I’m always partial to a bit of good song-and-dance musical theatre, and so was pleased to hear of a new musical version of Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu”. Albeit done with puppets, in a Muppets style. Sounds fun, and it runs for two hours under the title of Cthulhu: the Musical! (R-rated). You can catch it touring America with the ‘Puppeteers for Fears’ troupe, a puppeteer troupe based out of Oregon, USA. They’re now a month away from setting out on a 2023 post-lockdown summer tour, with a banner tour headline of “Back from the Dead”. Also on the road with them will be a full rock band, multimedia projectionists and (one hopes) some cute 1970s-style groupies.

Booking now.

A Lovecraft film festival in Mexico. The ‘Festival Nocambulante Lovecrafiano’ is a camping overnighter on 17th June 2023, in the Xochimilco Ecological Park (about 15 miles from Mexico City). 20 movies will be shown. It looks a little like the Dark Swamp in places, so hopefully the organisers have booked a big solar-powered midge-zapper. Or perhaps big outdoor cinema screens come with such things built-in, these days.

A nice scan of a supposed “H.P. Lovecraft” novel, newly popped up on honest Abe’s sales site. The cover demonstrates that, even as late as 1993-95, the average person could pick up a Derleth paperback at a news-stand book-spinner rack… and think it was by Lovecraft. In fact, just over 1,000 words by Lovecraft, with the rest of the novel by Derleth.

The British publisher Panther was rather more honest in 1973-75, admitting up-front on the cover that it was likely to be a Derleth stitch-a-thon.

Interestingly, for a book that supposedly shifted some 100,000+ copies in all, an Amazon UK search suggests it’s now thoroughly out-of-print and has no audiobook. Are the currently owners of Derleth’s estate missing a trick there?

Opened 6th May 2023, and perhaps still on, an exhibition of Lovecraftian crafts and illustrations by Claudia Sedler at a gallery near Dusseldorf in Germany. Address: Atelier Andersartig, Alexander-Coppel-Strabe 40, 42651 Solingen.

“HPL in Brooklyn with kitties”. Another Playground.ai experiment, after Photoshop fixing. Playground.ai seems to know more about what Lovecraft looked like, now.

New at the HPLHS, the next Dark Adventure full-cast recording. It’s Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”, and is set to ship and download on 21st June 2023. Temporary cover artwork at present, so here’s my quick Dream by Wombo AI-generated image of the Providence house in its earlier days…

Entry dates and full rules for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, now available.

No “romantic comedies”, I see. They’re banned. Aww. Lovecraft wrote at least one of those (“Sweet Ermengarde”). But it seems the gore-loving masses must be forever deprived of a hilarious makeover for his “Ermengarde”. Imagine a tentacle-filled moustache-twirling Perils of Pauline silent-movie -style big-screen romp.

Anyway, the deadlines are now available:

August 2023 (Providence): 30th May 2023.

October 2023 (Portland): 1st August 2023.