… “substantially expanded and embellished edition … more than doubling its size” to 174 pages. I should note that some of these supposed memories have been criticized as “fabrications” (Joshi and Schultz, Lovecraft Encyclopedia), and one hopes these will be footnoted as such. But the book’s page has nothing on that point. Indeed, we’re not even told if buyers will actually get any new information about Lovecraft. Nor do we see a contents-page. The new expanded edition is set to ship in September 2025, and is currently pre-ordering.
* New in the Spanish open-access scholarly journal Alambique, two reviews of the recent book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book…. “seeks to fill [a] historiographical gap by exploring the Spanish roots of epic fantasy through a theoretical analysis and an anthology of representative texts.” Review 1 and review 2. Freely available online, and both reviews are in Spanish.
* I see that Maurice Sand’s Conan-like epic fantasy novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867) has been reprinted in paperback in France, by PRNG in 2024. The book…
… reads as one of the first heroic fantasy or even sword-and-sorcery works ever written in modern times. The ‘rooster’ of the title looks and acts in a similar way to Howard’s Conan. Its fictional world is also fully Howardian both for its themes and its style.” (from the journal article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe”).
The new paperback of Le Coq is in French, and scans of the original book are not on Hathi or Archive.org. However, there is now a free English translation PDF on Archive.org.
* The Sprague de Camp Fan blog has a new and lengthy survey of publications related to Robert E. Howard’s early schoolboy writings.
* VoegelinView reviews the new book John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism (2025) and asks why this English author is today “ignored by readers and academics alike?”. Well… he’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I did try to read his A Glastonbury Romance once, having managed to actually find a copy in those pre-Internet days. But I recall he was just so boring that I gave up after a chapter or two, and for £1 passed the then-scarce book on to a colleague who was seeking a copy. The new review does interest though, since it reveals something new to me, that… “his last novels are ‘fantasies’ that can read like a kind of futuristic science-fiction”. SF Encyclopedia notes the relevant titles and some details of contents, remarking that his final works are… “fabulations, some of them unhinged”.
* A new podcast “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett”, a long interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries. Possibly a useful backgrounder for Mythos writers and RPG makers?
* The latest Appendix N Book Club podcast discusses H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.
* New on Archive.org, a scan of From The Sorcerer’s Scroll a long-ago ‘zine which had the article “The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons” (1978). Last month Grognardia had a post on this same seminal article. It appears to have been one of the very earliest attempts to translate what was then the “Lovecraftian Mythos” into role-playing games (actually it was Lovecraft + Derleth, but few could tell the difference back then).
* Grognardia is also developing a new RPG for Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and now has a public comments and suggestions post on his blog, which welcomes ideas and suggestions.
* The HPLHS has a pre-order page for their The Spark Devil, this being a complete prop-heavy Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure set in Providence in 1935. It… “makes extensive use of real Providence history and locations to create the most authentic setting possible”. Set to ship in October 2025. Also includes audio-props, which play via this device-prop which is included in the boxed-set…
* I see another nice set for luxury tabletop gaming, seemingly this very week. New Call of Cthulhu collector editions… “for Pulp Cthulhu, The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic, and the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep [adventure, in two volumes]”.
* And finally, LongPage is a new dataset of 300 novels with applied… “multi-layered ‘planning traces’ including character archetypes, story arcs, world rules, and scene breakdowns.” It’s free, uses public-domain, and seems useful for training AIs to plot and plan (or even write) novels in a coherent manner. I guess RPG makers may also find a use for this.
— End-quotes —
— Lovecraft on Angell Street —
[On the death of his beloved grandfather in 1904, Lovecraft at age 13] … mother and I were forced to vacate the beautiful estate at 454 Angell Street [built by his grandfather in 1880–81, and then numbered 194] … My home had been my ideal of Paradise and my source of inspiration — but it was to be profaned and altered by other hands. Life from that day has held for me but one ambition — to regain the old place and reestablish its glory — a thing I fear I can never accomplish.”
“… my grandfather transferred all his interests to Providence (where his offices had always been) & erected one of the handsomest residences in the city — to me, the handsomest — my own beloved birthplace! [in Angell Street]. The spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees, & a delightful fountain. Back of the stable is the orchard, whose fruits have delighted so many of my sad (?) childish hours. The place is sold now, & many of the things I have described in the present tense, ought to be described in the past tense. The house has been sold to one purchaser; the stable & orchard to another; & an ugly garage now smells to high heaven where once the crystal waters of the fountain played! Such degeneracy! Why could not the purchaser have kept his car elsewhere, & suffered the ancient fount to sparkle as of yore?”
“I never liked any other colour combination so well as black-and-gold. To my naive and undeveloped aesthetick sense that represents about the apex of dignified beauty — perhaps because that was the scheme in the front hall of my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. […] Ebony and gold is the aesthetick mixture [I like] — although old gold and rose is a great scheme, as the front parlour of my birthplace amply proved. There was an almost Oriental richness in that room, as in the palace of a caliph — I used to read the Arabian Nights there with an especial zest.”
