HPLinks #75 – ‘Terrible Old Man’ film, a new Lovecraft tarot pack, sanity as a game mechanic, and more…

27 Friday Feb 2026

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

* From Italy in English, the “Fragments from Elsewhere: the Weird as a Transmedia Genre” (2025). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available online.

* Pierre Deleage’s blog posts about his new book Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow and Burroughs, noting… “It is a revised, corrected and quite expanded version of my article ‘La transmigration de Robert H. Barlow'”.

* The new open-access book Crossing borders between countries, scholars, and genres: Commemorating the late Kathleen E. Dubs (2025) has two relevant chapters. “Crossing Genres, Crossing Media: The Cthulhu Mythos Through the Ages”, and “Liminal Aspects of the Hero’s Journey in the Major Works of Neil Gaiman” has the comparative sub-section titled ‘From Lovecraft to Gaiman’.

* The Italian Tolkien journal now has a book collection of the best articles, in English translation, as Arda Notebooks: the Best of I Quaderni di Arda. In the new book one can find the acclaimed German scholar Thomas Honegger in English on “Re-enchanting a Dis-enchanted World: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. The publisher Walking Tree has free abstracts for the book’s contents.

* Also from Italy, a film adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” as “Il vecchio terribile”. It premiered a few days ago in Rome, and is now reportedly destined for the film festivals circuit… “The short film The Terrible Old Man, a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous horror novel, premiered last night [24th February 2026] at the Cinema Caravaggio in Rome”.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of The Collected Poems and Letters of Hart Crane (1952)…

I have been greeted so far mostly by his [Lovecraft’s close friend Samuel Loveman] coat tails, so occupied has Sambo been with numerous friends of his here ever since arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her pipingvoiced husband, Howard Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there), kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him, and I think he is making the usual mistake of people visiting NY, of attempting too much, getting prematurely exhausted, and then railing against the place and wanting to get back home.

* Popping out shortly before Christmas 2025, which means I missed noting it here, the podcast The Atlantean Archive: Retro Books & Shows had A Chat with “The Lovecraft Geek”, Dr. Robert M. Price.

* Publishers Weekly reports that sales in U.S. comic-book shops hit a new high in 2025 at $2.2 billion. Said anecdotally to be largely due to the influx of a new paying audience in the form of Generation Z (now ages 14 to 27). I guess many are earning wages now — and thus many Z-ers can walk into their local comic-shop with far more than dad’s pocket-money in their wallets. A further guess would be that many will also have recovered from childhood manga overdoses, and are now discovering the joys of Proper Comics. Theoretically, such demographic and economic changes should also feed into Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related sales, especially as the U.S economy booms.

* In the academic Game Studies book Video Games and Mental Health (2025), the chapter “The Sanity Metre: Madness as a manageable resource”. Sanity as a finite resource… “renders madness operationalisable for a game’s code, has its historical roots in psychiatric discourse and its cultural roots in cosmic horror”. The editors kindly offer the book free, in its Kindle ebook version.

* Also in games, the forthcoming Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth has a free audio phone-app ‘trailer’ from Chaosium…

Our coming board-game Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth takes you on three adventures set in and around [Innsmouth. It is trailed by the new] Miskatonic Tales app (not required to play), which offers immersive audio recordings of the introductions and all paragraphs from the three scenarios. Simply select a scenario and a paragraph number, and the app will read the corresponding passage from the storybook. You can adjust the background music, volume, and playback speed.

* Talking of Innsmouth, Francois Baranger’s fully illustrated edition of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is now pre-ordering, for “release later this year”. If you know the tale well and just want the art, apparently the sumptious large-format artbook is already available in French.

* Up for auction, Gahan Wilson’s original sketch of a stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently… “the inspiration for the original statuette for the World Fantasy Awards”, rather than the other way around?

* The catalogue for the coming auction of The Peter Hansen Collection of Comics, seemingly the largest collection of vintage British comics yet to come to auction. With high resolution images of original artwork/layouts, unwatermarked, and available without registration. Effectively, a free online exhibition. Also includes some early fanzines, comic-related toys and trading-cards. A few British underground issues, in one lot. A few art-posters, such as the Barry Windsor-Smith poster seen below. No newspaper strips, that I noticed, other than a bound collection of U.S. one-page Sunday newspaper strips all from 1945. Here’s my pick…

* Now available, Blood N Thunder 2025 Special Edition magazine. Includes…

Pulp historian and novelist Will Murray tells the complete story behind “The Golden Vulture”, a Shadow novel originally written by Doc Savage scribe Lester Dent in 1932 but shelved for six years until being revised by Walter B. Gibson, chief chronicler of The Shadow’s exploits. [Plus] a comprehensive history of “The Bat, the legendary master criminal who first appeared in a 1920 play subsequently adapted several times to film and TV. Most importantly, The Bat was acknowledged by Bob Kane to have influenced the creation of a certain Caped Crusader still plying his trade in movies and comics.

* And finally, new to me is a Lovecraft Tarot pack from Spain. 78 cards, and to my experienced eye the artwork doesn’t appear to be AI generated. Might also be useful for writers, providing randomised starting-point ideas for a basic plot framework? Seemingly new, and not yet sold-out.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft on the value of pomposity-picking humour and “amusements of a lighter sort”. What he says seems to be relevant to cartooning and comics.

“There is art and sanity in psychological deflation …. One of the most contemptible ostentations of the human primate is a priggish dignity and particularly about non-essentials of form, custom, convention, regularity, and so on. It is this devastating pusillanimity which has created the repulsive beast called Babbitus Americanus, and which has paved the downward path toward standardisation, time-table helotry, and glorified mass-mediocrity. No saviour is more deserving of praise than one who can jolt and kick these cow-like conformers into something like a semblance of vitality, individuality, and well-proportioned perspective — who can air out their stuffy and meaningless primness and precision, and give them at least a pinch of that basic sense of humour, porportion, relativity, and cosmic irony which makes real men as distinguished from grotesque sawdust-stuffed homunculi. All hats off to the lusty deflater!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1930.

“One of the greatest obstacles to be combated during this unsettled era is the mistaken notion that amateur journalism is a non-essential and a luxury, unworthy of attention or support amidst the national stress. The prevalence of this opinion is difficult to account for, since its logic is so feeble. It is universally recognised that in times like these, some form of relaxation is absolutely indispensable if the poise and sanity of the people are to be preserved. Amusements of a lighter sort are patronised with increased frequency, and have risen to the dignity of essentials in the maintenance of the national morale. If, then, the flimsiest of pleasures be accorded the respect and favour of the public, what may we not say for amateur journalism, whose function is not only to entertain and relieve the mind, but to uplift and instruct as well?” — Lovecraft during wartime, in the United Amateur for May 1918.

“… comicality always depends wholly on the system of thought and values held by the perceiver; that, in short, ridiculousness is relative, and conditioned by the truth, inflexibility, or paramountcy of certain common ideas which are absolute to the multitude yet merely virtual to the closer inquirer. Intelligence and education, as they open new fields of risibility, close old ones; so that the laughing-stock of one stage of culture is often the gospel of the next, and vice versa. [Thus] we perceive the difficulty of laying down permanent laws of laughter in an age when all standards are plastic. […] is it not possible that some of the Philistine hyperticklishness at unaccustomed whimsies springs from a lack of that deeper and more pervasive humour which sees in all human life and effort an ironic comedy? Verily, laughter is an art for the discriminating.” — Lovecraft in The Conservative, July 1923.

HPLinks #74 – Lovecraft and Kafka, 1924 in NYC, voice-cloning, Lovecraft at the Miskatonic Library, and more…

22 Sunday Feb 2026

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HPLinks #74.

* The open-access book Tierwerden und Pflanzendenken in der Literatur: Okologische Entgrenzungen von Franz Kafka und H.P. Lovecraft bis heute (September 2025). Being a comparative study exploring the ecological thinking of Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft. In German, but under CC-BY and in .PDF, so auto-translation should be relatively straightforward.

Key chapter titles in translation…

– The Question of Comparability: Kafka and Lovecraft in their times and in relation to each other.
– “The Metamorphosis” and “The Rats in the Walls”: Visions of becoming animal.
– “A Report for an Academy” and “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn”: Becoming animal as becoming human.
– “The Burrow” and “Shadow over Innsmouth”: Rhizomatics and Hybrid Beings.
– “Investigations of a Dog” and “At the Mountains of Madness”.
– Varieties of Ecological Thinking in Kafka and Lovecraft.

* Deep Cuts looks at the letters sent to Weird Tales by Hazel Heald after Lovecraft’s death… “Lovecraft was a gift to the world who can never be replaced — Humanity’s Friend.” (Heald).

* From France, Lovecraft 1924: Love Before Cthulhu is a slick 24 minute film on Lovecraft’s pivotal year. It blends archival footage of NYC, Ken Burns-style slow zooms/pans on photographs, and occasional colorised images. YouTube auto-dubs it to English, for me.

* For sale on eBay, two issues of Barlow’s The Dragon-fly.

* The Grognardia blog considers “H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing”. (Part I) and (Part II).

* In Spanish, Krill magazine examines “La clonazione vocale: Iperrealismo sintetico tra utopia e fragilita del reale” (‘Voice cloning: Synthetic hyperrealism between utopia and the fragility of reality’), through the lens of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Freely available online.

* The Italians have just published a book whose title translates as ‘The Horror at Miskatonic University’. Turns out to be a 48-page comic-book. Not quite long enough to be a BD, but experimentally put into hardback and aimed at Italian bookshops and collectors rather than the flagging news-stands. It appears to offer a self-contained story set at Miskatonic University, but perhaps set in the 1970s or 80s (it opens with a Dr. Nimoy – ‘Spock’ – giving a lecture there), and the review finds that it’s neither an “intellectualistic rereading of Lovecraft […] nor a faithful, masterful adaptation” of Lovecraft. Just a fun romp by the sound of it, and with rather nice b&w artwork…

The story is by Giulio A. Gualtieri, with collaboration from Marco Nucci, two well-known names in Italian comics of the last few decades, with art by Matteo Buzzetti.

* British gamer Boring Dad Gaming has a six-part in-depth play-through review of The Dark Rites of Arkham, a point-and-click detective videogame set in Arkham in 1933. Part one and you can find the rest linked at his YouTube channel. Made in old-school Pixelvision…

The respected Rock Paper Shotgun calls it… “a well-made ode to Lovecraft’s Mythos which will appeal to anyone who loves Call of Cthulhu and ’90s adventure games.” It’s a $15 indie, available now on Steam and Itch.io.

* A new book which may interest British readers, Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995. Published a few days ago, it explores the nooks and crannies of weird and supernatural British TV in its glory-years.

* Marzaat reviews both volumes of A Means to Freedom, the letters of R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

* And finally, the HPLHS Raffle Ticket 2026. Prizes include, among others, both volumes of A Means to Freedom. The raffle prize-pick is on 15th March 2026.

— End-quotes —

“The original Arabic [of The Necronomicon] was lost before Olaus’ time, & the last known Greek copy perished in Salem in 1692. The work was printed in the I5th, 16th, & 17th centuries, but few copies are extant. Wherever existing, it is carefully guarded for the sake of the world’s welfare & sanity. Once a man read through the copy in the library of the Miskatonic University at Arkham — read it through & fled wild-eyed into the hills…” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1927.

“… Mulder’s infamous Ghorl Nigral. I even saw a copy of this once — though I never opened or glanced within it. It was many years ago in Arkham — at the library of the Miskatonic University. I was in a shadowy corner of the great reading-room, and noticed a huge volume in somebody’s hands across the table from me. The reader’s head was completely hidden by the massive tome, but on the book itself I could descry the words “Ghorl Nigral” in an archaic Gothic lettering. What I knew of it made me shudder — and I felt vaguely alarmed when others began glancing at the silent reader and quietly edging out of the room one by one. When I saw that I was wholly alone but for the unspeaking page-turner, my feeling of disquiet became almost overpowering — and I too edged toward the door …. keeping my eyes resolutely away from the reader for some unknown reason or other. Then I saw that the room was growing very dark, though the afternoon was by no means spent. I stumbled over a chair, and gave vent to a wholly involuntary cry — but heard no answering sound. At this point came a horrible glare of lightning and a deafening stroke of thunder, though those outside the building observed no sign of a storm. Attendants came running in, and someone brought a candle after the lights were found out of commission. The man who had been reading was dead, and his face was not pleasant to contemplate. He had a queerly foreign look, and his hair and beard seemed to adhere in unhealthy patches. The book, from which all eyes were sedulously averted, was tightly clasped in the brown, bony hands — and the attendants seemed slow in trying to dislodge it. When at length they did so, they encountered something very singular. For the hands, instead of releasing the book, came irregularly off at the wrists amid a cloud of red dust — whilst the body, pulled forward by the attempt, collapsed suddenly to a powder, leaving only a heap of greenishly mouldering clothes in the chair. Those clothes were later identified as belonging to a man buried 30 years before — whose tomb in Christchurch Cemetery was found to be empty. Never since that day has the Ghorl Nigral been taken from its locked vault in the library basement.” — Lovecraft to Willis Conover, August 1936.

“Candlemas is only five days off, and I am carefully rehearsing the formulae in the Book of Eibon — having borrowed the mediaeval Latin version of Philippus Faber from the library of Miskatonic University. A look of doubtful expectancy seems to have subtly gathered on the stony muzzle of the Eidolon [a carving sent to Lovecraft by Smith], and I am reminded hideously of an elliptical allusion in the original Dusseldorf edition of the Black Book. Everything, of course, depends upon the precise identity of It. Let us hope that the problem will not be solved in too hideous a way!” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, January 1932.

“The aspect of the Eidolon [Smith’s carving] as the mystic Solstice approaches is such as to breed a vague disquiet. There is too much of a suggestion of unaccountable anticipation and satisfaction lurking about Its muzzle, and one cannot be quite sure as to a half-opened eye. I am even now collating the ritual texts in Dee’s Neconomicon and in the Latin copy at Miskatonic University, in order to be safeguarded to the utmost on the Night.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1932.

HPLinks #72 – Lovecraft festival at the Sorbonne, Barlow monograph, REH’s Haunted Seaports, Metal Hurlant, Lovecraft on ghosts, and more…

06 Friday Feb 2026

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

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HPLinks #72.

* H.P. Lovecraft is to be celebrated at the Sorbonne university in France, in March and April 2026. A large programme with a conference, interviews with translators, film screenings, and an exhibition at the Edgar Morin University Library. Also a related… “day in Boulogne with Lovecraft board games and role-playing”.

* The open-access journal Brumal (2025, Vol. 13) has the Spanish article ‘Cosmic horror and the fantastic narratives of H.P. Lovecraft in videogame mechanics’ (my translation). Also in Spanish, a book review of Across the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and Ontological Horror (my translation).

* Deep Cuts considers the memoir Memories of Lovecraft (1969) by Sonia H. Davis & Helen V. Sully.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post brings news of the new monograph Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow, Burroughs (2026). Available now as a budget-priced Kindle ebook or paperback. This…

slender but substantial monograph is one of the most penetrating studies of R.H. Barlow ever written, examining not only his weird fiction but also his anthropological work in Mexico to paint a much fuller portrait of Barlow than has been available elsewhere. Along the way, Deleage examines Barlow’s relations with both his mentor, H.P. Lovecraft, as well as William S. Burroughs, who briefly studied with him in Mexico.

* Death At The Flea Circus is writing a series of Fungi From Yuggoth -inspired sonnets… “S.T. Joshi has accepted my sonnet “Immortal Bird” for number 24 of Spectral Realms magazine.” Spectral Realms No. 24 appears to be shipping now.

* A new Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter, for members. Including the typescript of the letter “To H.P. Lovecraft, ca. August 1930”.

* SpraguedeCampFan has posted “Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard: Additional Books”. This is part three of the post series, and we reach the the more interesting books (from a Lovecraftian perspective). A Guide to REH’s Lovecraftian fiction, which includes the appendix “Horrors from the Deep: Howard’s Stories of Haunted Seaports”. Plus the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy.

* ICV2 report that a mammoth R.E. Howard Art Chronology book-set is planned for 2026…

Troll Lord Games revealed a four volume Robert E. Howard Art Chronology set […] 1,600 pages and 7,000 images chronicling Robert E. Howard’s publication history in the U.S. The book tells the narratives of the artists who adapted Howard’s characters …

* Talking of artwork, I hear that major comics publisher Titan has a new magazine, titled The Savage Sword of Conan: Reforged. It take the best tales from Marvel’s original Savage Sword of Conan b&w magazine and adds careful hand-painted colour. It’s appears that it’s not to be compared to the sort of hideous day-glo colouring we’ve seen in the past, on comics such as Moebius b&w classics. Two issues so far, and another due in February.

I also see that Titan are re-issuing the original The Savage Sword of Conan magazines as budget-priced Kindle editions. They seem to be on a release schedule of about one a week. #14 arrives next week. The lead tale has art by Neal Adams. ‘Nuff said. …

Titan also have a new reprint and ebook of the Shadows Over Innsmouth (1994) Lovecraftian anthology. Good to see that Neil Gaiman hasn’t been excluded from the contents-list. The reprint is set for March 2026.

* Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) No. 18 (new series), April 2026, will be another Lovecraft special.

In this issue, echoing the Lovecraft Special of 1978, you will find the nectar of Lovecraftian comics from the 1970s to the 1990s. Whether among the Americans or the Franco-Belgians, H.P. Lovecraft had a deep and sprawling impact on the creativity of fantasy authors, and Metal has selected for you the best. So dive with us into the universe of the Master of Providence alongside the legendary Moebius, Bilal, Caza, Claveloux, Chaland and all the others!

* From the world of Lovecraft theatre, the board-treaders of the Miskatonic Theatre write from Hamburg, Germany…

After the ‘world’s only horror theater’ was set on fire by unknown perpetrators in March 2025 and burned to the ground, the Miskatonic Theatre endured a turbulent season in exile at Sprechwerk and Haus73 on the north side of the Elbe. [But] it will now reopen its doors in Hamburg in autumn 2026, which with your support will be bigger and better.

* In Spanish, Hijos de Cthulhu blog usefully discovers a ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale tucked away in the English-language anthology War of The Worlds: Global Dispatches (1996, 2021). The book has stories of the Martian invasion encountered elsewhere in the world, as told by historical “celebrity eyewitnesses”. Don Webb’s “To Mars and Providence” tale was set in Providence, and he had the young telescope-peering Lovecraft encountering Martians. Wikipedia still keeps a copy of an old page for the story which summarised the plot, and which the WikiPolice later deleted from the main Wikipedia.

* Talking of anthologies, Dark Worlds Quarterly this week surveys Horror Anthologies of the 1920s…

We tend to take Horror anthologies for granted. […] Back in 1920, not so much. There were ghost story collections [and] 1913’s Ghosts & Goblins from the UK is a Pulp before Pulp collections. Pearson’s, the British publisher, did Uncanny Stories in 1916. […] The stage was set but what was missing was the Pulps.

* And finally, the Ghosts and Goblins (see the mention above) caused me a bit of trouble in its tracking down, but Heritage Auctions saved the day. Published by The World’s Work in London (not ‘The Lord’s Work’, as HA amusingly has it), and the book appears to have been a shilling-shocker issued and promoted by the sensationalist tabloid newspaper The News of the World. Not online.

Update: Not published in 1913. HA have the date wrong.

— End-quotes —

“Miss Fidlar’s remark that war horrors have exhausted the capacity of the world for receiving new horrors may be answered [by saying that] The physical horrors of war, no matter how extreme and unprecedented, hardly have a bearing on the entirely different realm of supernatural terror. Ghosts are still ghosts — the mind can get more thrills from unrealities than from realities.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, 1921.

“To my mind, the sense of the unknown is an authentic & virtually permanent — even though seldom dominant — part of human personality; an element too basic to be destroyed by the modern world’s knowledge that the supernatural does not exist. It is true that we no longer credit the existence of discarnate intelligence & super-physical forces around us, & that consequently the traditional ‘gothick tale’ of spectres and vampires has lost a large part of its power to move our emotions. But in spite of this disillusion there remain two factors largely unaffected — & in one case actually increased — by the change: first, a sense of impatient rebellion against the rigid & ineluctable tyranny of time, space, & natural law — a sense which drives our imaginations to devise all sorts of plausible hypothetical defeats of that tyranny — & second, a burning curiosity concerning the vast reaches of unplumbed and unplumbable cosmic space which press down tantalizingly on all sides of our pitifully tiny sphere of the known.” — Lovecraft to Harold S. Farnese, April 1932.

“the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome […] has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” — Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

HPLinks #69 – Derleth at the Weird Tales offices, CAS conference report, Lovecraft’s personal museum, and more

14 Wednesday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #69.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog for 31st December 2025 has a long free extract from the newly-published August Derleth Sac Prairie Journal for 1939. A diary in which we get vivid glimpses of… “Derleth’s preparation of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others” and an account of a visit to the Weird Tales offices under Farnsworth Wright.

* The Catholic subscription-only podcast Reconquest (Episode 498) this week considers “Lovecraft’s Lore and Catholicity: A Stark Contrast”.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has it that there’s a Truth Seeker “podcast on Lovecraft and religion” on Vimeo. Yes, Vimeo still exists it seems. Sadly I couldn’t get past Vimeo’s blocker-bot, but perhaps you can.

* From Mexico in Spanish, in the latest edition of the open-access journal Revista de Filosofia, “Los cuentos del gusano. Verdad, evolucion y antinatalismo en la ficcion de lo extrano de H.P. Lovecraft y Thomas Ligotti” (‘Truth, evolution and antinatalism in the strange fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti’). Freely available online, and these days easily auto-translated from the PDF.

* There’s a new £140(!) academic book in the Palgrave Gothic series, Uncanny Doubles: Doppelgangers, Twins, Clones and the Gothic (2026). One of the chapters is “Lovecraftian Dualities and Nonhuman Bodies: The Case of the Whateley Twins in “The Dunwich Horror”.

* Kalimac’s Corner blog reports from the recent U.S. conference on Clark Ashton Smith.

* New on Archive.org, an early work-in-progress PDF of Clark Ashton Smith In Early Fiction Magazines, with covers where possible.

* Deep Cuts considers “Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner and “A Glimpse of H.P.L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana. The latter post also digs up the drawings by…

“Betty Wells Halladay from [Lovecraft’s shelf collection of] objects [, as later] owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library. Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945”

* The same drawings are also new on Archive.org, found in good scans of the booklet of memoirs Rhode Island On Lovecraft (1945) (first and second edition).

* The new documentary film Lovecraft in Florida (no relation to the new book, it seems) is to have its world premiere at the Pensacon convention (Pensacola, Florida) in February 2026.

* New Pulp Tales has a new interview with author Ramsey Campbell. The short text-only interview is… “the first in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month”.

* SFcrowsnest reviews the magazine Cryptology #4 (July 2025) and notes that…

“Writer Will Murray’s second part of his look at Charlton horror comics is a demonstration of creators being given freedom to do what they liked because the company couldn’t care less – as long as their printing presses could be kept running continually. It also allowed new talent to learn their craft before moving onto the more profitable companies.”

* TDT podcast blog has a quick review in Spanish of the new Spanish book Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft: La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1 (‘We will always have Lovecraft: The influence of his cosmic horror on popular culture. Vol. 1.’). I also found what looks like a video from the book’s author at a university repository, talking about the new book in Spanish.

* The major new biography The Buried Man: A Life of H. Rider Haggard (2025).

* Les Heliocrates podcast examines the broad themes of Lovecraft & R.E. Howard: a correspondence beyond its time. In French, but YouTube autodubs it into English. Skip to three minutes in, to get to the start of talking about the letters.

* A new print magazine, RevERBerate: A Magazine of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The third issue moves to the print format, and apparently includes a survey of… “the early African explorers whose feats influenced Burroughs’ writing”.

* E. Hoffmann Price’s “Satan’s Garden” is a new free public-domain audiobook on LibriVox. 158 minutes.

* From Poland, the undergraduate final dissertation, Arabowie oczami Ameryki. Jak ukazywano swiat arabski w amerykaaskich magazynach pulpowych dwudziestego wieku (2025) (‘Arabs through the eyes of America: How the arab world was portrayed in American pulp magazines of the twentieth century’). Not online, but there is a cogent English abstract. Looks like the author takes a balanced view as a historian, and I’m guessing that (if an editor asked) it might become a trimmed English translation in a pulp history ‘zine?

* Everything you need to know about Selling at PulpFest 2026.

* And finally, Francois Baranger is lining up further editions of his richly illustrated large-format Lovecraft books. His “The Haunter of the Dark” will be hovering over the bookshops in the late autumn of 2026 in French, while his “Shadow over Innsmouth” is apparently due in English later in 2026.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft was fond of small sculpture and bas-relief tiles, and at the end of his life the shelves of his small bedroom area was adorned with gifts of small figurative sculptures made by Robert Barlow, C.A. Smith, ancient artefacts given to him by Loveman, and curious items picked up on his travels.

“My generous host [Loveman, in New York City] presented me with two fine museum objects (don’t get envious, O Fellow-Curator! [i.e. Morton]) — to wit, a prehistorick stone eikon from Mexico, and an African flint implement, with primitively graven ivory handle” — Lovecraft to Morton in January 1933, Selected Letters IV.

“I saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s […] Loveman quite overwhelmed me by giving me several objects for my collection of antiquities — a real Egyptian ushabti (small funerary statuette) 5000 years old, a Mayan stone idol of almost equal antiquity, & a carved wooden monkey from the East Indian island of Bali.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, January 1934.

“As for my newly-acquired Bird of Space … he looks something like this — standing about a foot tall. He is carved out of a piece of horn — I don’t know of what animal, though the colour is black — & highly polished & lacquered on the exterior. Wings & feathers — as well as eyes — are suggested through some very delicate engraving. The posture of the bird — as if looking into the sky preparatory to a hop-off for unknown trans-galactic reaches — combined with its generally weird aspect to suggest the title Bird of Space. […] Loveman was amazingly generous to give me this object. I had admired it for years in his home, but never thought of hinting for it. On the last night of my visit we fell to talking about it, & as I left he pressed it into my hands as a final thunderbolt surprise. That’s just like him! I’ve put the Bird on the top of a new low bookcase in company with a Japanese idol & a Kim Ling vase. Some time I mean to take a photograph of this & other objects in my ‘museum’ — and when I do I’ll send you prints. I have an Egyptian ushabti, Mayan images, & other odd & curious things …” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

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

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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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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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

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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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.

Tentaclii

~ News & scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft

Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

HPLinks #75 – ‘Terrible Old Man’ film, a new Lovecraft tarot pack, sanity as a game mechanic, and more…

HPLinks #74 – Lovecraft and Kafka, 1924 in NYC, voice-cloning, Lovecraft at the Miskatonic Library, and more…

HPLinks #72 – Lovecraft festival at the Sorbonne, Barlow monograph, REH’s Haunted Seaports, Metal Hurlant, Lovecraft on ghosts, and more…

HPLinks #69 – Derleth at the Weird Tales offices, CAS conference report, Lovecraft’s personal museum, and more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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