HPLinks #77.

* The NecronomiCon’s Armitage Symposium has its calls for papers out. Set for 13th-16th August 2026, in Providence, Rhode Island. The Symposium…

is mainly dedicated to the life and works of the Providence-based weird fiction writer, the father of cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft, but also to his milieu: his literary predecessors, contemporaries, and current successors of the genre.

Submissions are welcome from all, if one can give an in-person presentation. Presentations will be considered in due course for Lovecraftian Proceedings No.7. Deadline: 24th May 2026.

* The NecronomiCon art-show, Ars Necronomica 2026, does not yet have details for the forthcoming show. Other than that it will run in Providence… “for most of August 2026”.

* New from Charles University, the PhD thesis Lovecraftova literarni tvorba v kontextu objektove orientovane ontologie (2026) (‘Lovecraft’s literary work in the context of object-oriented ontology’). Freely available online, in Czech with English abstract. Also in Czech, this week they have the official translation of Tanebe’s mammoth The Shadow over Innsmouth manga adaptation.

* The hub website hplovecraft.com has a new page for Collections of Lovecraft’s Works, made re-sortable by year, publisher or title.

* Deep Cuts considers two 1973 publications about Lovecraft and Sonia.

* Sechrist’s grandson has made contact, via my 2018 Tentaclii post on Edward Lloyd Sechrist (1873-1953). See the comments at the foot of the post.

* Parker’s Ponderings reviews “The Craziest Commonplace Book Ever” ($ paywalled, Substack), apparently through the lens of an interest in notebook-keeping methods. It’s Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, in a new illustrated version.

* One I missed back in 2016. Daniel Birmingham produced “At the Mountains of Madness” as a low-budget screenplay as the final dissertation submission for his Screenwriting degree… “Rather than scale the film to make it larger than life, I wanted to write a quiet, chilling piece that could be shot on a low-budget.” Now freely available online, from his university repository.

* The German Lovecraftians report on a forthcoming premiere for a drone-orchestral-visual “Colour Out Of Space”, in Berlin…

After more than 10 years of work and the creation of over 700 images, The Dunwich Orchestra will perform their complete production “The Colour Out Of Space” live for the first time, on 23rd April 2026 the venerable Babylon cinema in Berlin. The German Lovecraft Society is sponsoring the project as an official cooperation partner. Berlin-based comic artist and illustrator Andreas Hartung and The Dunwich Orchestra have adapted this horror parable as a dark, episodic visual show with an atmospheric soundtrack, entirely without words, drawing the viewer into a hypnotically slowed vortex of horror – a profound drone-comic visual spectacle.

* The Enki Bilal Collection, on show from June 2026 in Paris, France. The major retrospective will be ticketed and priced. Many Tentaclii readers will know Bilal from his distinctive artistry and storytelling in Heavy Metal and elsewhere.

The artist [himself] is opening the Enki Bilal Collection in the Marais district of Paris. Serving as both an exhibition hub and a creative studio, this museum [quality] exhibition space will showcase the painter and author’s works, allowing visitors to explore his creations firsthand. In addition, it will host temporary thematic exhibits, panel discussions, screenings, book signings, and meet-and-greet events. A retrospective exhibition showcasing Enki Bilal’s work is set to inaugurate the venue, running through September 2026.

* Also in comics, Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson was published last month as an affordable paperback and ebook. Wrightson’s various collected 1970s work for Creepy magazine. Including an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”, and with all the strips kept in b&w rather than being coloured.

* Publisher DMR has a new free ‘best of’ sword-and-sorcery story sampler book, The Battle Rages On: A Free Anthology from DMR Books. If you like what you read they have plenty more.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press has a new fundraiser book to aid the restoration of Howard’s home, titled First Cuts – the Drafts and Fragments of Breckinridge Elkins. Elkins being Howard’s irascible hillbilly from Bear Creek.

* Talking of Howard, I see Titan Books have published a new… “Solomon Kane novelette, Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black”, a $1.99 ebook read…

Journeying back to his native [English county of] Devon, Kane finds his homeland is not as he left it. A foulness has spread across England, changing it forever. The devils that inhabited far-off lands have infiltrated this blessed plot.

No sign of it via search on Amazon UK for “Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black”, but it turns out the ebook is there. It also turns out that this is No. 2 in a series and that a similar No.1 ebook slipped out just before Christmas 2025 as Solomon Kane: The Lair of the Mari Lwyd. No. 1 was set in Wales, and appears to have had good reviews.

* Talking of Wales, the Welsh regional newspaper Powys County Times brings news of a new Lovecraftian anthology with a regional Welsh flavour…

‘Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country’ brings together tales inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the influential American writer, and features stories by six Welsh authors […] The collection explores Lovecraft’s literary connections [with Wales], particularly his debt to Caerleon-born author Arthur Machen.

Sounds good, and better I see it’s on Amazon UK as a budget ebook. Amazon’s listings suggests Night Country may be a follow-up to the editor’s first Cthulhu Cymraeg (2013) anthology, rather than a reprinting.

— End-quotes —

Over Christmas and New Year 1927 Lovecraft dug out his crumbling copy of some old notes on the family tree… “I had copied it from my late great-aunt Sarah Allgood’s chart (plus a chart of the Lovecraft side) in 1905, and it had nearly fallen to pieces”. On re-copying for preservation, he discovers a… “shocking revelation of hybridism”…

“… who is this dame that my great-grandfather William Allgood married in 1817? Rachel Morris — yes, I knew that before. But where did she come from? Wales! [and] my great-great-grandmother, born in 1774 and died in 1845 […] was Isabella Purcell, daughter of Owen Purcell of Llanariba, and of his wife Susanna Rees, daughter of David Rees or Rhys. A Welsh gentlewoman of unmixed Celtick blood!” [and] my great-grandmother Rachel Morris had a mother wholly Celtic Welsh, and a father one-quarter Celtic Welsh.” — to Belknap Long, January 1927.

There is no Llanariba in Wales. Llan is common and simply indicates a place with an enclosed church and graveyard. a-riba or ariba is not Welsh, nor is there anything like it if one assumes an h for a mis-transcribed b.

Writing to Barlow in 1934, he still thought he had… “a good deal of Celtic blood from Welsh, Cornish, and Devonian lines.” Also in 1934 he wrote to Rimel… “Only lately did I learn that Rhys (on my Welsh side) is [pronounced] Reez. I had called it Riss.”

“Oddly — for one whose Devonian and Welsh and Cornish lines imply a good proportion of Celtic blood — my weird imagination is not at all Celtic. I not only lack but dislike the Celt’s whimsical angle toward the unreal world. When the genes were juggled around in the formation of my cerebral cells, the Teutonic ones seem to have pre-empted the fantastic division. However, I like to apply that Teutonic imagination to themes which may be far from Teutonic. The fact is, my instinctive loyalties and area of interest seem to follow cultural rather than biological lines … a tendency directly opposed to the Nazi tribal ideal. Undeniably, my own blood kinsfolk on the continent [i.e. the Germanic cultures] interest me less than my cultural kinsfolk, whose blood diverges sharply from my own as the stream recedes in time.” — Lovecraft to Barlow, June 1936.

HPLinks #76.

* From Spain, a new illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest, though here titled as En Busca de la Ciudad del Sol Poniente (trans: ‘In Search of The Sunset City’).

published by Alianza Editorial in its Singular Books Collection (LS). Translation by Francisco Torres Oliver, and illustrations by Gonzalo Gruber. A hardcover with 216 pages.

Finding the publisher’s page for the book also reveals it’s available from them in paperback and ePub. Turns out it’s even on on Amazon UK right now as a £13 Kindle ebook with free sample. The publisher’s website also has details of the artist…

Gonzalo Gruber, graduate in fine arts, forest firefighter, and tireless draftsman. Always immersed in impossible projects that combine his passion for art and nature. Like “Ear Ashes”, his elusive graphic novel/essay which now has more than 300 illustrations and is always in progress. In 2026 he immersed himself in the unique dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft, illustrating Dream-Quest for Alianza Editorial.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a useful and informative review of H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend (2024).

* The Independent Horror Society offers a short review of the recent London Lovecraft Festival.

* The Portland 30th H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, now successfully Kickstarted and set for mid September 2026.

* ‘Technologies of the Fantastic’, an online conference set for 13th-15th May 2026. The title seems somewhat misleading, since the organisers say they intend to focus on “the technologies of fantasy” in particular. Such as… “carefully constructed runes and magical glyphs that operate as locks and keys; in the textile metaphors of spell weaving; in the taxonomy of the naming [of natural elemental forces]”. Registration is not yet open, but it will be via Eventbrite.

* Guest Posts at Wormwoodiana, for “The Centenary of Amazing Stories” pulp magazine, part one and part two.

* Deep Cuts considers the Lovecraft recollections of his friend Mrs Miniter, which were preserved in various amateur journalism publications of the 1920s. In giving a talk to the amateurs, she wrote that Lovecraft delivered with a voice having a… “staccato utterance and an air of temporarily abandoning Greek for this time only”.

* New to me, the historical survey book The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (2008), from Yale University Press. No mention of Lovecraft, it seems, but the early chapters have plenty of cultural context, re: Lovecraft’s times and NYC.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog post notes that his Mythos fiction survey book The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos has appeared in Russian translation.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the 1970s Cartoonist PROfiles magazine. Cartoonist PROfiles #30 (1976) has a previously unpublished Dunsany comic-book adaptation introduced thus…

Back in 1966, Russ Jones, an advocate of more sophisticated and more ambitious comic book continuity formats, put together a Pyramid paperback entitled Christopher Lee’s Treasury of Terror. Classic stories by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Bram Stoker were robustly аnd intelligently illustrated by veteran comic-book artists, two or three panels to a page, sideways. Jones’ initial “great picture stories of supernatural horror” compendium should have merited a second edition: Jones planned a follow-up, and though adaptations and finished illustrations were assigned and produced, they never saw the black of the press.

The unpublished Dunsany here was from the planned second book. Turns out the ‘Lovecraft’ item in the first book was “Wentworth’s Day [1957] by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth”, hardly a “classic”.

And in Cartoonist PROfiles #24 (1974), an illustrated Tom Sutton interview with a fabulous 1974 Charlton cover in b&w. The cover as published was rather badly coloured.

* At Substack, The Obelisk reviews Bloch’s Strange Eons…

Strange Eons is nowhere near Bloch’s best work. In fact, one has to have a strong fondness for cheese to merely enjoy this paean to Lovecraft’s universe. Pretty much every twist in the narrative is followed by digressions on the greatness of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. That’s all well and good, but I can understand the criticisms of Strange Eons, especially in regard to its adolescent-esque prose. Bloch almost seems to be writing for a teenage audience here [and there are a vast] number of Easter eggs buried throughout. […] Ultimately, Strange Eons is best enjoyed as a kind of love letter to an old friend.

No free audiobook, it seems.

* William Emmons Books has the book review “Elak! Out From The Shadow Of Conan!”. This being a review of Henry Kuttner’s novelette Thunder in the Dawn, published in two issues of Weird Tales, 1938. The long review has plot spoilers. Thunder was written for a pulp audience used to a fast-paced story, yet as the review observes…

this novella starts to cross the bridge from sword and sorcery toward epic fantasy [and the hero’s quest] is at least creeping towards epic fantasy.

I see there’s a free and well-read audiobook of it on YouTube, running to 140 minutes. Long, but the latest version of the YoutubeDownloader freeware can handle it.

* Talking of freeware, those seeking to restore old fandom tape-recordings (interviews, convention panel discussions etc) may like to know of the new LavaSR v2. State-of-the-art superfast automatic audio-restoration, via a locally-installed AI model. Free, as is all local desktop AI (if you have the graphics-card to run it, entry-level being an Nvidia 3060 12Gb card).

* And finally, U.S. Library of Congress archivists have discovered a lost 19th century film by Melies in some rusting old film cans. They realised…

we were looking at ‘Gugusse and the Automaton’ a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George Melies […] made around 1897, [which] was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century.

— End-quotes —

“I once owned an Edison machine of the primitive type, with recorder and blanks; and I made many vocal records in imitation of the renowned vocalists of the wax cylinder. My colleagues would smile to hear some of the plaintive tenor solos which I perpetrated in the days of my youth!! But sad to say, I gave the old machine away about a year ago to a deserving and not too musical youth who occasionally performs useful labour about the place. I wish now that I had retained it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917.

“Something over a decade ago I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results — mothers are not always unbiased critics — but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive, ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack [famous Irish principal tenor]. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1918.

“It took the bizarre & nondescript tonal & rhythmical hashes of post-war jazz to get me disgusted with popular ballads — & even now I relish the old-time [pre-jazz] inanities when they are revived on the radio …. though this may be merely because they recall the lost illusions & optimisms of the youthful period when I first knew & ululated them. […] with a gang of fellows whistling or howling the tin pan ditties of the period with overt & genuine gusto, as Grandpa must confess to having done in the lost golden days of ’06 & thereabouts!” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, February 1934.

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.

* 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 #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.