HPLinks #104 – dreams and paganism, the madhouse, dreamlands, prayers, and proofreading

10 Saturday Oct 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

* McFarland’s website claims to have the book H.P. Lovecraft and Modern Philosophy “in stock”, though I note that Amazon UK knows nothing about the book at present. McFarland’s page for the book also indicates the contents…

    – Phenomenological and Lovecraftian Excavation of Meaning.
    – Heideggerian Ruminations and Lovecraftian Ruination.
    – Alien Dispossession in Lovecraft and Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Phenomenology.
    – The Genesis and Decomposition of the Self in Levinas and Lovecraft.
    – Multiple Alterities: The Weird Interpellation.
    – Welcome to the Cthulhucene.

* A new article in French in the psychiatric journal L’Evolution Psychiatrique, “Reve et creation: du phenomene onirique dans ses rapports a la fonction subjective de la creativite chez l’ecrivain HP Lovecraft et le peintre G. Garouste” (‘Dream and Creation: The Dream Phenomenon in its Relation to the Subjective Function of Creativity in the Works of the Writer H.P. Lovecraft and the Painter G. Garouste’). The article… “draws on a rigorous reading of his numerous written accounts — particularly his correspondence — regarding the function of [dreams on Lovecraft’s] artistic practice. […] notably a letter to Clark Ashton Smith” (from a Google ‘Quick Read’ AI summary, the article itself being blocked by a captcha).

* Details of a Spanish PhD thesis Revising Paganism in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (2025). This has a…

classification, description, and detailed explanation of these [pagan] elements and their origins in the anthropology of his time [plus a survey of the] influence that paganism had on the genesis of his pantheon of fictional deities and his mythopoetic cosmogony”, and goes on to suggest parallels with modern pagan notions such as cyclical time.

* The journal Studies in Gothic Fiction appears to have left Cardiff University Press (no longer listed on their journals page, website dead). But Cardiff’s online repository now has Studies in Gothic Fiction 7, seemingly newly out-of-embargo and available under Creative Commons. This was a Lovecraft special issue. No unified TOCs for this issue, regrettably, but search reveals…

    – Introduction: adapting Lovecraft in weird times.
    – Weird experience: transformations of space/place in Lovecraftian LARP.
    – Narrative archaeology: excavating object encounter in Lovecraftian video games.
    – Gamifying fictions of defeat: adaptations of Lovecraft to games media.
    – Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic monstrosities (book review).
    – “‘His madness held no affinity’: reimagining Arkham Asylum”, from which…

The Gothic madhouse present in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction is not a dimly lit padded cell situated in a former manor house. Rather, Lovecraft gives little description to his mental hospitals, which is curious given the many narrators who end up in such institutions. […] this article compares the depiction of asylums in two fictions by Lovecraft: “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919), and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933), considered alongside [Batman in the form of] Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), and Dan Slott’s serial Arkham Asylum: Living Hell (2004).

* Ginger Nuts of Horror has a new review of the recent Welsh Mythos anthology, Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country Review.

* According to the latest Locus magazine, PS Publishing have the Darrell Schweitzer edited anthology Lovecraft’s Dreamlands set for November 2026. I also see PS has Robert Silverberg’s Ghosts and Things due in October 2026, a follow on from his Monsters and Things collection. Neither book has details on PS’s forthcoming titles page, as yet.

* Deep Cuts digs up another post-Lovecraft lost tale from the pulps, this being the EC-horror comics-like tale “Fiend of Fire” (1952) by Eando Binder… “it has never been included in collections of the Binders’ pulp fiction, as far as I’ve been able to determine”.

* In the latest Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, “Documenting Fandom: A Content Analysis of 1970s American Comics Prozines” (open-access, but blocked by a captcha)

* This week DMR surveys Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe.

* A relative newcomer to DeviantArt, Mark Fuller Dillon is posting fine old pulp illustrations and golden-age paperback covers, along with a few classic comic-book covers, and he now has over 500 items.

* Eldritch Prayers I: An Anthology of Cthulhu Mythos Poetry and Art appeared in 2025. Duotrope’s Submission Manager Platform currently has details of what appears to be Eldritch Prayers II (Cthulhu Mythos Poetry Anthology). With a stated June 2027 opening date for submissions, and some details…

… we are going to try using Kickstarter with stretch goals to increase the payment to the poets. We hope to have the book ready to print by the end of the Kickstarter Campaign (October [2027?] with Halloween in everyone’s minds).

* And finally, Bethaniel is an excellent freeware offline copy-editor and proof-reader. On testing I find it handles a 60,000 word novel in an hour without problems, and also interfaces very sweetly with Microsoft Word. If you run a strict firewall, on install you need to lower the firewall to get both the .GGUF and the Llama.cpp CUDA models to install. It’s one of those annoying ‘install and then have the software silently download Gb’s of unknown models, to make it work’ bits of software. But it’s fine once it’s working, and it will then run on your GPU rather than CPU… assuming you have a graphics card with 12Gb VRAM or more. Bethaniel is of course verboten to the anti-AI zealots, but may be a god-send if you have very long texts to fix.

— End-quote —

Lovecraft on proofreading.

“… our good old friend W. Paul Cook of the Recluse Press — and boy! how he did back me up! In the face of all sorts of troubles and delays and blunders on the part of his office force, he turned out what is undoubtedly the finest piece of bookmaking ever produced in amateur journalism; so that he really ought to have had an equal share in the dedication. Above all, he was ineffably patient with my hyper-critical proofreading, so that we have produced that rarest of literary marvels — a volume absolutely without typographical errors.” — Lovecraft to Talman, June 1928, on producing a posthumous book of the poetry of the Anglo-Canadian poet and fellow amateur journalist John Ravenor Bullen.

“Thanks for the set of proofreading symbols — which I am filing in my professional department beside the other card you so kindly sent. Wish I could get a chance to turn proofreading to financial advantage!” — Lovecraft to Talman, dated October 1932 in Selected Letters IV, but possibly mis-dated from 1931 (see quote below).

“I suppose proof-reading is merely a light indoor sport with you [i.e. with Derleth] …. yet at that one has to keep a sharp eye open for tricky, almost imperceptible errors. My biggest job in that line was the Dartmouth College history which I did (making certain revisions in the proofs) in the autumn of 1931.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, January 1934.

“Just now all my writing is in abeyance [due to] the large book job which I went to Hartford to [learn about, it involves] revision and proofreading (aided by your chart of symbols) of a long history of Dartmouth College — and I may add that it has kept me tied down for a fortnight with a concentration which may or may not have been responsible for the sick-headache-and-bum-digestion spell out of which I am only just now pulling. I finished the damn thing last Tuesday, and got it off by parcel post Friday.” — Lovecraft to Talman, October 1931. The book was the History of Dartmouth College, 1932, and Lovecraft was paid only $50 for the work.

HPLinks #103 – 10,000 Stars, Joshi on the letters, Le Monde edition, and more…

01 Thursday Oct 2026

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

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #103.

* The unfinished documentary Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right has been funded on Greenlit, albeit with only £10,000 of the target £20,000. It seems a target doesn’t have to be hit for Greenlit to release the funds? Good to know.

This is the first film ever made about H.P. Lovecraft — and almost no one has seen it. Shot in 1989–90, it features unique interviews with Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues. It has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years.

* S.T. Joshi has republished his 1982 Starmont introductory book on Lovecraft as an budget-priced ebook… “under the title H.P. Lovecraft: A Short Critical Analysis and …

In this edition I have added my lengthy discussion of Lovecraft’s correspondence (“A Look at Lovecraft’s Letters”).

* Joshi’s latest blog post also notes a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ novel, albeit in Italian. “Stefano Varanelli has written a novel about Lovecraft and Houdini”, Sotto la Piramide (2026). The author is an accomplished TV writer in Italy. A translation of a blurb accompanying a podcast interview with the author (spoilers) reveals the framing…

The year is 1927. After months of mourning the sudden death of his wife, Bess, Harry Houdini reconnects with an old associate: H.P. Lovecraft. Orphaned and recently expelled from boarding school for very good reasons, Houdini’s niece Anna finds herself unwillingly swept up in the adventures of Houdini and Lovecraft, who become — albeit imperfect — surrogate father figures to her. Invited to a coastal Rhode Island manor, this mismatched trio must piece together a centuries-old chain of events surrounding the disappearance of the estate’s owner, the inventor and entrepreneur Randolph Baxter. […] The novel balances between historical reality — known in detail yet also the stuff of dreams — and fantasy, fueled by the genre’s conventions as well as by true history.

* A new PhD thesis from Manchester Metropolitan University, England, Towards a Weird Hydropoetics: Hybridity, Thalassophobia, and Transcorporeality in Modern and Contemporary Oceanic Weird Fiction (2026). The first half of the thesis looks at the history of “The Weird and the Sea”, and then in this light examines Lovecraft’s tales “Cthulhu” and Innsmouth”. Freely available online.

* The French newspaper Le Monde has an article noting new books of Lovecraft’s tales. It’s a shallow example of the typical hasty journalist’s potted ‘Lovecraft for absolute beginners’ article. But it usefully makes me aware of a substantial new French edition of Lovecraft. The collection being noted turns out to be published by the newspaper as a set, with the books seemingly using the text of the recent and acclaimed new translation — but here issued as a handsome but affordable multi-volume set. Of most interest to English-speaking readers will be the artwork extras, such as the accompanying poster and prints sets.

Le Monde also has a short interview with the cover artist Tomas Hijo…

I like to think that my illustrations capture something of the brutality and naivety of those early images [in pulp magazines, yet at the same time Lovecraft’s imagination evokes] … impossible geometries, nonexistent colors, illogical structures [so…] I wanted to draw on certain now-traditional representations of the bestiary and transpose them into a universe of unsettling shapes and colors, which suggest these qualities described by Lovecraft. [The linocut style was chosen to work for] “stories full of grimoires, ancient manuscripts, and works that one can easily imagine being illustrated using a technique of this kind, like medieval codices.

* Jason Thompson, who made a fine complete graphic novel of Lovecraft’s Dream Quest along with a Dreamlands wall-map, has a new book due in 2027. Dungeons! Illustrated Maps of Classic Dungeons & Dragons Adventures.

* New from McFarland, the book Myth and Fabulation in the Fantasy Fiction of Neil Gaiman, which started life as a 2012 French PhD thesis. The blurb suggests it may overlook Lovecraft as a key influence, though…

Available in English for the first time, this wide-ranging critical study examines Neil Gaiman’s fiction through the lenses of intertextuality, metafiction, and cultural context. Informed by comics, novels, short stories, and film, Camus situates Gaiman’s oeuvre within a literary network that includes Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Philip Jose Farmer, Jack Kirby, and Winsor McCay. The study explores how myth operates across Gaiman’s fiction as both an inherited narrative and an evolving cultural practice, shaping the meaning and structure of his works.

* Florida’s 48th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts has the theme “Fantastic Appetites” and is now calling for papers, with “hunger for knowledge” being one the suggested themes. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* Coming this weekend, the 2026 International Edgar Allan Poe Festival. Tickets still available.

* Jules Burt has a YouTube tour of the recent Innsmouth Literary Festival, a gathering of UK Mythos writers…

We tour the dealers room and have a close look at the tables of Dorset Bob and many other exhibitors and authors. We get to interview artist Les Edwards, editor and publisher Trevor Kennedy and author and editor Stephen Jones.

* Some advance details of a ‘sound novel’ videogame of “Ex Oblivione — Lovecraft’s 1921 text, dreamed six ways”.

H.P. Lovecraft’s prose poem of the same name, read in full, and then dreamed five more times. Each dream retells the same eleven paragraphs, and each takes one of the senses away, in the order the Tibetan Book of the Dead gives for dying. There is no combat and there are no puzzles. There is text, a voice (Lani Minella narrates every dream), and a dark ambient score by Last Offices that dissolves along with the senses. It comes to Steam in 2027, with a demo during Steam Next Fest in February. Follow here for news, and for glimpses of how a sound novel is built.

* Taskerland considers “The Slaying of the Monster: Lovecraft, Barlow and a Misread Protege”…

Written during the autumn of 1933, “The Slaying of the Monster” (full text) is only six paragraphs long and appears not to have been formally published until the mid-1990s when an effort was being made to exhume all of the work to which Lovecraft had contributed. The story is insubstantial and its author thought so little of it that he never got round to submitting it for publication, but it is biographically significant as the first official collaboration between Lovecraft and the boy who would eventually be selected as his literary executor.

* Brett Rutherford has personally uploaded his poetry collection An Expectation Of Presences to Archive.org under Creative Commons. Including poems such as “H.P. Lovecraft at the Newsstand”.

* Also new on Archive.org, a newly uploaded 20-issue archive of Starlog’s spin-off magazine Future Life, from the late 1970s/early 1980s. Sadly it passed me by at the time, perhaps because it was never distributed here in the UK? But I see it had a 31-issue run, showcasing cosmic optimism rather than cosmic horror. As such it seems an interesting view of a moment when some tried to push back against the doomsters. (Update: Thanks to John Coulthart, who points me to the full run of 31 issues).

* Talking of vintage publications, eBay currently has the 1997 Cyber Cthulhu Calendar issued by the Lovecraft band The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets. With sample images (various artists in b&w).

* Reel & Rock is waiting for the bus with H.P. Lovecraft.

* Chaosium invites you to submit questions for the forthcoming official podcast on the new Encyclopedia Cthulhiana edition… “Our host Bridgett Jeffries will be talking with Encyclopedia Cthulhiana author Dan Harms.”

* Currently on Humble Bundle (software bundles sold for charity), STL Lovecraftian Miniatures Mega Bundle. Collections of digital files for 3D printable miniature figures, intended for Lovecraftian tabletop adventures. STL also have a current Kickstarter for their forthcoming collection “Worshippers of the Waning Moon” (Leng in the Dreamlands: Moon-Beasts, Men of Leng, investigators, and the High Priest Nyarlathotep). You need a 3D printer for these, though I imagine the .STLs will load in any good 3D editor, and then a grey render could be used as a reference image for generative AI.

* The excellent new generative video model Minimax H3 now has a 1920s horror LoRA along with an ‘aged film’ slider LoRA (two variants, oxidisation or scratches). LoRAs help guide the video generation onto the style you want, in combination with your text prompt. All free, as is the way with local AI.

* And finally, eBay has a picture new to me of the Arcade in Providence, one of Lovecraft’s favourite places in childhood and later. The image provides a context I wasn’t previously aware of – right next door was the twice-daily + Sunday newspaper the Providence Daily Tribune. The young Lovecraft published astronomy articles in the newspaper.

— End-quote —

The young Lovecraft is saved from a watery suicide in the Seekonk, by the Providence Daily Tribune… “[19]06 …. or very possibly, ’07. About then I had a nervous breakdown (winter ’05-’06) & had to stay out of school for months, & my lack of energy stopped my even thinking about anything. Then the Providence Tribune was founded, & I learned that I had a good chance of breaking into print at last … contributing monthly astronomical articles just like Prof. Upton’s [of the Observatory] in the [Providence] Journal & Bulletin. One couldn’t miss a chance like that! Let suicide wait! And the articles landed…” — Lovecraft to Vernon Shea, February 1934. The articles can be found in Collected Essays: Science.

HPLinks #102 – Lovecraft on modernity and optimism, Fungi chapbook, 1975 “Shadow” adaptation, Lovecraftian film and more…

21 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #102.

* A new book in French from the essayist Aristide Leucate, Lovecraft: La modernite en horreur (2026)…

Lovecraft’s ‘indifferentism’ led him neither to nihilism nor to the cult of progress. An admirer of classical antiquity, nostalgic for old England, and a reader of Spengler, he felt a profound aversion to consumer society, standardization, and the ugliness of the modern world. By exploring both his short stories and his essays and his immense correspondence, Aristide Leucate reveals a little-known Lovecraft: not only the poet of cosmic horror, but also the worried witness of a civilization disrupted by modernity.

* Johnny Lighthouse considers H.P. Lovecraft’s Hidden Optimism. He sees Dream Quest as a fundamentally optimistic and constructive narrative, in which Lovecraft ultimately holds to the unique benefits and beauty that are intrinsic to his own inherited life-world, and in which he is deeply immersed enough to find enjoyments that are free and accessible — and which can even hint at subtle and fantastic wonders. On Lovecraft and optimism, see also the Sully letters. Also Matthew Beach’s “Lovecraft’s Consolation” in Lovecraft Annual 2019, which is a follow-up to his earlier “Lovecraft’s Optimism” in Lovecraftian Proceedings #2. Link.

* Deep Cuts is delving deep into the post-Lovecraft pulp tales influenced by the master, and digs up “Why Abdul Al Hazred Went Mad” (1950) by D.R. Smith.

* A bargain spotted, one that regrettably a reader here in the UK can’t obtain without substantial shipping costs. But one lucky Tentaclii reader in the USA will get the fine hardback The Lovecraft Letters Vol 1: Mysteries of Time and Spirit: Letters of H.P. Lovecraft & Donald Wandrei for just $35.

* New on YouTube, Unboxing Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth, in the form of a new fine press chapbook from Obsidian Cortex Press.

* Also on YouTube, the first half of PCB’s latest podcast enthuses about “Why every Lovecraft fan must watch this forgotten German adaptation”…

Hard to find and barely seen, Schatten aus der Zeit is a German TV movie from 1975 that brilliantly adapts Lovecraft’s Shadow Out of Time.

* Wyrd Britain has a short review of the book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968 – 1995. Wyrd finds that the author is…

a digger extraordinaire, so alongside those old favourites there are a couple of tantalising treats of programmes I had no idea existed – ‘A Pattern of Roses’, ‘Shades’, ‘The Plant’ – and his analysis are ever cogent, and insightful, mining details from his subjects that make for fascinating reading.

* A new book which may interest Tentaclii readers, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (2026).

* Black Gate looks back at “The Birth of Conan Scholarship”.

* PulpFest now has copies of The Pulpster No. 35 for order.

* Italy’s latest Weird & Fantasy magazine is a Lovecraft special…

* Eric Williams surveys Automata in Weird Fiction.

* Peter Stanfield surveys the 1970s rock/pulp fiction of Mick Farren.

* Set for the start of October 2026, the Portland wing of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

* At the Eastman Museum, the famous Eastman Kodak photography museum in upstate New York, a mini Lovecraft film season for Halloween.

* “Guillermo del Toro Explains His Strategy for H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations”…

During a September 2026 Reddit AMA held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, the Academy Award-winning director explained that he believes the majority of Lovecraft’s bibliography is better suited for shorter, episodic storytelling.

* Talking of film, Lovecraft would surely have enjoyed the news that a “New Documentary Brings the Battle of Rhode Island (1778) to Life”. Possibly a relatively easy way for Lovecraftians to learn about a topic that Lovecraft often discusses in his letters?

* Screenrant notes a 2021 Netflix series I’d never heard of, The Silent Sea…

Across its eight episodes, The Silent Sea becomes one of the strongest homages to Lovecraftian cosmic horror currently available to stream.

* And finally, make your own movie. For the amazing new video-generator Minimax H3, for which an entry-level 3060 12Gb graphics-card is perfectly feasible, a new 1980s Horror Movie LoRA, along with the new Day-Night Slider LoRA and a Video Age ‘Aged Film’ LoRA for making the video look old. LoRAs are relatively small files that help in guiding the video generation into the desired style or look. All free, as is the way with local AI.

— End-quote —

A few outtake quotes that didn’t make it into my recent Lovecraft Annual journal article “Eating Anarchist Spaghetti With Lovecraft”.

“… did I ever tell you that I ate dinner with a real Italian nobleman as early as 1922? If not, I may mention that about a year ago I saw an item in the paper stating that our old Cleveland confrere Raoul S. Bonnanno, — the guy who taught me how to eat spaghetti at Luccione’s — had fallen heir to 18 titles, several sulphur mines in Sicily, & sundry estates, through a decision of the Italian courts. He is still a member of the [the amateur journalism organisation] N.A.P.A. (there’s the democracy of true rank for you!), though I haven’t heard from him since the old Birchdale days. Whenever, nowadays, anyone criticises my way of gulping spaghetti, I am prepared to come back with the withering retort that I was instructed by a real dago of title — no mere peasant or tavern-keeper!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1933.

S.T. Joshi, from I am Providence… “In late August [1925] he sampled minestrone soup for the first time, liking it so much that on many subsequent occasions he would go to the Milan in Manhattan and make a meal of a huge tureen of minestrone for 15¢” [the ‘Milan’ was at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street … Joshi then quotes Lovecraft to Aunt Lillian, as saying] “I never order anything but spaghetti & minestrone except when those are not to be had — & they really contain an almost ideal balance of active nutritive elements, considering the wheaten base of spaghetti, the abundant vitamines in tomato sauce, the assorted vegetables in minestrone, & the profusion of powdered cheese common to both.”

“Naturally, in casual conversation one doesn’t use the precise and elaborate language of a book. The proper thing is a plain simplicity; and so far as I can see one seldom incurs the charge of affectation when he practices it, no matter who his audience may be. Would you say ‘Nice-a day, Beppo! Breeng-a me one plate spaghet’ weeth meat-a sauce, pleece!’ when ordering food of an Italian waiter?” […] — Lovecraft to Woodburn Harris, February-March 1929.

HPLinks #101 – Microfiction contest, Lovecraft’s Weird Atheism book, narration in games, Red Hook and more…

12 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #101.

* A Lovecraftian microfiction contest, with an 11th September deadline.

* Announced from prolific UK non-fiction publisher Bloomsbury, the philosophy book H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Atheism (due in April 2027). The book…

serves as a major reinterpretation of the themes with which Lovecraft concerned himself, including the meaning and value of humanity in a hostile cosmos, the role of aesthetics in the good life, and the fear and allure of monstrosity.

* “But Pa, it’s healthy for me!” New in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, “From Play to Praxis: Translating Tabletop Role-Playing Games into Evidence-Based Clinical Interventions” (2026, $ paywall)…

Tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and Call of Cthulhu, are increasingly being adapted for clinical use, yet the field remains limited by inconsistent terminology, variable intervention models, and a nascent empirical literature.

* The new edition of the Journal of Fandom Studies has “Towards a Global History of Fandom: A network analysis of science fiction fans, 1926–47” (2026, $ paywall). Examines…

1926 and 1947 through three intersecting lenses: a global network of letters published in [the pulp magazine] Amazing Stories, a semantic analysis of these letters to determine a common conversation held between fans, and a close reading of letters from isolated locales.

* Bud Plant’s Summer 2026 Incredible Catalog gets ready for Halloween already, with his latest cover.

Of possible special interest to Tentaclii readers are: a graphic novel autobiography of Edgar Rice Burroughs (‘first time in print’ for the 1929 text of 20,000 words); a collection of Steve Ditko’s horror work for Creepy magazine; and Cryptology magazine issue 10, a special on the work of Neal Adams as found in horror comics and also an article on his 1970s Batman ‘Man-bat’.

* The latest Doctor Strange nightmare-adventure is a Lovecraftian one. Available now. Daily Dead interviews the creator (has some spoilers)…

I was heavily into the Lovecraft mythos and cosmic horror, and when Marvel and Abrams asked me to do a Marvel graphic novel, I wanted to turn my imagination to Dr. Strange and a nightmarish, Lovecraftian story.

More of a double-issue than a graphic novel, though, at just 64 pages in total. But it sounds interesting.

* In October 2026, Chaosium will release a new hardback edition of The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: the definitive guide to the Cthulhu Mythos…

Chaosium’s new fourth edition features updated text and is presented in a new full color, hardback format with interior art, and cover art by John Sumro.

How extensively the text was updated, the page doesn’t say.

* On YouTube, a 95 minute recording of Narration in Lovecraftian Games – Expert Panel at NeconomiCon 2026.

* Here in the UK, the Welsh borders have a major retrospective exhibition of the paperback cover-art of Bob Fowkes…

A new exhibition is celebrating some of science fiction’s most iconic 1970s paperback covers. Hosted at Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, the display features original sci-fi and fantasy cover art by Bob Fowke, whose illustrations appeared on the works of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, and other genre legends. The exhibition is on now until 22nd September 2026.

* In France, a live-theatre / puppet show in the run-up to Halloween 2026, Sorcier Lovecraft…

Mitsi, a scatterbrained young girl, meets a rat, and together they embark on an adventure in the dark forest. Ralzeimer the rat doesn’t eat her, and together they search for the kingdom of Celephais, but to get there they must confront the cats of Ulthar and the terrible Cthulhu. Prepare to be shivered by this epic tale directly inspired by Lovecraft’s stories.

* And finally, a rare image of the waterfront at Red Hook, New York City, from eBay. I’ve never seen this card before. Of possible use as a visual prompt item for RPG gamers, and as a reference image for Mythos writers. I’ve given it an AI makeover.

— End-quote —

“I took several walks of exploration around the [Red Hook] waterfront rookeries, and acquired a very fair pictorial and oral image of the whole blight even in its extremist phases” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927. The Dwyer letters are to be found in the back of Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others.

“I came to know that squalid world [of a lodging house on the edge of Red Hook] as few white men have ever known it. The sounds in the hall! The faces glimpsed on the stairs! The mice in the partitions! The fleeting touches of intangible horror from spheres and cycles outside time …. once a Syrian had the room next to mine and played eldritch and whining monotones on a strange bagpipe which made me dream ghoulish and incredible things of crypts under Bagdad and limitless corridors of Eblis beneath the moon-cursed ruins of Istakhar. […] And what scraps of old papers with Arabic lettering did one find about the house! Sometimes, going out at sunset, I would vow to myself that gold minarets glistened against the flaming skyline where the church-towers were! […] The keynote of the whole setting—house, neighbourhood, and shop, was that of loathsome and insidious decay; masked just enough by the reliques of former splendour and beauty to add terror and mystery and the fascination of crawling motion to a deadness and dinginess otherwise static and prosaic. I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing — a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth. Every closed door seemed to hide some brooding crime — or blasphemy too deep to form a crime in the crude and superficial calendar of earth. I never quite learned the exact topography of that rambling and enormous house […] there were wings and corridors I never traversed; doors to rear and abutting halls and stairways that I never saw opened. I know there were rooms above ground without windows, and was at liberty to guess what might lie below ground. There lay a pall of darkness and secrecy upon that house — it subtly discouraged from first to last one’s inclination to speak aloud, and at times one felt a faint miasmal tangibility in the circumambient air. The great high rooms had something of the mausoleum in their crumbling stateliness, and in the halls at night one always had to be sure the great, white flamboyant Corinthian pilasters never moved just the least bit. Something unwholesome — something furtive — something vast lying subterrenely in obnoxious slumber — that was the soul of 160 Clinton St. at the edge of Red Hook, and in my great northwest corner room.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

[My friend Everett McNeil] dwelt in the frightful slum of Hell’s Kitchen — where Manhattan’s forties slope gradually down to the Hudson [river]. This was and is the toughest slum in New York — toughest in an active sense, being full of fighting Irish […] policemen in Hell’s Kitchen go in pairs, and report a high casualty list. High in a squalid tenement house amidst this welter lived good old Mac — his little flat 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. He lived on meagre rations of canned soup and crackers, and did not whimper at his lot. We all used to shudder at having to wade through such a neighbourhood to get to his place, but when he entertained a [Kalems] meeting his shy hospitality atoned for all.” — Lovecraft to Zelia Bishop, January 1930.

“I shall never forget my experience on the 31st day of May, when, at a point not far from Northern Boulevard [the then edge of New York City], and at the very edge of a depressing line of flimsy stucco’d rookeries, I beheld a peaceful antient farmhouse with barns, byres, orchards, and plough’d fields about it; dreaming in compleat changelessness amidst so much of change. Westward, in fantastical outline against a glamorous sunset, tower’d the grotesque spires of Manhattan like a mirage of doom.” — Lovecraft, “Observations on Several Parts of America”.

HPLinks #100 – Will Murray, Lovecrafter No. 15, Cthulhu in China, Bibliomysteries, and more…

05 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #100.

* It’s sad to learn that Will Murray has passed away, and at the too-young age of 70. There’s an obituary at the Keohane funeral service website, presumably online with the family’s blessing. Also memories and appreciations from Murania Press, Super Stuff in the Bronze Age, and Comics Beat magazine.

* The son of the pioneering 1970s Lovecraft researcher John L. McInnis III now has a new Web page detailing his father’s scholarship and on-the-ground research. There are also photographs and primary-source documentation where available.

* The German Lovecraftians have issued issue No. 15 of their paper annual magazine The Lovecrafter. This issue focuses on Clark Ashton Smith.

* Deep Cuts digs deep and reprints the Weird Tales tale “Medusa” (1928) by Royal W. Jimerson, noting it has some elements in common with “Medusa’s Coil” (1930). The latter being the tale ghost-written by H.P. Lovecraft (a re-writing and re-ordering of what was likely a lost original tale or outline by Zealia Bishop).

* In English in a Hungarian academic journal, “Cthulhu’s Resurgence As An Event: Mediation And Performativity In Chinese Online Novels” (2026). Freely available online.

* A Shiver in the Archives makes me aware of the bibliography Bibliomysteries: An Annotated Bibliography of First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World of Books, 1849-2000 (2014) (second revised edition, with the first apparently being a limited edition of 200 copies). I see the same author has also published the 440-page American Mystery Classics: Golden Age Bibliomysteries (July 2026) and… “This volume collects the finest of such stories” form American fiction, says the blurb. Currently it’s a 99-pence Kindle ebook on Amazon, but be warned that once purchased there’s no “Download available in additional formats” and Amazon has stopped sending ebooks to their older ereader devices. Also be warned that the first story in the collection is very skippable and curiously has nothing to do with books. Start with the second story.

* New to me, Sentinel Hill Press has “New England’s Creatures, Creepers, and Cryptids – A Bibliography” (2024) as an online post.

* Librivox has their new Coffee Break Collection 041 – Witchcraft online, including items from Lovecraft Circle members Wilfred Blanch Talman and Clark Ashton Smith. All Librivox audio readings are public domain.

* An academic paper, “AI-assisted literary-to-song adaptation: a practice-based study of literary interpretation in a text-to-audio workflow” (2026). Freely available online.

The corpus comprises 32 songs developed by a single creator, largely based on H.P. Lovecraft and produced in a post-punk/indie-rock idiom through close reading, researcher-written lyrics, ChatGPT-supported revision, Udio text-to-audio generation and human-directed assembly. Two cases are analysed: ‘The Viol Screams’ adapts “The Music of Erich Zann” and ‘Whispers from Yuggoth’ brings together selected sonnets from Lovecraft’s ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’ sequence.

* A concept album, Providence by SomeWhereOut (2026)…

Providence is the third album from Raul Lupianez under the name SomewhereOut, written over the course of two years and built as a collection of stories, each one drawing [musical inspiration] from the pages of Lovecraft and Poe.

* The production of the German open Lovecraft RPG is ceasing operations, according to the latest newsletter of the German Lovecraftians… “The entire FHTAGN editorial team is ceasing operations. We intend to complete all planned publications for this year.” The game and its offshoots remain open and freely re-usable. As I recall, it’s fairly well finished and also has a number of expansions. Open to take, adapt, translate.

* Spanish newspaper El Pais reviews what appears to be a new translated anthology which collects Lovecraft’s various Necronomicon tales.

* And finally, I see that Brown University Library News published an online “The Evolution of Cthulhu” article, ahead of NeconomiCon 2026 in Providence. On the same page is news that the Hay Library (which holds the Lovecraft collections and related) will re-open in September 2026, after being closed for the summer due to exterior renovation work. Looking at the Brown Repository page, I see the new F.B. Long letters are still not online as scans. But new there are high-res scans of two portraits of Lovecraft, one from 1931 by Wilfred Blanch Talman, and the other early from his The Conservative years. The .JP2 files are around 40Mb each. Here I’ve restored the 1931 portrait as much as possible, given the high constrast of the bright summer day…

— End-quote —

Lovecraft, photographer…

“Sunday morning Loveman and I explored Prospect Park, fed the squirrels, and talked literature. At noon I did some Kodak shooting during which process there dawned upon us the new infant celebrity who was to form our principal focus of interest [thereafter, Frank Belknap] Long, whose phantasies you have doubtless read (I believe you mistook one for Theobaldian stuff!) is an exquisite boy of twenty who hardly looks fifteen.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1922.

[Lovecraft photographs Sonia on her arrival in Providence]. “Arriving at the Crown about 3:15 p.m., I paused only to snap the fair [Sonia] with my V.P. [Vest Pocket] Kodak, (the [Kodak Box] Brownie is still at 20 Webster!) & proceeded at once to show the quiet sights of Providence with the assurance born of practice on you & Daas.” — Lovecraft letter from September 1921.

In 1933 Lovecraft was still using his Kodak camera… “#2 Brownie which I bought 26 years ago – in far-off 1907. A sturdy two dollars’ worth!”. It had broken or run out of film in 1930, but he dug it out and used it again in 1933 to photograph his new home at 66 College Street. He also owned a portable “vest-pocket Kodak”, though it only made what he called “microscopic views”.

Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book entry, of story idea-germs, No. 184. “Expedition lost in Antarctic or other weird place. Skeletons and effects found years later. Camera films used but undeveloped. Finders develop — and find strange horror.”

[Lovecraft sends Galpin some snaps, 1933] “The please-help-the-blind effect is caused by the sun in Grandpa’s eyes — which were closed when the camera was prematurely snapped. The blurring is due either to the perturbation of the ancient Brownie at its repulsive subject, or to a lack of steadiness in the grip of the photographer. These cheap Brownies have such slow shutter action that they have to be held very still even for allegedly instantaneous exposures.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.

HPLinks #99 – HPL in Hebrew, lost tales, short pulp, vintage Providence pics, and more…

27 Thursday Aug 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #99.

* Catharsis Publishing has released new Hebrew translations of “The Call of Cthulhu” and Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone”, in one volume. Another companion volume has translations of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, paired with R.E. Howard’s “The Hoofed Creature” and “Doves from Hell”. The Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature has a 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair interview with the publisher, in English, though sadly it’s trapped in a horrible Instagram format.

* 334digital on “The Shape Outside the Frame: Lovecraft, Identity and the Haunting of Contemporary Culture”. 334 also has musings on the Lovecraft that might-have-been in lost and unwritten tales.

* Jeffery Pintabona on “Why You Should Read Pulp In 2026”. Among other reasons he suggests the relatively brevity will appeal to many…

It’s often a lot shorter than literary fiction. Pulp magazines were dominated by short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Rarely would you find something longer than 40,000 words. [Plus, very little padding but lots of pace]. Pulp writing emphasizes story, action, and keeping things moving. [Modern readers] might be intimidated by the thought of attempting to read a 500 page book, but they might feel comfortable braving a 200 pager.

* MPorcius revisits Weird Tales magazine for July 1925…

All three of the stories [Hoffman Price, Lovecraft, R.E. Howard] present a philosophy and/or try to make arguments about groups of people instead of just offering simple entertainment, and the philosophies and arguments are striking (if not necessarily convincing) and so contribute to the value of the stories, to their ability to maintain the reader’s interest.

* Deep Cuts digs up a never-reprinted 1942 tale “Hell in the Village” (1942) by Hugh Raymond, noting that…

the name of the villain, Von Junzt, was likely inspired by the author of Nameless Cults in the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of Robert E. Howard. Michel also tipped in references to Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley, which suggests the whole might be a nod to Weird Tales — with tongue firmly in cheek.

* A new German translation, Die Weiden Neue deutsche Ubersetzung . Mit Einfuhrung, Anmerkungen, Chronologie und Bibliographie (‘The Willows: A New German Translation. With Introduction, Notes, Chronology and Bibliography’).

* In the new Edinburgh Companion to Irish Literature and Periodical Culture (2026), the chapter “A Lord Abroad: Tracing the Fiction of Lord Dunsany in British and American Periodicals”.

* Previously unseen 1980s Providence photos from Steven J. Mariconda. The real and later-demolished Federal Hill church in “Haunter of the Dark”, and the actual Shunned House with interiors. Also the Patterson Museum in New Jersey, established by Lovecraft’s good friend Morton.

* Released as a Kindle ebook a week ago, The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft graphic novel. Given the price and the download-size, I assume it’s the trade edition which collects all the floppy single-issues in one volume. I seem to recall it’s been a collected graphic novel before now, from a small indie publisher, but I assume this new trade edition from a bigger publisher will also include new extras?

* IGN‘s The Sinking City 2 Video Review…

Nobody really gets a happy ending in the Cthulhu mythos. But I was pretty satisfied with this latest, harrowing peek into its writhing innards.

* Now crowdfunding, the abandoned documentary Lovecraft: When the Stars are Right. Currently 20% funded with 33 days to go…

This is the first film ever made about H.P. Lovecraft — and almost no one has seen it. Shot in 1989–90, it features unique interviews with Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues. It has sat unfinished for more than thirty-five years. We need your help to complete it and release it for the first time.

* And finally, the very worthy HPLHS audiobook The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, currently free for a “limited time” on Amazon UK when you get an Audible subscription. And seemingly free even if you just get the Trial…

— End-quote —

Talking of lost tales…

“I am still obsessed by the notion that one of the most extremely powerful of all tales would be an utterly realistic thing dealing with the sensations of a man deposited without a great amount of warning on another world. The one fatal weakness of nearly all interplanetary tales is that they almost completely ignore this factor of the situation. To my mind, the stupendous wave of emotion-incredulity, lostness, wonder, stark terror-incident to this supreme dislocation from mans immemorially fixed background would be so colossal a thing as almost to dwarf any events which might happen to a celestial traveller. I yet mean to write a tale whose one supreme climax shall be the hero’s discovery, after many torturing & ambiguous doubts, that he is on another world.” “… it would begin as a dream-phenomenon creeping on the victim in the form of recurrent nightmares, as a result of his concentration of mind on some dim trans-galactic world. Eventually it would enmesh him totally — leaving his body to vegetate in a coma in some madhouse whilst his mind roamed desolate & unbodied for ever above the half-litten stones of an aeon-dead civilisation of alien Things on a world that was in decay before the solar system evolved from its primal nebula. I doubt if I’d handle it as phantasy so much as a stark, macabre bit of quasi-realism. [..] In cold realistic fact any man with half an imagination would undergo a frightful mental shock at the mere idea of any contact with a planet other than this. This feeling would be the central element of any interplanetary story of mine; indeed, the whole thing would be more of a psychological study than an adventurous narrative…” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, letters of December 1929 and November 1930. Some basic components of the idea would appear to have been later woven into “The Shadow Out of Time” (written 1934-35).

HPLinks #98 – Night-gaunt puppetry, Avernus, NecronomiCon 2026, Providence litfest, thieves in the night, and more

22 Saturday Aug 2026

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

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #98.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, an audio reading of his “A Descent to Avernus” (1928).

* Released to YouTube especially for Lovecraft’s birthday, the handmade puppet film Night-gaunts (2023), and there’s also The Outsider (2024) from the same puppeteer.

* Edward Carmien reports from NeconomiCon 2026, in a series of posts. I Am a Man of Providence, 404: Lovecraft Not Found, A Day in Pictures, and a Post-NecronomiCon goodies round-up.

* The House of Shadows & Ink podcast interviews the Vendor Room Organizer at NeconomiCon 2026.

* A YouTube recording from this year’s Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon, a paper on “Gothic Echoes: Lovecraft’s ‘Rats in the Walls’ and Walpole”.

* The latest 30+ Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft podcast considers Lovecraft’s letters, in the new episode “Letters from the Editor”.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, philosopher Nick Nielsen considers “Lovecraft and the Epistemology of Cosmic Horror”.

* Grognardia has the birthday post “Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft”.

* The Journal of Southern History reviews the 2025 Robert E. Howard biography from the University of North Texas Press. Mostly free.

* SpragueDeCampFan reviews the book Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age.

* A forthcoming book, The Strange World of H.P. Lovecraft: A Guide to the Characters and Creations of the Cthulhu Mythos which is …”due out in the UK on September the 1st” according to the author.

* New and free at Archive.org, the Peter Harrington well-illustrated auction catalogue for Quo Vadis? Visions of the Future.

* To Live and Let Die gives details about a forthcoming novel which will recount the full events behind Lovecraft’s Dexter Ward. All the events and meetings and trips that are only alluded to or mentioned in passing, apparently.

* A current Humble Bundle (i.e. digital goodies sold for charity) for Lovecraft videogames. 20 days left.

* Will Vigar considers pop culture and Lovecraft at length, in “Lovecraft Out of Context”, with his coda “Lovecraft Out of Mind”.

By turning Cthulhu into a plush toy, an encyclopaedic wiki database, or a videogame boss with a quantifiable health bar, contemporary culture is merely repeating the exact failure of Lovecraft’s academic protagonists.

* The Providence city council reportedly has plans to host Providence’s first official literary festival… “in late January 2027. Planning is still underway and details will be revealed soon”. Possibly an opportunity to talk about the siting of the Lovecraft statue? A plinth on the Twin Islands would be my suggestion, which would somewhat protect it from leftist vandalism.

* And finally, Locus magazine reports a break-in at L.W. Currey, during which a book thief stole first-editions of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Shunned House”, along with much else. The thief was apparently… “6’4″ tall, dressed in black and wearing pointed-toe dress shoes”. No night-black cape, which seems rather an oversight.

— End-quotes —

“… if any thief touches this outfit; why, by _____, I’ll smash his ______ for him with one fist whilst I pulverise his _____ _____ with the other, meanwhile kicking him posteriorly with both feet in their most pointed shoes and manner!” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1926. [While living in Red Hook, Lovecraft has three suits, his overcoat, and Loveman’s radio set stolen one night by juvenile delinquents. Here he tells Morton that he has a new replacement outfit. In another letter, he comically remarked on his loss by drawing a cartoon of himself trudging the streets in a yeti-like costume composed only of his own hair.]

“… those night-daemons or personifications of darkness which appear in all Aryan mythologies as thieves or mischief-working entities more or less inimical to man. The element of thievery or mischief-making symbolises the theft of daylight by darkness.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.

[Lovecraft ligs his way into a party at the most fabulous private New Orleans mansion]. “I spend all my time in the Vieux Carre, & am constantly uncovering new street vistas, perspectives of massed chimneys, gables, & balconies, & garden-garnished inner courtyards. [… One very famous mansion is…] zealously guarded from vulgar sight by the proprietor. I hung around this place like a thief planning a large-scale cleanup, but was finally rewarded when a large party — evidently friends of the inhabitants — called & strolled about the patio & arcade with the gate open! [Lovecraft slips in on the tail, as if one of the party] — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1932.

“I saw that Wollheim article dealing with Hugo the Rat [i.e. Gernsback] — through the kindness of a bright young member of the Science fiction League, Kenneth Sterling, who has recently moved to Providence. It was nothing new to me — for more than one friend of mine has been robbed by that thieving son-of-a-beachcomber.” — Lovecraft to William Frederick Anger, April 1935. Gernsback was notorious for not paying his pulp magazine writers. Wollheim had published an expose of his methods.

An audio reading of “A Descent to Avernus” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft

19 Wednesday Aug 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

≈ 3 Comments

Happy birthday, H.P. Lovecraft, for 20th August! This year, my present is an audio reading of “A Descent to Avernus” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft.

Download: At the Internet Archive.

The text describing his descent into the underworld was extracted from a long travelogue titled “Observations on Several Parts of America”, written in 1928. The text has here been lightly abridged for audio production and to ensure wide distribution. With a small addition from a letter written to Zelia Bishop, 28th July 1928, describing the same trip. I’ve also let his “Observations” run on a little after the visit to the caverns, to encompass his return to the city of Providence immediately afterwards.

Note that Lovecraft uses the term “buried aeras”, which does not indicate historical eras. The word aeras is ancient Greek in origin, and indicates a sort of ethereal breath or tremulous atmosphere blown out into the air. Probably believed by the Greeks to be breathed by divine beings. In Lovecraft’s use it then poetically indicates a mighty breath trapped or frozen in rock deep beneath the surface of the earth. The same word is also used in his famous story “The Call of Cthulhu”…

… those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars.

There “dim aeras” would seem to indicate the scientific method of cosmic transportation, implying a dimly-lit atmospheric cloud which surrounded the Great Old Ones when they were traversing the depths of outer space. This would then seem to relate to the idea they could ‘sail the star-winds’ without the need of spacecraft, as hinted at slightly later in “The Call of Cthulhu”. Such enveloping seems especially likely when we hear in the story that they were not made of normal matter…

The [Great Old Ones] had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.

HPLinks #97 – Bloch biography, Otto’s daemons, Worm ebook, Robert E. Price interview, sea-breezes and more…

13 Thursday Aug 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #97.

A less-full-than usual HPLinks this week, what with these being ‘the dog days’ of August and what with many goodies released last week ahead of NecronomiCon 2026.

* A new full biography of a member of the Lovecraft Circle, Psycho Century – Robert Bloch, American Horror Master (2026). Being… “the first full literary biography of this immensely influential author.”

* From the Concordia University Research Repository, the Masters dissertation “Daemons From the Stars: Discerning the Mysterium Horrendum in Otto and Lovecraft” (2026). Freely available online.

* In a timely post, amid the whirring of air-conditioning, Lonely Power Poles appreciates Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”.

* The Dreamands collection of tales by Gary Myers, The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2022), now seemingly has a $10 ebook version. The last time I looked the ebook was of the 2013 version.

* The latest July 2026 edition of the podcast 30+ Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft is “The Price of Fiction”, a 90 minute interview with Robert E. Price.

* Possibly an interesting curiosity, Dunhams Destroys Lovecraft! ‘zine. Crowdfunding on Indiegogo, and also soliciting contributions. The ‘zine…

is an upcoming quarterly journal published by Dunhams Manor Press. It will feature parodies, satires, farces, art, and all around irreverent Lovecraftian fun. Note: This is NOT an anti-Lovecraft publication.

* IGN reviews Chaosium’s new Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth Board Game.

* Avatar of Chaos examines Kadath (1979)… “which appears to be the first Lovecraftian video game, [and] is loosely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* The acclaimed major AAA videogame The Sinking City 2 is set for an 18th August 2026 release, with an Innsmouth-alike setting and an open world.

* My quick and vaguely Lovecraftian demo video, from the amazing new Minimax H3 video generator. Generated locally and quickly on my entry-level RTX 3060 12Gb graphics-card. Surprisingly, all but the tech-press have ignored this major game-changing open and free model.

* London’s esoteric bookshops are starting to list their autumn talks. These include An Evening with Lovecraft at Watkins Books in London, set for 20th August 2026.

Another London bookshop talk of possible interest to some is “The Golden Dawn and the Arts”, set for 29th September 2026.

* And finally, those now arriving at NecronomiCon 2026 in Providence may want to note that the Extended Programming page was updated yesterday. The page also has flyers/posters for the theatrical events.

— End-quotes —

It seems suitable for high summer and for the advent of the beside-the-ocean Necronomicon 2026, to offer a little trawl of Lovecraft appreciating the cooling sea-breezes…

On the sea-breezes of Charleston… ” At twilight — a very brief subtropical twilight — the birds sang in the gardens, and an insidious perfume of many blossoms floated cryptically over the whole city. Cool breezes sprang up, and those who disliked warmth would walk along the Battery, or White Point Gardens, at the very tip of the peninsula, which fronts the spacious harbour and receives a sweep of air from across the low islands dividing the harbour from the open Atlantick.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

“The atmosphere makes me feel twenty years younger and one hundred percent better — and I really seem to have a surplus fund of energy for the first time since last August. The sea breeze is always blowing, and I have become as tanned as an Indian in less than a week.” — Lovecraft in Charleston, to Moe, May 1930.

“And the screen Dracula in 1931 — I saw the beginning of that in Miami, Fla. [Florida] — but couldn’t bear to watch it drag to its full term of dreariness, hence walked out into the fragrant tropic moonlight!” — Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, February 1933.

“Darkness – sunset – dreams – mists – fever – madness – the tomb – the hills – the sea – the sky – the wind – all these, & many other things have seemed to me to retain a certain imaginative potency despite our actual scientific analyses of them.” — Lovecraft to Harold Farnese, September 1932.

“… his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village.” [to dream of the city of Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai] — Lovecraft, “Celephais”.

“But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits a thing untold by his grandfather. [That …] when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous, brooding silence [of the Strange High House, a silence that was] ever before the bane of Kingsport’s maritime cotters. And old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth’s joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly.” — Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

HPLinks #95 – NecronomiCon 2026, Oceanic Horror conference, Pulpster 35, fungi by the Seekonk, and more…

30 Thursday Jul 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

HPLinks #95.

* NecronomiCon Providence is now less than a month away, and The Armitage Symposium 2026 wing of NecronomiCon has released details of the scholarly papers. There’s a PDF with abstracts. Titles include, among many others…

— “Correlating the Mind’s Contents: Lovecraft’s Challenge to Philosophers”.
— “From Quebec to Kadath: Echoes of Canada in Lovecraft’s Late Fiction”.
— “Cold, Circulation, and Cosmic Affect: Bodily Experience and Sensory Language in Lovecraft’s Fiction”.
— “Galahad in the Rubble: Frank Belknap Long’s Letters to Donald Wandrei, 1927–1975”.
— “A Shared Bond through Greece and Rome: Classical References in the Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”.
— “Lovecraft’s Influence on UFO/UAP Ontologies”.
— “Lovecraft and the UFO”.
— “Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches’ Sabbath”.
— “Lovecraft and Eugenics: for HPL, It was Personal”.
— “The Antipodean Weird in Lovecraft and Others”.

In the main programming for NecronomiCon, I spotted Fred Lubnow on “The Science of the Dreamlands”, and panels on “The Collectable Lovecraft” and “Librarians & Archivists in Weird Fiction”, among many more. A very rich year, by the look of it, but sadly I can’t be there. Still, hopefully recordings will surface on YouTube in due course.

* Lovecraft’s own Newport, Rhode Island, is to host an academic conference on “Oceanic Horror” in March 2027. Curiously, given the setting and theme, the call for papers neglects to mention Lovecraft. Given the current state of academia, perhaps they’re simply unaware of a Lovecraft connection? But some academics may be interested in the call. Deadline for proposals: 30th September 2026.

* New from Spain’s University of Salamanca, the open-access book Echoes of Fantasy and Reality (2026). In English. Contains, among others…

— “Alphabets For The Shadows: The Design Of Three Alphabets To Talk To The Dead”.
— “Impossible Mazes: Transmedia Representations Of The Fantastic Rhizome”.
— “Unspeakable, The Art Of Talking About Forbidden Topics Through Fantasy & Horror”.
— “A Visual Reflection On The Fantastic And Magical Realism: Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781) and Bocklin’s Triton And Nereid (1873)”.
— “The Poetics Of The Immense: Scale And Visual Metaphor In The Cinema Of Denis Villeneuve”.
— “The Long and Cinematic Shadow of the Vampire Nosferatu”.

* The new edition of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy has “Stay Strange: A Computational Stylistic Analysis of Altered Consciousness in American Science Fiction 1960–1979”. Freely available in open-access, in English. Related is the forthcoming NeconomiCon 2026 panel on “White Rabbits and Purple Haze: The Influence of the Psychedelic Era on Weird Fiction”.

* PulpFest details the contents of this year’s convention annual, in “Highlights from The Pulpster #35″.

* The scholarly annual journal Lovecraft Annual No. 20 (2026) is now listing on Amazon UK, and is set for an August 2026 release. As well as the articles and reviews, it includes… “a comprehensive index to issues 11-20.” No table-of-contents on the Hippocampus Press site as yet, but the Amazon blurb gives a flavour of the contents.

* The SpraguedeCampFan blog considers “Robert E. Howard and the American Fiction Guild”.

* A rare bit of CAS scholarship in the scholarly journal Odisea, “The Reversion of the Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of the Enchanter’ (1933)”. Freely available online, in open-access.

* I see NecronomiCon 2026’s core programming has “The Pale Song of the Butterfly Collector: Nabokov as Weird Fiction” with a focus on the fabulous novel Ada, or Ardor (1969).

* Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys “The Fantasy Novels of Clifford D. Simak – Part 1”. The is ‘the late Simak’ of the mid 1970s paperback boom, his name firmly established and newly able to have fun in the space where fantasy and science-fiction meet. Which at the time didn’t endear him to the ‘genre police’ on either side, but the mood of the times was with him.

* The University of Chicago magazine has the new long article “Wonderland”, on their magnificent Stephen D. Korshak art collection and its collectors. Freely available online. The collection is online here, and also in an affordable hardcover artbook as Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection (2025).

* Launching on Kickstarter on 4th August, Deep Space Lovecraft Collected Edition. A 184-page book collecting various one-man Lovecraft comics adaptations…

reimagined as tales of a retro-futuristic spacefarer encountering and enduring the very monstrosities conjured by Lovecraft’s own tortured mind, but in the environs and technologies of deep space and adapted to the artform of comics.

The book version adds two new adaptations, of “The Outsider” and “Dagon”.

* Coming soon on the Steam gaming platform, The Steeple, a one-man indie videogame which apparently aims to be a faithful version of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”…

Explore a stylized recreation of 1935 Providence in this story-focused adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s final work.

* Keen Gamer has a long and pithy review of the new $30 videogame The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu (2026).

* From Chaosium, a new Call of Cthulhu: Innsmouth Sourcebook (2026) for table-top RPG players. Also potentially useful as reference for Mythos writers.

* Here in the UK, on stage at the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer is “Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Innsmouth Crown”.

* In Austin, USA, this summer, the promenade theatre performance “Speak No More: Lovecraft”…

Physical theatre experimenters La Fenice [offer a] silent, site-specific, and immersive drama [which unleashes] Lovecraftian secrets, through an improvised narrative that audience members will walk through.

* This year’s NecronomiCon 2026 is also very strong on theatre presentations, with far too many to list here. Note also the performance of T.L. Wiswell’s Magic Lantern show of “The Call of Cthulhu”…

The magic lantern is an early version of the slide show, with hand-painted glass plates, phosphorus lighting (replaced for safety’s sake with an incandescent bulb), and a touch of the quirky.

* In Scotland, British Horror Studio have started filming for their indie “Lovecraft-inspired, feature-length horror anthology”, For We Are Many: Lovecraft. They plan a Kickstarter release in due course.

* Talking of film, the open source and local Marlin-2B (GGUF here) is a new small lightweight video-describing AI. It may be of use to some who wish to index (rather than transcribe the audio of) large video archives or film footage. The small 5Gb size means it can run even on entry-level Nvidia 3060 12Gb graphics-cards.

* On YouTube, this summer Strange Magick is making a series of YouTube Shorts visiting Lovecraft-related places. So far he has visited the Newport round-tower, the Dark Swamp, and Neutaconkanut Hill.

* And finally, I see NecronomiCon also has “Foraging Horrors: A NecronomiCon Mushroom Walk – OFF-SITE, at Blackstone Park” by the side of the Seekonk. Sunday 16th August 2026. Which suggests the humid and warm air of Providence in mid August yields early fungi? If so, then that changes how one imagines Lovecraft in his outdoor summer letter-writing grove on the bluff above York Pond, since there would also have been early-emerging fungi around? Note also the related Armitage Symposium talk “In the Absence of Light… An Assessment of Lovecraftian Non-Photosynthetic Ecosystems”, in the early morning of the same day.

— End-quotes —

The following seems somehow approprate for the advent of NecronomiCon 2026…

N’ggah-kthn-y’hhu! Cthua flh gup r’lhob-g’th’gg Igh thok! G’llh-ya, Tsathoggua! Y’kn’nh, Tsathoggua!

It hath come!
Homage, Lord Tsathoggua, Father of Night!
Glory, Elder One, First-Born of Outer Entity!
Hail, Thou Who wast Ancient beyond Memory
Ere the Stars Spawned Great Cthulhu!
Power, Hoary Crawler over Mu’s fungoid places!
Iä! Iä! G’noth-ykagga-ha!
Iä, Iä, Tsathoggua!!!

— Lovecraft, from Selected Letters III, 7th October 1930. Not included in The Ancient Track.

HPLinks #93 – Argentina, cosmic humour, Gaslight reviewed, Sanz illustrates “Colour”, Hypnos filmed, and more…

15 Wednesday Jul 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #93.

* Deep Cuts digs deep and brings up the complete never-reprinted “Something from Beyond” (1941) by Paul Dennis LaVond.

‘Something from Beyond’ is pure Lovecraftian pastiche, albeit in an uncommon space opera setting, which gives it the feel of a very stripped-down prototype of Event Horizon.

* New to me, the Spanish-language book Lovecraft en Argentina (‘Lovecraft in Argentina’) (2015) by Carlos Abraham…

an exhaustive tour of the history of Lovecraftian letters in our country [i.e. the translators, editors and publishers, and also touches on the influence on the nation’s writers]. In an appendix, he also takes the opportunity to review the [Spanish] first editions of Robert Howard’s works. It is an interesting work, essential for the collector who intends to complete his library, but at times the book becomes difficult to read due to small type or the technical nature of the contents.

Contents:

  – Introduction.
  – Dark beginnings (1939-1956).
  – The dissemination of a secret author (1957-1990).
  – Lovecraft as a classic (1991-2015).
  – Conclusion.
  – Appendix: The first Spanish editions of Robert E. Howard.

* Four years after a devastating Russian cyber-attack, the British Library’s EThOS (E-Theses Online Service) is finally restored and back online. The latest relevant “Lovecraft” British PhD thesis is from Manchester in 2022, ‘Live. Laugh. Loathe.’: cosmic humour and contemporary pessimism in literature and on screen (1969-2019). Currently posted online in May 2026 but under a repository embargo with one year to go before release to the public. The same author published a new book with Bloomsbury in June 2026, titled Cosmic Humour and Philosophical Pessimism in Contemporary Culture, which I assume is the PhD text… but revised and polished for publication?

* New in the latest History Today magazine, the short article “Fringe beliefs” (2026, Volume 76, Issue 7, page 6). Possibly this is a regular column(?), and in this instance its indexing-service abstract says the article discusses Lovecraft’s posthumous influence on the 1960s-70s ‘ancient astronauts’ theories.

* The Obelisk reviews Michael Shea’s 1984 novel The Color Out of Time, in “Watchers on the Threshold vs. Vampiric Jelly”…

The Color Out of Time is a mess of a book. It is ‘Lovecraftian pulp’ rather than cosmic horror. Plus, Shea’s attempt to mirror the Master’s purple prose comes across as stiff, and it does little to help the simultaneously simple yet hard-to-follow plot. […] As a homage, it is nice enough. Shea writes like someone who actually enjoys Lovecraft and his works [which is refreshing today …]

* RPG Review reviews the late-Victorian London “Cthulhu by Gaslight” role-playing adventure book from Chaosium.

* The English translation of Gou Tanabe’s “The Dunwich Horror” is still on track for release as a deluxe hardcover at the end of September 2026, and now has cover. Also due around the same time, an 80-page illustrated German translation of “The Colour Out of Space”. A hardback “with four-color, full-page illustrations by Salvador Sanz”, an experienced Argentinian comic-book artist, animator and comics teacher. Looks promising, even in German.

* At the Annecy International animation festival, the U.S. Cartoon Network announced development on a Conan animated series, helmed by Genndy Tartakovsky (Primal). Reported to be an adult Conan animation series, and a project he’s been trying to get off the ground since 2008. Possibly set for 2029, judging by what’s said in animation trade journal reports?

* Lovecraft’s undervalued story “Hypnos” is being filmed, as part of a feature-length indie anthology currently on Kickstarter. No further details.

* And finally, plucked from eBay… I found an amusing one-page 1978 underground comix strip which riffs on street names in Lovecraft’s Providence. Was it a one-pager, or were there more pages? The one page is all that’s being sold on eBay.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft on street-names.

“In 1912 my first bit of published verse appeared in The Evening Bulletin. It is a 62-line satire in the usual heroic couplet, ridiculing a popular movement on the part of the Italians of the Federal Hill slums to change the name of their main street from “Atwells’ Avenue” to “Columbus Avenue”. I pictured Providence in 2000 A.D., with all the English names changed to foreign appellations.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1916. The poem is “Providence in 2000 A.D.”

“Street names are notably picturesque [in Paris], including such specimens as Rue Git-le-Coeur (Street Where the Heart Lies), Rue Chat-qui-Peche (Street of the Fishing Cat — probably named from a bygone shop sign), Rue de l’Arbre Sec (Street of the Dry Trees), and so on. This quaint nomenclature is typically French, and is paralleled in other towns of France, and in Quebec on our own continent. Many streets are likewise named for the illustrious dead — not only statesmen and warriors, but men distinguished in the arts — a practice also common in Germany, but in America followed only in Boston.” — Lovecraft on Paris street-names, in “European Glimpses”.

“Amongst the [Boston] streets named for illustrious men I was pleas’d to note a Belknap-Street, commemorating the Revd. Jeremy Belknap, minister of a church in Federal-Street, and founder of the Boston Historical Society. The name of this street hath since been chang’d to Joy-Street, and I am sure that no reader of my small Belknap’s phantasies can deny that Belknaps invariably afford joy!” — Lovecraft to Galpin & Long, February 1923. Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model” faithfully used Boston North End street-names in the tale.

“Providence thank heavens has avoided the stultifying custom of numbering [streets, as in New York City] ‐ our only numbered streets being ten obscure ones in the north end of the town.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, suggesting he knew the names of just about every street and lane in Providence.

As Providence grew into a large city… “still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west [of College Hill], spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old waterfront recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.” — Lovecraft, Dexter Ward.

“Some years ago Long and I attempted to explore the Fulton Fish Market section of New York — which is full of quaint scenes and buildings. I don’t know where I left the lunch I had eaten an hour previously — for I was too dizzy to read the street signs! In the end I managed to stagger out of the stench without actually losing consciousness …” — Lovecraft in a letter of 1933, Selected Letters IV.

HPLinks #92 – Clara and Lovecraft, bestiality, fandom research, the OED, film, theatre, and more…

09 Thursday Jul 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #92.

* Deep Cuts asks “Who is Clara in Lovecraft’s Letters?” and ably uncovers a new Lovecraft acquaintance in Providence. I’d add that the Westport Historical Society has a Clara Buffum page, with additional details of her summer home in Westport and her cataloguing work at the Providence Athenaeum. The Providence Athenaeum Bulletin reveals she also worked on the Delivery Desk in 1897, around the same time as the cataloguing work. Later the Providence Handicraft Club has her giving a talk on bookbinding to the Club in 1923, and her correspondence and mail-order sales address in 1926 was “42 College St., Providence, R.I.” which is that of the Club. Later the American Art Annual 1932 lists her as a member of the Club. Both the cataloguing work and the Club would tie Clara to Lovecraft’s aunts.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Profiles In History: Autograph Catalog 41 Winter 2006. Offers a 1930 Lovecraft letter to C.A. Smith, with transcript…

Carlsbad = the famous Carlsbad caverns. 20 years ago one could have had this letter for what today would be deemed a bargain price.

* From Indiana University, the Phd thesis The Edge of Cognition: Enchantment in Weird Fiction (2026). Freely available online.

* New in the 2026 of the French open-access annual journal Res Futurae, “Lovecraft sans Cthulhu. Epistemologie et esthetique de la bestialite dans l’oeuvre lovecraftienne” (‘Lovecraft without Cthulhu: Epistemology and the aesthetics of bestiality in Lovecraftian work’).

This article reconstructs the author’s intellectual landscape to better understand the interfaces between the pattern of bestiality and racialist zoo-anthropology. The study of the stories ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and ‘The Dunwich Horror’ allows us to articulate bestiality with an aestheticized evolutionary imagination.

* From the University of Marburg in Germany, a new open-access journal titled Fandom | Cultures | Research. Dedicated to fandom and fan-cultures research and research methodology. So far, four issues have been produced. Mostly English items.

* On YouTube, Archiving Horror! The S.T. Joshi Interview. A new Joshi interview.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Arkham House Catalog and Stock List With Addendum, 1986-1987.

* A new book Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination (2025), which may interest some.

* Murray Ewing has a new blog post on “Lovecraftian Labatut”, musing on the curious similarities between the “strange and disturbing new insights” of the physicists and mathematicians, and the entities and cosmic vistas their workings can appear to glimpse.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog announces…

the Friends of August Derleth is a going concern, and we are actively soliciting members. As can be seen from our website at friendsofaugustderleth.org, which is still in a somewhat rudimentary stage, a membership is remarkably inexpensive, and at a later time members will be allowed special privileges (such as access to books published by the Friends) not available to non-members.

* Among other items, Joshi also notes his participation in a…

conference on Lovecraft’s philosophy put on by Steven K. Stakland and others and taking place in Japan on [29th June – 1st July. Other speakers] included papers by such veterans as Robert M. Price and Steven J. Mariconda. [The papers] will not be available online, but it appears that a book of all the papers is likely to be published by Routledge.

* DMR considers “R.E. Howard’s “The Garden of Fear”: Flowers of Evil and a Tower of Dread” and “”The Valley of the Worm”: Forging the Myth Behind the Myths”.

* On YouTube, “…when I last see him” The de Camp Interviews on Robert E. Howard…

Michael K. Vaughan discusses a rare, limited-edition book containing unedited interviews by L. Sprague de Camp regarding Robert E. Howard. These primary source transcripts offer fans and scholars a transparent look at the original accounts from those who knew the author

* Adventures Fantastic has A Brief Report from Robert E. Howard Days 2026.

* From veteran audiobook reader Horror Babble, what appears to be a new full reading of “The Shadow out of Time” (July 2026). I’ve not listened to it yet, but I assume it’s a more polished re-read of the earlier version HB released to YouTube some years ago. There’s also another fine unabridged reading free on Archive.org.

* The Obelisk has “Atom Age Lovecraft: A Review of Frank Belknap Long’s Journey Into Darkness”.

* New to me, an early item in Lovecraft scholarship Out for Blood (1984). A chunky A5 booklet, apparently aimed to “…prove that Lovecraftian analysis is not ‘worked out’ as many believe. [Gives] evidence to support my conviction that Lovecraft’s fictional concepts were developed with consistent logic and form a unified body of work”. However, the contents-list on the back suggests an essay selection with some intriguing topics.

* Comics publisher Dark Horse has announced a cover and a firm 2027 release date for the Gou Tanabe graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark in English translation. To be paired with “Dagon”.

* “Crowdfunded $10K film ‘It Calls'”…

a psychological cosmic horror film inspired by the mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft […] Filming began in mid-May and is taking place throughout Roseburg, Bandon and other locations across Southern Oregon, with production expected to wrap on the 1st of August [2026]. Produced on a $10,000 budget raised entirely through crowdfunding, the studio said It Calls represents its most ambitious production to date.

* Germany’s Miskatonic Horror Theatre will be staging their biggest show yet, “The Call of Cthulhu” in Hamburg from 21st-23rd August 2026. Taking to the stage at the big open-air stage in Hamburg’s city park. Booking now.

* RobbieTheRobot has a current page of the choice selections he’s making from the itch.io mini-games and interactive fiction which have Lovecraft as the theme.

* A long English abstract for the Polish undergraduate final dissertation “Horror in Pixels: How Ugly Games Generate Fear” (2025).

When coupled with a cosmic or Lovecraftian narrative, even modest graphics can transform a game into a masterpiece.

* A slick new Cthulhu Mythos – H.P. Lovecraft Concordance for 14 stories, as a new website.

* And finally, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has added the word “Lovecraftian” in their latest update, tracing the first use of the word to 1936 and Robert Bloch in a letter to Weird Tales.

— End-quotes —

“… drifting down a stagnant river betwixt high basalt cliffs, & wondering why I drifted; since the water had no motion, & there was no breath of wind in the awful SILENCE.” (Lovecraft to Kleiner, May 1920). “… conscious of drifting down some hideous stagnant river in a rotting boat, between terrible overhanging cliffs of basalt. There was no wind, and I wondered why I moved down so still a stream. The insects were of strange form, and made me shudder as their numbers increased and they began to light all over me” (Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920). — Lovecraft recalls a dream, to two correspondents, in 1920.

“About the most daemoniac place I ever saw was a valley in New Jersey — in the foothills of the Ramapos — where the sides were covered with the outcroppings of a black crystalline basaltic formation, & the floor was strewn with curiously angular fragments. I only saw it once, but its image has lingered with me.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“Primal Basalt Bridge over the black & oily River Gnar. Time of the Bulbous Shape’s passage up-stream” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1933.

“Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it — and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me. Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, just one example of various uses of basalt at key moments in Lovecraft’s tales and poetry.

Tentaclii

~ News & scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft

Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

HPLinks #104 – dreams and paganism, the madhouse, dreamlands, prayers, and proofreading

HPLinks #103 – 10,000 Stars, Joshi on the letters, Le Monde edition, and more…

HPLinks #102 – Lovecraft on modernity and optimism, Fungi chapbook, 1975 “Shadow” adaptation, Lovecraftian film and more…

HPLinks #101 – Microfiction contest, Lovecraft’s Weird Atheism book, narration in games, Red Hook and more…

HPLinks #100 – Will Murray, Lovecrafter No. 15, Cthulhu in China, Bibliomysteries, and more…

HPLinks #99 – HPL in Hebrew, lost tales, short pulp, vintage Providence pics, and more…

HPLinks #98 – Night-gaunt puppetry, Avernus, NecronomiCon 2026, Providence litfest, thieves in the night, and more

An audio reading of “A Descent to Avernus” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft

HPLinks #97 – Bloch biography, Otto’s daemons, Worm ebook, Robert E. Price interview, sea-breezes and more…

HPLinks #95 – NecronomiCon 2026, Oceanic Horror conference, Pulpster 35, fungi by the Seekonk, and more…

HPLinks #93 – Argentina, cosmic humour, Gaslight reviewed, Sanz illustrates “Colour”, Hypnos filmed, and more…

HPLinks #92 – Clara and Lovecraft, bestiality, fandom research, the OED, film, theatre, and more…