HPLinks #9.

“[in the] foreign colonies one sees a gradual Americanisation” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, February 1932.

* Sky News Italy reports on a new graphic novel about the master H.P. Lovecraft…

Recounting the life of the famous writer in a dreamlike and imaginary way, a soon-to-be-published graphic novel combines biographical and fantastic features to explore the genesis of H.P.’s literary works.

The chunky new graphic novel is HPL – Una vita di Lovecraft. By writer and cartoonist Marco Taddei, illustrated by Maurizio Lacavalla. Lacavalla has a rough and inky style that reminds me a little of Nicole Claveloux…

To be published in Italian by Edizioni BD. The 234-page table-trembler was launched in September at the Treviso Comic Book Festival, Italy, and is set for general release on 15th October 2024. Amazon UK shows an affordable £9 Kindle version (presumably with a free-sample on release), while Amazon Italy has both the digital and dead-tree versions.

* L’Antique Sentier has a well-illustrated new blog post on “La decadence de Red Hook”, in French, with extended translation of Lovecraft’s letters. Worth seeing for the pictures alone, though of course you can auto-translate.

* Swamp Atlas has a new and long survey of marshes, bogs and swamps in H.P. Lovecraft’s works, including those found in the poetry. In Italian.

* From 2012 but new to me, “H.P. Lovecraft: creencia estetica y asentimiento intelectual”. Freely available as part of the Catalonian open-access journal Taula. Examines the formation of…

Lovecraft’s theory of cosmic horror” arising from “the deep connection between his narratives and scientific images of the world, his distinctions between intellectual assent and aesthetic belief and between the mundanely gruesome and true cosmic fear.” Also notes how this feeds into… “the metaphysical assumptions that underpin his late literature.

* Free in open-access from Brazil, the 294-page ebook As Nuances Do Gotico: do setecentos a atualidade (‘The Nuances of Gothic: from the 17th century to the present’) (2023). The lead essay is on the modern nature of the monstrosity revealed in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

* The German Lovecraftians reported in September that the latest annual… “double-issue of our magazine Lovecrafter is nearing completion”. This year the magazine takes the topics of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ / ‘Lovecraft and the cinema’.

* In France, the article “The Rats in the Walls: un centenaire, mon chat, et la restauration monumentale” celebrates the centenary of “The Rats in the Walls”. Freely available online, in French.

* A review of the new Dagon videogame adaptation, as played on the PlayStation console, from PlayStation Universe…

Dagon Complete Edition is a captivating, engaging, and informative piece of content that truly loves and respects H.P. Lovecraft. […] the visual quality is so enjoyable and vivid that the [one hour of] bare-bones gameplay never wears out its welcome.

The reviewer usefully notes that one of the DLC easter-eggs is a cel-shaded toon adaptation of Lovecraft’s very juvenile tale “The Little Glass Bottle”, written when the budding master was about seven years old.

* Horacio Lalia: Una Vida Dibujada, a 2023 book on the life and work of an acclaimed comics artist. He has produced several books of Lovecraft adaptations, among his other horror comics.

* New to me, a collection of comic-book adaptations HPL Vol. 1: Comic Adaptations of the Works of H.P. Lovecraft, all by Canadian Nick O’Gorman. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Doom that Came for Sarnath”, and “The Cats of Ulthar”. Apparently the Herbert West: Reanimator serial is also made to fit into the book’s 156 pages, and thus I guess we should expect a little truncation. Published by Target Destroyed in summer 2023, and available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as in paper. The maker (I think I had previously noted his recent Imprisoned with the Pharaohs comic-book adaptation) expects to eventually illustrate all Lovecraft’s works in this way, culminating with “At The Mountains of Madness”. The Vol. 1 book is “quite violent and gory” says one reviewer, so it’s not a kiddie-comics edition of Lovecraft.

* In Spain, the citizens of the city of Pamplona celebrates their link with Lovecraft, in the form of a new book…

In 1927, the American writer H.P. Lovecraft had a strange dream that took him to ancient Pompaelo [Pamplona]. An illustrated book will recreate the story that was left unfinished. Lovecraft dreamed that he was an Ancient Roman and was undergoing the ancestral rites of the so-called ‘mountain people’. Almost a hundred years later, author and editor Oihane Amantegi and illustrator Unai Gonzalez have come together to create the first adaptation of Lovecraft’s dream-story. In order to carry it out, they have launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Verkami platform. […] the story shows the extensive knowledge that Lovecraft had of ancient history, of Hispania [Spain] and of the Basques in particular.

It’s already been handsomely crowd-funded, with 23 days still to go.

* In table-top games, a big crowdfunder for Trail of Cthulhu 2E (2nd edition) is being launched about now. Trail is a core Lovecraftian investigation RPG that uses the Gumshoe play system.

* A new links page for Bob Byrne’s collected Robert E. Howard essays posted at Black Gate.

* Archive.org is still offline, after a serious hack. The Wayback Machine is back online today, though in read-only mode. The Archive is reportedly due back in “days, not weeks”, apparently. When it’s back, you may want to save out your own torrent magnets and host them on a blog post etc as a backup. So long as you’re still seeding what you posted, your files should (theoretically) then still be available to the public even if the Archive goes down again.

* And finally, the largest exploration spacecraft ever built has today successfully launched on a SpaceX rocket. The craft will search for evidence of alien life in the dark waters below a frozen ocean, on a large and mysterious moon near the edge of the Solar System. Very Lovecraftian!

— End-quote —

“There recently appeared before the public a rather unsophisticated volume entitled Pollyanna, which preached a sweetly artificial doctrine of converting ills into blessings by the contemplation of possible calamities still more direful. [Though the book proved a success with girl readers,] poor Pollyanna became the target of every penny-a-line hack reviewer and little-wit in Grub-Street [i.e. mass-market journalism]. They loftily demonstrated that the easing of melancholy by force of imagination is a vastly unscientific thing. Impossible, they vowed! Or, even if possible, it ought not to be […] The New York Tribune, in fact, deemed the inoffensive Pollyanna sufficiently culpable to merit a sneering editorial. So runs the worldly-wise current of twentieth-century life! Your modern philosopher had rather be mature and miserable, than childlike and contented; and he deems you a monstrous imbecile if you can be happy at a time when he thinks you have not sufficient cause to be happy. Heaviness of spirit, he doth asseverate, is a sacred obligation of every thoughtful and responsible citizen. [… I confess to] no little amusement at the wailing of these worshippers of morbid maturity. […] It is dangerous to dabble in realities, and if more of us were able to retain the happy illusions of our infancy, those illusions would be so much nearer truth [in reality, and yet meanwhile] on the pleasures of the fancy rests all the mighty framework of art, poesy, and song”. — H.P. Lovecraft, “In the Editor’s Study”, October 1916.