Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

HPLinks #48 – Lovecraft and music, new and old comics, D&D 5.5e Lovecraft, and more…

31 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #48.

* The Great Dangerous Books podcast this week on H.P. Lovecraft & The Apocalypse. Discussing the… “philosophical implications of Lovecraft’s stories, particularly the themes of knowledge, reality, and the human condition.”

* In France, the 23rd Festival de Bourgogne (seems to be in Burgundy, France) is to offer a two-day “The World of Lovecraft” event in late August 2025…

Films by Marc Thomas Charley and Martine Chifflot will introduce the world of Lovecraft to mark his birthday on 20th August 2025. Three short biopics, and bio-fiction films in the evening. The 21st August meeting will then address the themes of witchcraft, documentaries, and Lovecraftian fiction. Two documentaries, three biopics, and audience discussions will take place before another evening screening, which will feature a documentary by Marc Charley, “The Curse of the Feathers,” a true case of witchcraft, followed by a new black-and-white version of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in The Witch House”. “Ritual” will be shown that evening. Followed by discussions with the audience, these screenings revive the spirit of the Festival’s film club by presenting inventive art-house films. A moment of sharing, discovery, and emotion for all in the Chauffailles cinema.

* In the latest Cryptology #3 (Spring 2025), Lovecraftian Will Murray has an article on the Charlton horror comics. I recall some of these titles fondly, when they were unusual items found in the dusty bargain-boxes of British comics shops.

Writer Will Murray does the first part of “A Requiem For Charlton Horror”, looking at their early horror titles with a selection of covers.

* Also in comics, Broken Frontier reports this week that Gou Tanabe’s Comics Adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ “is to be translated and published by Dark Horse” in English. Set for January 2026.

* Feuilleton has “Lettering Lovecraft”, meaning hand-lettering.

* DiGRA 2025 now has its papers and abstracts online. This year’s major videogames think-fest will offer papers such as “Tentacle to the Metal: Ecosophy, Metamodernism, and Splatoon 3″, “The Fractured Imbunche: a Study of Chilean Horror Games”, and (abstract only) “Ecology of Killer Insects and Violent Nature in Grounded”.

* Also in the world of games, Form of Dread has a new and very detailed and technical review of Cthulhu by Torchlight. This new gamer book is meant to transform the core tabletop RPG game D&D 5.5e into a Lovecraftian world.

The single biggest highlight of Cthulhu by Torchlight are the subclasses, which are among the better-designed out of all those that I have seen made for 5e. [But the] bestiary [is disappointing], specifically the statblocks of the Mythos Deities. These are genuinely underwhelming, having few options to influence the battlefield and generally being ‘bruisers with one extra trick up their sleeve’.

Not to be confused with Cthulhu by Gaslight.

* A fledgling attempt to pin down some of the linguistic specifics of a R’lyehian language.

* Forthcoming, a French edition of Encyclopedie H.P. Lovecraft, being the encyclopaedia by Joshi & Schultz. Due in mid October 2025 from Bragalonne, according to Amazon UK. 500 pages and newly illustrated.

* A very niche new survey of a subset of Lovecraftian tales, the illustrated Powerpoint presentation “Cthulhu Returns to Camelot: New Works of Lovecraft-Inspired Arthurian Fiction” (May 2025). Available from academia.edu, and note that a Google Scholar search will get you an open PDF download without having to sign up to academia.edu.

* Seeming to me to be relevant to Lovecraft’s travels and campaigns to keep venerable old buildings, and his sense of resigned loss when they were demolished, is the new journal article “Spectres of gentrification: Towards a hauntological framework for exploring the impacts of gentrification” (2025)…

Using a case study of a gentrifying neighbourhood in New England, this article describes the utility of the hauntological framework in understanding ‘more than material’ impacts of gentrification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, alongside photovoice and walking interviews with long-time residents, this article describes how participants and residents are often haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood.

* A new book chapter, “Empty horizons: Library music and the occult”, meaning stock ‘music library’ tracks which were licensed by production companies and broadcasters and used to accompany supernatural scenes. Part of the new book Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2025).

This essay focuses on a particular strain of library music that engages with the occult and the supernatural, produced at a time when there was a countercultural fascination with esoteric belief systems. New technologies such as the Moog and Arp synthesizers were able to create other-worldly sounds, the like of which had not been heard before

* And finally, in keeping with this HPLink’s focus on comics and music, “The Music from Beyond”. A Chamber of Darkness comic-book adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Zann”.

— End-quotes —

“Decidedly, Grandpa is an eye-man & not an ear-man! If any one thing killed my musical taste it was the violin-lessons I took betwixt the ages of 7 & 9. Back in ’97 I thought I liked music, but a year or two of classico-academic drill on a 3/4 size fiddle soured me completely. They wouldn’t let me scrape the tunes I wanted, but confined me to useful exercises & insipid folk-tunes out of a book. As a result, practicing became a hell, & the whole damn practicing became a hell, & the whole damn business drove me so close to nervous exhaustion that two physicians (I was little short of a neurotic semi-invalid as a kid) told my mother that a halt would have to be called. […] Today I can scarcely tell one end of a violin from another, & don’t recall a cursed thing about reading music” [i.e. from sheet music] — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., December 1936.

“Merely because the world is haphazard & imperfect, with certain satisfactory [aesthetic] adjustments attainable by only a part of the population, he jumps to the erroneous & irrelevant conclusion that nobody can attain such adjustments; that those who say they do merely pretend it, & that it is a waste of time to seek such a type of felicity. In other words, because some people can’t appreciate music, it is foolish for anybody to seek the pleasures of harmony.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, October 1933.

“I revel in absolutely frivolous light opera & musical comedy airs, I cannot bear serious Music with a capital M. However, I am not so narrow that I do not understand its aesthetic value, & I never laugh at it in the manner of Lord North and other celebrated anti-musical personages. So fond am I of light and catchy music, that I tried to write a comic opera when about ten years old!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Despite my vast ignorance [of music], there are musical compositions which tend to evoke from my imagination certain definitely visual concepts which could be expressed (had one the skill) either in poetry or painting.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, May 1934.

HPLinks #47 – vitalist Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the Po Delta, re-evaluating CAS, a new Lovecraft Atlas, and more…

24 Thursday Jul 2025

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

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HPLinks #47.

* More Lovecraft + philosophy. New from Hungary, “Lovecraft, antimodernism and new vitalisms” (2025)… “H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre is considered as a specific genre iteration of antimodernist themes, but also as a formative influence on the philosophy of speculative realism.” In Hungarian from the Dept. of Philosophy at Zagreb, and freely available for download.

* Overthink podcast Episode 134: Weirdness with Eric Schwitzgebel, interviewing Eric about his philosophy book Weirdness of the World (Princeton University Press, 2024). With a substantial discussion of the book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

* Aetherium Arcana blog has a new short article on “Lovecraft and the Unconscious Structure of Empire”, followed by the new longer essay “Self-devouring Racism: Subversion and Collapse in Lovecraft’s Mythos”.

* New from Spain in English and open-access, “Development of Expert Systems by means of Large Language Models”. The authors feed Lovecraft’s fiction to a leading AI LLM, and have it try to find and map connections. Freely available online, those the images are rubbish quality and partly unreadable even in the source zip. This is as good as they get…

* Strange Aeons has a Catalog and Contacts link-list for the Italian Lovecraftians. Seems to have first appeared in 2023, and was last updated on 23rd July 2025.

* Also in Italy, Wu Ming 1 on Lovecraft, appearing at the Lunatico Festival. On 25th July 2025 he presents his new novel featuring Lovecraft-as-character, and then… “the geographer Francesco Visentin and Andrea Olivieri will dialogue with the author”. Followed by a presentation of…

The graphic-musical project [that depicts] the imaginary journey of H.P. Lovecraft in the Po Delta in 1926, between hallucinated visions, esoteric confraternities and monstrous water creatures. Designed by the Italian-English musician Jet Set Roger and the Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograph, preseting a concert event that merges music and literature in a game of cross-media references with the Wu Ming novel.

* Decadent Serpent considers “The Reevaluations of Clark Ashton Smith”. Part of the discussion is of “The Quest of Iranon” by Lovecraft, compared to “Xeethra” by CAS.

* Black Gate has a long event-report with excellent photographs, “Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days” 2025.

* A useful new survey article of all the “Biographies of Robert E. Howard”, issued prior to the new and well-reviewed biography from the University of North Texas Press.

* Forthcoming in French, Atlas Lovecraft, a 180-page book that sounds like a cartographic atlas for Lovecaft. Due in October 2025 from reputable publisher Bragelonne.

A completely unprecedented atlas offering tangible geographic and cartographic representations of the emblematic places of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. An illustrated work in colour presenting plans of Providence, the State of Massachussetts, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich and its region, a map of the Antarctic Expedition and a cartographic statement of mountain areas… [etc]

* And finally, a LoRA add-on for Flux, meant for generating images of whimsical toon Happy Shoggoths. Not on CivitAi, thankfully — since (as of today) the go-to site for creative AI is effectively banned here in the UK. I’m happy now that I nipped in just in time with my Windows 11 Superlite upgrade, and thus I now have the SD 1.5 turbo LoRAs, SDXL, Flux Kontext and Wan2.1 all downloaded and set up with workflows and ComfyUI to run them.

— End-quotes —

“I have always been fond of maps & geographical details (I’ve drawn a map of “Arkham’ to keep my local references straight), & my lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., February 1936.

“I used to row [in a boat] considerably on the [River] Seekonk, which you’ll find on your city map … and also on general maps of R.I. Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, April 1934.

[Lovecraft is delighted to find that he can circumnavigate the city of Charleston entirely via its many graveyards …] “the President of the Charleston Garden Club some time ago form’d the notion of mapping out an idyllic cross-town walk which might include as many as possible of these with a fair degree of continuity.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

[Lovecraft rises to the very top of the highest building in New York City …] “The assembled clan’s first move was up — clean up to the top of N.Y.! It costs half a ducat [dollar] per rube [person], and is worth it. Loveman was dizzy, but your grandpa wasn’t — gawd knows how hard I worked when I was ten years old to conquer my native tendency to dizziness from altitudes! I walked on high railway trestles, and hell knows what not! But I digress. All Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City lay below, outspread like a map — in fact, I told Mortonius [Morton] that the city-planners had done an excellent job in making the place almost as good as the map in my Hammond Atlas at home.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1922.

HPLinks #46 – Lovecraft & Science conference report, CAS conference, Sonia update, Vondy letters, Tanabe and Stanley at work on new projects, and more…

17 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #46.

* In the journal Transatlantica, a new and detailed 5,000-word summary and conference report from the recent major international conference on Lovecraft and the Sciences, held at the University of Poitiers from 4th-6th December 2024. In French, but here’s the Google Translate link.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other things, he has news of a one-day conference “The Smith Circle: A Clark Ashton Smith Conference”. To be held in Smith’s hometown of Auburn, California, at the Auburn Carnegie Library on 18th January 2026. Booking now.

* My thanks to Ken Faig for tipping me off to Sean Donnelly’s long article on the Vondy-Spink correspondence file…

I sat down with the file of Vondy-Helm letters and hoped to find some clues. After all, they both knew Lovecraft and they were writing to each other during the last 14 years of Lovecraft’s life. There must be some reference to him in all those letters.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog (on Lovecraft’s wife) has an update on 2025 Sonia Scholarship.

* New from the Italians, Potrebbe anche non esserci piu un mondo (2025)…

Lovecraft’s longest single letter, delivered to the Italian reader in the form of a book. Here is Lovecraft as a man who is sober and calm, full of healthy common-sense, an acute and resigned critic of the modern age and anticipator of the future.

Possibly the letter to Woodburn Harris, then? Although the blurb has it that the letter was addressed to an unknown recipient.

* A 700-page script? No problem, for the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. Purgatory Chasm is their new audio production with a difference, a choose-your-own-adventure in audio with multiple storylines and music. The setting is 1922, when a geologist discovers mysterious glyphs and artifacts in a New England cave.

* Another excellent new reading of R.E. Howard’s ‘El Borak’ tales, “The Lost Valley of Iskander”. Free on YouTube. Note that the reader’s Patreon patrons are able to suggest stories to be newly recorded in future.

* Gou Tanabe has reportedly started work on his manga adaptation of Dexter Ward. Given the length and complexity, I’d imagine it might be offered across two or more graphic-novel volumes? Although, given the glacial pace at which his work reaches an official English translation, I guess we may not see it in English for three or four years yet.

* Another more long-term project should be underway relatively soon. Richard Stanley’s movie version of The Dunwich Horror is still planning to start filming in Providence in early 2026. The movie aims to be the follow-up to his acclaimed Color Out of Space movie, set well after the events of Color and making Dunwich into “a futuristic version of Arkham”. It seems that Stanley hopes to film on the Brown campus and on College Hill, in his words… “to actually shoot the beast on College Hill and on the Brown campus”, fees and campus politics permitting. So presumably digital CG / AI / FX will give the present-day Providence a makeover, transforming it into a future-Arkham. Sounds good.

* HPL in the 18th century.

* Call of Cthulhu Ireland (Chaosium, 2025) is… “an update of the 2012 Miskatonic University Library Association (MULA) Monograph ‘Mysteries of Ireland'” for role-play gamers. 230+ pages, a 1920s setting, and also likely to be of interest to writers (as a spur to ideas and plotting within this setting). Currently nominated for the 2025 ENNIES Awards for new RPG books. Doesn’t appear to be on Amazon, and is possibly only on DriveThru RPG (which flung a ‘captcha’ road-block at me on trying to visit, and thus I didn’t visit and they don’t get a link here).

* And finally, order now to beat a 5% price-rise at print-on-demand publisher Lulu. All the store’s print book prices go up by 5% from 1st August 2025, due to inflationary back-end costs.

— End-quotes —

“… according to O’Hart’s Pedigrees [Irish Pedigrees (1892)] [in my family-tree] my Caseys are descended from Baudoin Ui Niall (O’Neill), 137th King of Ireland. Begorra …” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1933.

“My mother and aunts knew the daughters of Joseph Banigan from childhood, and found them really worthy in every respect. The grandchildren were my earliest playmates, though it made me shudder in my British soul to know ‘Dicky Banigan’, ‘Robert McElroy’, ‘Edmund Sullivan’, etc!! [… The Banigan mansion is now] one of the ‘show places’ of the neighbourhood, and excited Klei[ner]’s vast admiration when he was here. It is a Gothic manor-house of brick and stone, such as its peasant builder may have seen and admired at a distance in his boyhood in Ould Oireland. The grounds are extensive and beautifully kept, with hedges, trees, and stables of pleasing architecture. It lies almost exactly half way betwixt the house where I was born, and that which I inhabit. Altogether, I fancy the Irish have helped rather than harmed the locality!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, September 1919.

“One of the great puzzles of Northern ethnology is the origin of the peculiar facial & cranial type associated with the Gaelic Celt of western Ireland & northern Scotland — the type with upturned nose, long upper lip, heavy eyebrow-ridges, &c. This type has no known analogue anywhere else in the world, & the ethnologist is at a loss to determine how it arose.” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“Most conservative anthropologists think it unlikely that — despite the vivid legends of diminutive Picts and elfin brownies in Scotland, tiny fairies and subterrene leprechauns in Ireland, sinister underground ‘little people’ in Wales, and Robin Goodfellow’s merry crew in England — any miniature race has ever actually inhabited the British Isles. We derive such tales entirely from the experience of our ancestors at a former stage of migration on the European continent.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.

HPL in the 18th century

12 Saturday Jul 2025

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HPL in the 18th century. Would he have been a College Hill gent as he hoped, or (more likely) a jobbing waterfront printer and local news-sheet editor?

No, not the result of the new Flux Kontext, which is a bit ‘off’ in terms of this sort of thing since it works from a single image. Also slow. Instead I made an SDXL LoRa of his face and shoulders, and used it with the superfast four-step SDXL checkpoint realvisxlV50_v50LightningBakedvae.safetensors   Considering this generates a 1024px image in about 3 seconds on a very modest 12Gb graphics card, the quality here is acceptable. Not superb, a little glitchy if you look hard for it… but acceptable. And yes, tweaking the prompt will cause him to smile. But I thought I’d spare the reader that.

The new Flux Kontext does have its uses though, including easy manga-fication of images.

HPLinks #45 – more Lovecraft philosophy, Hokusai, Pennell for SDXL, fine bindings, Carter by Tanabe, horror sound FX, and more…

10 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #45.

* In the latest edition of the journal Castilla: Estudios de Literatura, a review in Spanish of the Spanish book A Traves del Abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024). (‘Through the abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’). The review is freely available online, under Creative Commons Attribution. The book is also reviewed in the latest 2025 issue of the open-access journal Brumal: Revista de investigacion sobre lo Fantastico.

* A new book-a-journal from Argentina, Ontologia Analeptica IV, H.P. Lovecraft: La Anti-vida y el destino cosmico (2025). (‘H.P. Lovecraft: Anti-Life and Cosmic Destiny’). The book is paid, and is currently available to buy.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the most decisive writers who speaks to our present moment. With his work he penetrated to the heart of the great civilization changes, progress and modernity that define contemporary times. In doing so he has become a prophet of the future of humanity. Therefore, his work is here analyzed from an eminently philosophical perspective, while also engaging closely with the literature.

* Deep Cuts takes an extensive look at “Lovecraft & Hokusai”, the Japanese print artist. Lovecraft — an appreciator of Japanese screen actors and arts since his teens — saw a 1934 exhibition of his prints in Providence, and heard a lecture on them…

a splendid lecture & special exhibition pertaining to my favourite Hokusai, & the entire [Art Museum, Providence] quarterly bulletin was devoted to the subject of Japanese prints”. (Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V, page 127)

* Flame Tree Publishing is offering a 2026 Wall Calendar, Lovecraft: Illustrated by Jason Engle.

* The Yog-Blogsoth blog is in the midst of drawing and posting some of the more obscure creatures referenced in the Lovecraft mythos and beyond.

* New on YouTube, the explainer video “What is the Robert E. Howard Foundation?”. Also a fine new Josh Greenwood 84-minute reading of the ancient Irish tale “The Grey God Passes” by Robert E. Howard.

* Adam’s Notes / Eric’s Notes delves into “Robert E. Howard, Grettir the Outlaw, and the origins of two-fisted Weird Fiction”.

* PulpFest surveys “Fifty Years of The Man of Bronze”, anticipating the Doc Savage Doc Con 2025 and PulpFest combo in August 2025. In a fine example of local outreach, note also that the article states… “The general public is welcome to attend our afternoon and evening programming events free of charge”.

* Who knew? A Jack Kirby exhibition in Los Angeles, on now. “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity” is a substantial exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, until 1st March 2026.

* The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025, set for 22nd-24th August 2025 in Providence. No tickets available yet, but it can’t be long now.

* The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) announce their forthcoming The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, a sumptuous table-trembling volume of the Joshi-corrected texts, plus… “a reader’s guide to ten of the most significant tales”. Currently pre-ordering.

* Amazon is listing Gou Tanabe’s L’Indicible for release as a French hardcover on 4th September 2025. This appears to be his graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter tales, presumably minus the Dream Quest. Possibly with some biographical detours(?)…

Gou Tanabe brilliantly gives body to Randolph Carter, Alter Ego of H.P. Lovecraft … and through him express the thoughts and fears of the inventor of the cosmic horror.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of “Bibliography Of H.P. Lovecraft”, which was published in the journal Extrapolation in 1961. Long since superseded as a bibliography, but some may want it as an indicator of what was available to scholars by the early 1960s.

* And finally, need sound FX .WAV files for your project? An Archive.org .torrent has Stable Audio Open 1.0 WebUI Portable for Windows. This AI ingested all the public domain field-recording clips at Freesound, into a prompt-able local AI in a very simple interface. Tested and working on Windows 11. See the review for useful instructions for this standalone portable version. Not to be confused with a very similarly named music-generator.

Multitracking is done in the prompt, e.g. “A balanced mix between a good field recording of a man walking through dry leaves in winter, and a recording of small birds calling plaintively in the surrounding Canadian boreal forest.”

— End-quotes —

“Fine bindings don’t make good text!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1936.

“Acquire as many books of the right sort as you can afford to house, for ownership means easy and repeated access and permanent usefulness. Don’t be a foppish hoarder of fine bindings and first editions. Get books for what’s in them, and be glad enough of that. Marvellous bargains can be found on the dime counters of second-hand shops, and a really good library can be picked up at surprisingly little cost.” — Lovecraft, “Suggestions for a Reading Guide”.

Though some items may be curiously unobtainable…

“A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith.” — excised from an unpublished typescript for Lovecraft’s “The Hound”, before publication.

And don’t forget to buy some fire insurance…

“The flames devoured the volumes greedily — leaping up in strange colours and emitting indescribably hideous odours as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormy bindings succumbed to the devastating element.” — Lovecraft recounts a dream he had, to Bernard Austin Dwyer in August 1933.

HPLinks #44 – Whelan in the Mountains, Howard Days recordings, sea serpents and saurians, and more…

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #44.

* Deep Cuts this week examines “Black Thirst” by C.L. Moore and notes Lovecraft’s several reactions to the story when it appeared in Weird Tales in 1934.

* From the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, a Musical Engineering team issue a final report for 2025. Freely available online…

We chose the Cthulhu mythos as a conceptual anchor — not for its narrative, but for its emphasis on the “indescribable” and the unseen, which aligns with sound’s capacity to express fear beyond the visual realm. Guided by psychoacoustic theory, we designed two contrasting video clips with different sonic objectives.

* On SubStack, “The Life of Michael – artist Michael Whelan at 75”. Showing and discussing his painting “The Astrophysicist” (2008). Elsewhere, DMR brings news that Whelan is not resting on his 50 years of laurels, and that… “he is, at this moment, finishing up a glorious illustrated version of Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ for Centipede Press.”

* Broken Frontier reviews Gou Tanabe’s “The Colour Out of Space” graphic-novel in its just-released English translation. Spoilers-alert (for those who haven’t read the tale, which apparently includes at least one of Lovecraft’s most vocal critics).

* The latest The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast has a long discussion of “Art and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and the topics-list suggests the listener will enjoy widely-spiralling flights through esoteric dreamlands.

* From an Argentine journal, a new survey of “Nueva ficcion extrana Latinoamericana: hibridaciones narrativas, cine y juegos de rol” (‘New Latin American Weird Fiction: narrative hybridations, cinema and role-playing games’) (2025). Freely available online.

* Faunus 51 has been published, this being the scholarly journal devoted to Arthur Machen.

* A new scholarly overlay journal which may interest some, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism. The editors welcome your news of items and links of interest.

* Lots of R.E. Howard audio material this week, in the wake of the annual Howard Days event in Texas. Recordings now online include “Bob Howard & the Spicy Adventurers” (from PulpFest, rather than Howard Days), “Robert E. Howard in 1935, Professional and Personal”, “What’s Up with REH?” (on new publications coming down the dark river), “Spear & Fang” (REH’s first published story), and “Bob’s Photos”. Also, new on YouTube is a good free reading of the Solomon Kane tale “Rattle of Bones” by Robert E. Howard. A weary Solomon visits a forest inn for the night, with a travelling companion.

* Talking of rattling bones, a free LoRA add-on for models based on the AI image generator SDXL titled Wizard’s Vintage Creepy Creatures. This is Wizard as in ‘the vintage weekly British comic’. This well-loved title may recalled by British readers of a certain age, who may also recall the ‘Ken Reid’s Creepy Creations’ splash pages.

Ken (or perhaps a company heavily inspired by him) was also into generative art long before anyone else, shipping a long-ago ‘dial a monster’ cardboard-constructed frame to toy shops. Cleverly constructed with knobbed-dials which changed the head, eyes, nose, mouth/chin parts, to assemble an ever-changing random ‘creepy portrait’…

I recall it fondly from boyhood, but have never been able to find any trace of it since it was jettisoned during a house move. Until a Facebook page popped up recently, from the owner of what must now be one of the rarest vintage toys in the world. He too had been utterly unable to discover anything about it, but he managed to obtain one after a long search.

* Talking of generative image-making, I’m currently testing the new free image-editing AI called Flux Kontext Dev run in ComfyUI. I find it excellent for difficult watermark removal (e.g. a slip of cellophane with lettering on it saying “DO NOT COPY”, placed over the image of an eBay postcard). But it’s too crude for auto-colorisation of b&w images, compared to online services such as Palette or Kolorize. That’s a pity, and its line-art/comic style-transfer also leaves much to be desired in terms of subtlety. It can however easily take a head-and-shoulders picture and envision the person in a new environment. Such as Lovecraft riding the ‘last bus to Innsmouth’, here made by using Khoi Nguyen’s digital sculpt of Lovecraft’s head as the seed…

I’ve yet to explore its similar full-body capabilities, which apparently include the ability to keep intact the character costumes in the seed image (e.g. full-body character concept-art).

* For the real Lovecraft, visit the Wisconsin Historical Society H.P. Lovecraft | Photograph page, as there they offer the option to purchase a large version. Hopefully without what looks like a dreadful bit of scanner-moire across HPL’s cheek. Though perhaps that’s there to stymie AI upscaling using Gigapixel AI. Or maybe just original protective cellophane. From their ‘Harold Gauer papers, 1935-2008’.

* Now that I run Windows 11 as my OS, I can also test various locally-run “LLM” AIs. Next up, installing LM Studio AnythingLLM MSTY and trying out some of the local AIs. Eventually ones for audiobook and music/FX production, and Zork-style ‘choose your own adventure’ text-RPGs. Not to mention eventually distilling a ‘Lovecraft reanimated’ AI chatbot. I know… it’s a pleasant summer (for once) in England and I should be jigging around and eating dodgy hot-dogs at music festivals etc. However, living the high-life costs $’s and AI is free. No contest, and no dysentery.

* Talking of audiobooks… Librivox has just released a Weird Tales Double Feature public-domain audiobook. This being “The Salem Horror” by Henry Kuttner and “The Black Kiss” by Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.

* In the latest edition of The Fossil, the worthy and long-running journal of the Historians of Amateur Journalism… “David Goudsward describes a sea serpent that was the subject of a 1923 story written by Sonia Greene [Lovecraft’s wife]”. Freely available online.

* Hot from Pulpfest, a recording of a panel on Pulp Paleontology”, on dinosaurs and dinosaur-hunters in the pulps.

* And finally, talking of digging up fossils… “Startling Percentage of Neuroscientists Say We Could Extract Memories From Dead Brains”, referencing a paper published in the open-access megajournal PLOS One. Maybe we could store them inside the Moon in future?

— End-quotes —

“A few days ago I went over to Anastasia Island […] Tall trees casting a sinister twilight over shallow lagoons — funeral garlands of trailing Spanish moss — and the whole ground surface alive with scaly, wriggling saurians” — Lovecraft visits an alligator island in Florida, May 1925.

“… many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance — scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling.” — from “The Nameless City”.

“I am not only a non-modern but a violent anti-modern. Intellectually I believe in nothing; aesthetically I believe only in the irradiate dreams of childhood. Sophistication I loathe and abhor with all the venom inherited from aeons of reptile and saurian ancestors in palaeolithic abysms of terrestrial history, and I even despise intellect when not directly concerned in the process of philosophical and scientific intellection. By this latter paradox I mean that I see nothing of beauty or pleasure in intellect, but only the hideous fascination of the forbidden Golden Door for the miserable Agib who stands before it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1921.

Last bus to Innsmouth

30 Monday Jun 2025

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Playing around with a local install of Flux Kontext Dev. Not much use for auto-colourising old postcards (too crude, compared to Palette or Kolorize) or comic book pages (too inaccurate across panels), I’ve concluded. But one of the things it can do is take an image of someone and ‘re-imagine them’ in a new situation. Here’s Lovecraft on the last bus to Innsmouth…

Thanks to Khoi Nguyen for his digital sculpt of Lovecraft’s head, a render of which provided the seed image.

HPLinks #41 – Derleth’s portraits of the Kalems, Madness sketch, Ethnos article, Crumb, and more Doom…

10 Tuesday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #41.

A slightly smaller HPLinks this week, because I’m set to install Windows 11. Then there’s all the work that follows on from such a gigantic move to a new OS. Eeek! Don’t worry, though, it’s a ‘superlite’ version of the installer ISO with absolutely no bloat, junk, sign-in, apps, ads, privacy-invasion, forced updates, hardware requirements or other Microsoftie nonsense. Just the OS, and a fast stripped-down one at that. Being installed to a new SSD drive too. This seems the best way to go as Windows 10 dies and Windows 7 can no longer support local AI installs. I seriously considered the Linux OS for two weeks, but in the end… too much trouble to fathom/learn all its arcane ways, and also seemingly far too easy to break the OS just by trying out some new software. Thus I was pleased to discover the now-mature Windows 11 ‘lite’ and ‘superlite’ installers, in which the horror of 11 not just ‘suppressed a bit’ but actively ripped out. After install, my task will then be to make Windows 11 look as much like faithful ol’ Windows 7 as possible. I may be some time.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s making available the out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft’s Favourite Horror Stories, Volume 1 under his own Sarnath POD and ebook imprint. He adds… “I will reprint volume 2 of this series in a month or so.” He also gives Derleth’s description of the people present at a September 1938 post-Lovecraft Kalem meeting, via Derleth’s newly transcribed journal for 1938. One example…

Arthur Leeds, an aging man betraying all the marks of faded gentility, with tired eyes, a well-trimmed moustache, iron grey hair standing out against his dark skin, an odd little old-fashioned wing collar contrasting his black coat, his neatly combed hair with the aspect of wetness and cleanliness.

It looks like this is the first time these descriptions have seen print. See Joshi’s post for more such vivid descriptions of the Kalems, in a long quote. Joshi adds, re: Lovecraft and Kalem mentions by Derleth… “I will eagerly await the examination of the journal of 1939 (which David E. Schultz has already transcribed)”.

* New at Project Gutenberg this week, Arkham House: The First 20 Years 1939-1959 in what appears to be plaintext free of OCR errors.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, their Mountains of Madness Sketch Replica…

* Currently on eBay, a catalogue for a 1979 ‘Lovecraft art’ exhibition in France.

* New in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (June 2025), “Cthulhu Anthropology: H.P. Lovecraft and the Discipline of Difference”. Freely available online. The first half of the article is largely a mix of academic obeisance and ‘Lovecraft for beginners’, but the second half (starting at “The Other as Danger? Lovecraft in Anthropology”) has some meat. Though the author is regrettably unaware of the specific non-Boas currents in anthropology which Lovecraft was tapping into, other than making one glancing and unelaborated mention of James Frazer…

Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’ plays a major role [in The Call of Cthulhu]

This may be news to S.T. Joshi, who states in his book on Lovecraft’s philosophical thinking and intellectual influences that…

I cannot see that Lovecraft was much influenced by Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, for all the frequent citations of it in his stories” (H.P. Lovecraft, The Decline of the West, p. 24)

Here is Lovecraft stating the matter for himself…

I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as [Sir Edward Burnett] Tylor, [Sir John] Lubbock, [Sir James] Frazer, [Jean de] Quatrefages [de Breau], [Margaret] Murray, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn, [Sir Arthur] Keith, [Marcellin] Boule, [Grafton] G. Elliot Smith, and so on.” — Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness.

All British, except for an American and two Frenchmen. The one American was a very prominent eugenicist who had studied at Cambridge University in England. One of the Frenchmen was a member of the Royal Society of London. The Anglophile Lovecraft was evidently looking largely to Britain for his reading on such matters, and the British despised the American anthropologists. In 1919 Lovecraft had also read deeply in the anthropology of religion, as the field then stood, and this evidently formed many of his enduring ideas. Jean de Quatrefages seems to have been essentially a biologist, and was the first to suggest that new races might be formed by inter-breeding. Marcellin Boule gave us the view of the ancient Neanderthal type as likely to have been brutish, hairy and ape-like.

* A new in-depth biography of another key American outsider creative, Robert Crumb, may be of interest to Tentaclii readers.

Also, note that some 170-pages of Crumb’s serious / biographical / historical comics are set to be newly collected as Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979 – 2004. So far as I know, he never did anything related to Lovecraft, but I welcome being corrected on that point.

* In Amsterdam at the Black Cat Library on 21st June 2025, a Soiree Lovecraft event with lecture. Seemingly to launch a new novel, which at a guess may feature Lovecraft the man? Booking now.

* And finally, a video of “All the Lovecraftian references in Doom: The Dark Ages”. In Spanish, but YouTube now has AI auto-dubbing into English.

— End-quotes —

[As a creative writer] “I am a paradox anyway — for there have been periods when astronomy, geography, physics, chemistry, & anthropology meant more to me than any form of pure literature or aesthetics.” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, December 1929.

“An abridgement of Frazer’s Golden Bough is valuable as a compendium of odd folk-beliefs” — Lovecraft’s “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (1936). With the faint implication that was all it was good for.

“I believe a Georgian doorway has more real significance for an ordinary American than an Inca masque or Italian primitive has. In order to make the Inca or Renaissance object of equal significance — equal relationship, that is, to the actual experience & tradition stream of the beholder — one would have to take exhaustive & specialised courses in Peruvian anthropology & cinquecento art & life. It is childish to imagine that the layman can have any real knowledge whatsoever of the life & feelings of the various cultures represented by museum objects, so that the illusion of reaching the heart of the past through such symbols is sheer moonshine. The little aesthete who raves over Etruscan vases & Minoan goldsmith work is really — apart from the element of abstract art appreciation — doing nothing more than playing around in the sand with pretty pebbles for which he invents vapid little stories. He is not half as close to a knowledge of the real thought & feeling of ancient Etruria or Crete as is the historian & archaeologist, whom he tends to despise as a dull, prosy old soul. [And in some more leftist-minded people such as Long,] certain theories of life & art [also] makes you dangerously liable to overlap into the zones of frivolous mock-under understanding & merely derivative experience, without your fully realising the transition.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.

HPLinks #40 – early fanzines, mad Jung, Meeplesmith, Doom and more…

04 Wednesday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #40.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of the Lovecraft fanzine The Acolyte #4 from 1943, with a number of Lovecraft articles.

* Also new there, scans of the early fanzines Dream Quest #1, along with #2 and #5. These being from the late 1940s. General, but with an obvious continuing interest in Lovecraft.

* Talking of the 1940s and 50s, I spotted this in the catalogue description of an archive of personal papers that is now seemingly up for sale from Mark Funke Books…

… fanzines publishing anything at all by Lovecraft carry clearance from us.” [seller’s quote from a 18th March 1957 letter from John Stanton at Arkham House, sent to Boyd Raeburn].

* Translated from a Spanish review in Contrastes Vol. XXX, No. 1 (2025), in which the reviewer compares Jung’s mad delvings to those depicted by Lovecraft…

JUNG, CARL GUSTAV. The Black Books: Notebooks of Transformation in 7 volumes. Buenos Aires: El Hilo de Ariadna, 2024. The publication of The Black Books represents a fundamental event for understanding the thought of Carl Gustav Jung. […] the English edition of these previously unpublished notebooks appeared in 2021 under the direction of Sonu Shamdasani […]. This [new Spanish version] is a colossal, private, and numinous work, in which Jung, on several occasions, seems to lose control of his own psychic experience. Published in facsimile format, it allows consultation of the original manuscript, which adds an additional layer of depth to the reading.

At first glance, The Black Books can be compared to the work of Jung’s contemporary, H.P. Lovecraft. Jung’s descriptions of the “primordial” beast striking similarities to the stories of the writer of Providence. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is not very different from Jung’s archetypal visions, such as Atmavictu or Abraxas, that emerge in these texts. However, the distance between the two authors is significant: while Lovecraft cleaves to a materialistic and pessimistic vision of the cosmos, Jung opens up to the numinous dimension as a source of psychic and spiritual transformation.

* Be aware that Amazon shows the cover for the limited-edition ‘early Bird’ edition of the Druillet-Lovecraft book, which came with a slip-pocket and an additional set of prints as cards. What they actually ship is just the standard Druillet-Lovecraft book (Nov 2024) without such extras. At present the standard book is also currently still available direct from publisher Galerie Barbier in France, though I can’t help thinking that won’t last forever and it will probably sell out in due course. The sumptuous 288-page book has Demons et Merveilles (1976) reprinted in full, all the Necronomicon pages, the covers Druillet designed for Lovecraft’s books, plus additional “rare or unpublished paintings and sketches”.

Standard edition

* Nyarlathotep and Other Tales of Cosmic Dread (June 2025), a new album by David Thrussell & Flint Glass. No idea about the music, but the physical version has a pleasing look. Artwork possibly generative, but also possibly by ‘stefan alt’ who is credited with the design…

* Encountered at honest Abe’s used book emporium, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in French in 1975…

* Last noticed here in September 2024, Meeplesmith’s “Lovecraft’s Monsters” appears since then to have added new lines in its paintable miniatures. Including what is effectively a shoggoth…

* The big headline-grabbing videogame Doom: The Dark Ages is now available, and it appears to be a critical and sales hit even before its first patch.

Many are noting the very strong Lovecraft influences in the new game. A small sampling…

     – “like Lovecraft was on the writing team”
     – “really good during the Lovecraft part of the game”
     – “adds a Lovecraftian style to Doom, mixing green hues, water, and tentacles to the usual mix”
     – “appears to be heavily influenced by the Cthulhu mythos”

Apparently there are also many spoilers to be had in the game’s early reviews and YouTube videos, so it’s perhaps best not to delve too deeply there before playing.

If it’s moddable, there may be some interesting ‘even more Lovecraftian’ fan-mods in due course.

* Adventures Fantastic has a review of the new Robert E. Howard biography. And I see there’s another new free and excellent audiobook reading of an REH ‘El Borak’ tale, this time “Son of the White Wolf”. Download as an .MP3 file, to avoid the ads.

* A useful guide to REH adaptations, a new (nearly) Complete Chronology of The Savage Sword of Conan. This publication being Marvel’s Conan magazine which offered around 50 pages of b&w story per issue, in an oversized magazine with quality artwork and (mostly) complete-in-this-issue storytelling. In this new list and guide, the magazine’s issues are carefully and newly sorted by Conan’s age (or apparent age) in each tale. (Note that Marvel’s Savage Sword is not to be confused with their equally long-running monthly Conan the Barbarian title, which was sold on the spinner-racks among the superhero and funnies comics. These monthlies were recently bundled by Darkhorse into over thirty reprint volumes, titled The Chronicles of Conan).

* One for ticket-baggers to watch, 30th Anniversary H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland in October. Can’t be long now…

details will be revealed in summer 2025, and the first deluxe and VIP tickets will go on sale in our annual Kickstarter fundraiser (tentatively planned for June/July)

* And finally, in Providence… the local newspaper reports Lovecraft’s real “Shunned House” sells for $1.8M (Archive.is link, to let readers outside America bypass the EU-triggered censorship).

— End-quotes —

* “Vermont did not form the end of my visiting; since W. Paul Cook, on his second trip up, repeated the process of kidnapping a helpless old gentleman and bore me away for a week’s visit to Athol, where I had the honour of seeing him send to press, with his own hands, the sheets of my story The Shunned House, which when published will form my first cloth-bound book, (albeit only a thin affair of sixty pages, with a brief preface by my Belknap-grandchild).” — Lovecraft to Zelia Bishop, July 1928. (The project fell through, and the sheets passed through various hands).

* From “The House” (Lovecraft’s poem on the real Shunned House, July 1919).

The rank grasses are waving
     On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories sav’ring
    Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
    Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
    When the red sun has set

* Lovecraft’s own rough sketches of the real Shunned House in Providence…

HPLinks #39 – join the Esoteric Order, Lovecraft’s Dark Enlightenment, sculpting Lovecraft, Dunwich revived, Mayfair magazine, and more…

25 Sunday May 2025

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HPLinks #39.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a new acolyte to join his very own secret Esoteric Order. He also notes the ‘zine…

Nightlands no. 3 (Autumn 2024), containing my article ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Art’ (an article I wrote years ago as liner notes for an album that never appeared)

* In German, a philosophy journal article whose fragmented title might best translate into English as ‘The Dark Enlightenment of H.P. Lovecraft’, from Weimarer Beitrrge No. 68 (2022, freely available online 2025)…

… he develops an atheistic-materialistic philosophy not only in his literature, but also in essays and especially his extensive correspondence, which can be understood as a “dark enlightenment”. What Adorno and Horkheimer do in their dialectics of the Enlightenment, based on de Sade and Nietzsche also applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, for Lovecraft. His work unfolds an “intransigent criticism of practical reason” and its agent, the too “self-evident subject”. [Only by understanding the] basic positions of Lovecraft’s philosophy, as developed in essays and letters, does his poetics of form [become clear and] open us up to the full understanding of his literature. His works also provide directional concepts for the philosophy and philology of ‘the eerie’. […] Against this background [I engage in] a reading of his “The Color Out of Space” (1927)

* From Russia, “Preserving the Author’s Style in Translating The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“ (April 2025). A short conference paper, freely available online. Partly in English.

* Deep Cuts considers the very late “Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975), by Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman.

* “Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft” via 3D digital sculpting and texturing. A link from a few years back, but I don’t think I’ve linked to this ‘making of’ page before. Only to the results.

* New on Archive.org, a pack of three Historic Males SD 1.5 LoRAs including Lovecraft. These are free character add-ons for generating images with Stable Diffusion 1.5. Historical personage add-ons having been last week removed from CivitAI (the main Stable Diffusion download website) along with living celebrities. I guess CivitAI didn’t have either the manpower or the cultural savvy to know if a celeb was dead or alive, and thus they junked the lot.

Tip: you may want to put “Spock” in the negative prompt, if the LoRA wants to veer towards Star Trek’s Captain Spock. That seems to restore Lovecraft’s face. The above is an Img2Img style transform + the LoRA, starting from a Bondware Poser 13 render.

* Feuilleton has lengthy comments on the ‘history of Lovecraft in comics’ academic paper (linked to in my previous HPLinks). Reading this history has spurred him to finish his own unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror… “This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish”.

* The Alan Moore World blog has “Lovecraft was an American William Blake”…

In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge.” (Moore, 1993).

Sadly, it appears that his Yuggoth Cultures was left in a London taxi-cab and thus lost. Not sure how the book overlaps with Moore’s comic-book series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, but I’ll take it on trust that Alan Moore World knows that the published comics and the lost book are different things.

* I missed noticing this event, but managed to snag the poster at a small size. A ‘Lovecraft festival’ on the videogame service Steam, which has now been-and-gone.

But from this I was able to track down the larger and more appealing artwork (same artist, no artist credited) that the poster was partly made from…

* Bounding Into Comics reviews the new Re-Animator movie 4K UHD set, and itemises the many additional extras newly packaged with the movie.

* The publisher Dark Horse is preparing to ship a ‘special hardcover’ edition of Richard Corben’s “Lovecraft and backwoods terror” graphic-novel Rat God. 184 pages with “remastered lettering”. Unfortunately it’s also being coloured, having originally been in greyscale. Due in the autumn of 2025…

Terrible things stalk the forests outside Arkham in this chilling original tale from comics master Richard Corben.

* Viking (an offshoot of Penguin Books, last I heard) is reported in the book trade as being set to publish Penguin Weird Fiction later in 2025… “an anthology of stories featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others”. The advance notice makes it sounds like the stories feature these authors as characters, but I suspect it’s not that interesting. Just another cash-in reprint, I expect.

* New on Archive.org, a set of Mayfair magazine (for several decades a leading mass-market British equivalent to the U.S. Playboy), which search shows had in its February 1970 issue a reprint of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”. George Underwood was the artist…

* Another new batch of short SF/fantasy readings at LibriVox. This time around there are four by Lovecraft’s one-time protege Henry Kuttner, all public domain. Also, I didn’t realise any stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley had slipped into the public domain. But at least one of her stories must have, since she’s in this collection.

* And finally, a reminder to those who may be visiting Providence this summer, that I have a free Lovecraft’s Providence Map online.

— End-quotes —

“”Polaris” is rather interesting in that I wrote it in 1918, BEFORE I had ever read a word of Lord Dunsany’s. Some find it hard to believe this, but I can give not only assurance but absolute proof that it is so.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“As to the charge of modernism against me because of my predilection for Poe & Dunsany, why, Sir, I refute it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner December 1919 (he instead hails his predecessors in the 18th century gothic, discovered and read in his childhood attic).

“When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of “The Gods of the Mountain”, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean”, “The City of Never”, “The Fall of Babbulkund”, “In the Land of Time”, and “Idle Days on the Yann”.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“… a few weird [stage] dramas such as Dunsany’s ‘Gods of the Mountain’ & ‘Night at an Inn’ have demonstrated how a natural expert can weave horror, dread, & mounting tension with skilfully managed dialogue.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, March 1935.

“I infinitely prefer Dunsany to Cabell — he was a genuine magic & freshness which the weary sophisticate seems to lack” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, August 1926.

“Imaginative artists have been few, and always unappreciated. [William] Blake is woefully undervalued. Poe would never have been understood had not the French taken the pains to exalt and interpret him. Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise.” (Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, January 1921).

HPLinks #38 – Lexicon bagged, history of Lovecraft in comics, Amazing tentacles, Baranger art-prints, Tower of Shadows, AI art-styles, a bad fire, and more…

16 Friday May 2025

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HPLinks #38.

* The latest edition of the journal ImageTexT has “The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics”. The first part surveying some of the history of Lovecraft in comics. Open-access, freely available online.

* The Passing Place this week blogs about a new project, having newly embarked on what sounds like a researched… “book about Lovecraft’s creatures and worlds”. The author has some form there. Having already produced a 2022 book, though I don’t think I had noticed it here at Tentaclii, a book titled Lexicromicon: A bluffers guide to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

For those impatient for this forthcoming book, note that there’s already Anthony Pearsall’s fine The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places & Things in the Tales of H.P Lovecraft (2005). Which I only have as a Kindle ebook purchase, not ideal for a quick ‘pull it off the shelf’ consultation. But I’m pleased to say that Passing Place’s post fortuitiously prompted me to check eBay just now, and thus I’ve bagged the Lexicon. In VG paper from a UK seller for a reasonable £12… nice. Normally the price is stuck at three times that. Thanks again to my Patreon patrons, for the PayPal used to bring such little treasures winging onto my book shelves.

* The Pulp Super-Fan looks back at the ‘The Library Lovecraftian’ series, itemising what was in this ill-fated mid-1970s attempt at a small Lovecraftian fiction ‘zine. The third issue managed to attract “The Horror on the Beach: A Tale in the Cthulhu Mythos” by Alan Dean Foster (by then a well-known SF writer, I seem to vaguely recall), but after that it folded.

* New on Archive.org and new to me, scans of what appears to be a full run of Cimoc. This being a Spanish local equivalent of Heavy Metal magazine, and which ran 1981-1996. There’s a wealth of fantasy and science-fiction artwork here, even if you can’t read the stories. How many of these monthly Heavy Metal equivalent Euro-comics were there? Quite a few, it seems, as I also recently discovered the Italian equivalent L’Eternauta, having already known about the various Toutain-edited titles and licenced editions.

* Talking of which, this week up pops Les magazines de bande dessinee en France (2025). It’s a new open-access book with various chapters on the history of the ‘BD’ comics form in France. Includes, among others, in French…

   – Influence of the North American underground in adult comics magazines in France, 1969-1976.
   – Rock in comic-book magazines from the 1970s and 1980s.
   – The place of sex in comic-strip magazines for adults in the 1980s.

* Turns out the major new exhibition ‘Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo’ may have a Lovecraftian feel in their Old Europe macabre mistiness, if the images shown in reviews are anything to go by. On now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, until 29th June 2025, though with a hefty £17 ticket price. There’s a book catalogue.

* New on Archive.org, a fine scan of Amazing Stories for December 1929, with a delightfully tentacular cover that was new to me. One recalls Tolkien’s “The Watcher in the Water” here, and wonders if he ever saw the magazine in his friend Lewis’s pulp collection.

* Frontier Partisans has a brief “Centennial Salute to H. Rider Haggard”, 100 years after the adventure writer’s death.

* The Silver Key reviews the new biography Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author (2025), and finds it worthy.

* Limited edition French Paper Art Club fine-art prints, featuring The Art of Francois Baranger. Some are already selling out their editions, with the ‘Mi-Go from space’ print already gone.

* Publisher Fantagraphics is reprinting lesser-known Marvel Comics material as pleasing new books. The first is Lost Marvels Vol. 1: Tower of Shadows (2025) which collects the new comics (not reprint material) that appeared in the Tower of Shadows supernatural anthology news-stand comic from 1969-1971. Included adaptations of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” and “Pickman’s Model”.

Barry Windsor Smith in his Trimpe-emulating period, original artwork for a page of “The Terrible Old Man”.

* A new free Lovecraft Pulp Style LORA, a style add-on for Stable Diffusion SDXL-based image-generating AI models. The style is too ‘modern card-art for tabletop games’ for me, but some may like it and one user seems to have pushed it more towards Lovecraft’s landscapes.

* Talking of SD, I’ve been running workflow tests to see if a scene from Bondware’s Poser 12 can be translated to a new and convincing artistic style, using Stable Diffusion 1.5. The aim here was to keep exact Photoshop-layer registration with the original Poser render of the 3D scene (here deliberately made to look bad but also ‘SD friendly’). Such that the resulting image then can be consistently re-coloured and parts of it easily masked in Photoshop. Easy consistent clothes / heads / colouring / style being a Holy Grail in SD-made comics. Here a strong Controlnet, using a special type of render from Poser, holds the scene in place while allowing the SD style makeover to happen.

Using a difficult test scene from Poser I’ve had some success, as you can see. In this little demo a Lovecraft-alike visits an alien world and surveys the cosmos through his boyhood telescope. A wonky pose was applied to the Poser figure, meant for a steampunk airship with rigging for the figure’s hand to grasp. And it’s ‘too light, to too dark’, but that’s intentional. Plus getting a likeness of Lovecraft was tricky from a 768px starting render. Anyway… it’s a proof-of-workflow and you get the idea. Now I’m moving on to try to ‘Moebius’ the same scene.

* Talking of which, the new edition of The Comics Grid has the long article “Moebius and Digital Tools: From Experimentation to Remediation”. This examines how… “Moebius used digital tools throughout his career in a variety of ways, ranging from experimentation to remediation and back”. Remediation = ‘fixing unsatisfactory old artwork’.

* A while back I blogged about Novelforge, the offline creative writing editor software with style assistants and a one-time $60 purchase. A new version had added a choice of free remote or local AI creative-writing assistants. Those who tried it then may recall that Novelforge unfortunately lacks a dark mode, but… I now find this can be forced with the latest $10 WindowTop Pro utility. WindowTop forces any Windows software to use a dark mode, while also trying to keep the user interface’s other red-blue-green colours the same. The effect can be toggled with a few keyboard presses. I tried several ‘dark mode forcers’, and this was the one that worked for Novelforge while also keeping the red-blue-green UI icons etc intact.

* On display at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, until the end of June 2025, a selection from their new Lichtman Sci-Fi Fanzine Collection. The selection being exhibited aims to survey the collection’s “breadth and depth”…

… the Robert Lichtman Science Fiction Fanzine Collection amounting to over 15,000 items. This extensive collection spans nearly a century, dating from the late 1930s through 2022, and features commentary, fan fiction, criticism, conference proceedings, and other genres. Along with the printed works, the archive includes correspondence, original art, and several fanzine titles personally published by Lichtman.

It occurs to me that long-time fan collectors could now approach the Library, to see if their own collection might make a welcome and complementary addition (in due course)?

* And finally, Oregon Live has a long article recounting how last December, a couple purchased the sight-unseen contents of a storage unit in Lyons for $60, finding there…

“The original manuscript of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story, ‘Under the Pyramids’, which Lovecraft wrote on the back of old business letters.”

This turned out to have been stolen from…

James Strand’s collection [which was] probably the finest ever put together of science fiction and fantasy dealing with Lovecraft, [and also] Arkham House and the Arkham House writers. I can’t even think of an institution with a better collection.” (quote by L.W. Currey) […] Drug dealers and street-gang members quickly waltzed in after the medical examiner departed with Strand’s body [after his death]. They ransacked his library, stealing first editions, manuscripts and original art. [ Local police were not interested in the thefts, but …] The FBI [now] estimates $1 million in stolen books and comics have been recovered, but no one knows how many Strand books have disappeared into personal collections, burn piles or other storage lockers. If Strand kept a meticulous inventory, it disappeared in the looting of his home.

One hopes that, at least, no unpublished Lovecraft letters were lost. Such a pity the collection was never shipped to a university archive. But then in the case of some universities, you have to wonder if the archives themselves will be subject to purges a few decades along the line.

— End-quotes —

“I used to have the atlas [Mitchell’s Ancient Atlas], but it was lost during a household removal. Three removes [i.e. house moves], said old Dr. Franklin, are as bad as a fire!” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber Jr., December 1936.

“… the door of some Cyclopean furnace had been thrown wide, and the old mansion stood out black against a veritable holocaust of empyreal fire. The spectacle was a chromatick tumult unearthly and iridescent, nearly every colour having its place — even a vivid and sinister green which seem’d to typify the poisonous corrosion and putrefaction of the decaying elder America.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, November 1923, on encountering his own ancestral Simmonsville mansion amidst a violent sunset, during a walking tour of old family places.

“… [my] hands simply paralysed unless I hold’ em over the [portable oil] heater and thaw’ em out afresh for every beastly word. [Though] maybe I’ll survive through the night, since I see a fire has just been started in the furnace” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1925 (Lovecraft, shivering in his New York room on the edge of Red Hook).

HPLinks #35 – a different Alcestis, Hobbes and other philosophy, magic detectives, Brown, modernism, Moebius, pop-ups and more…

24 Thursday Apr 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #35.

* The HPLHS Store now has the new Alcestis book version in stock…

… not only had the pair of them written a new prologue for the piece, but also presented after that a version of the play itself that was substantially different from other known translations, so we consulted with a classics scholar. In the end, instead of the lovely but simple pamphlet containing Sonia and Lovecraft’s version of Alcestis, we originally intended to produce, we are creating a casebound volume containing an explication of all of the new discoveries about this piece in the form of a paper by Helios Editor/Publisher N.R. Jenzen-Jones and classics scholar Carman Romano; Sonia and Lovecraft’s edition of Alcestis, complete with their prologue, and newly commissioned illustrations by several of our favorite artists.

* “Music for a blind idiot god: towards a weird ecology of noise” (2024). On “the horror of noise” in Lovecraft and others. Freely available for download.

* In the latest issue of the open-access journal Diaphonia, “Uma interlocucao entre estado hobbesiano com “O mito de Cthulhu” na literatura de H.P. Lovecraft”. It’s an awkward title to translate but, with reference to the abstract, this would about cover it: ‘A discussion between the absolutist Hobbesian state and the totalitarian sovereignty of Cthulhu as described in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Freely available online.

* A new contribution on ‘The Weird’ from Graham Harman, a leading philosopher in the field, “Weird Fallibilism: Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Justified True Belief” (2024). Freely available for download. Drawing on Lovecraft, he suggests the description of ‘weird fallibilism’ for a situation in which… “1) truth never corresponds to reality, and (2) objects never correspond to their own qualities”.

* A review in the new edition of Mythlore of the academic book Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery (2025). The review is freely available online.

* The new academic book Deviant Landscapes: A Journey to Exotic and Imaginary Places and Spaces (2025). Intriguing title, but the only somewhat relevant chapter appears to be “Atmospheric Narrative Landscape, Stimmung and Place-Making in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence — A Fable””. Stimmung is German and means broadly ‘mood/atmosphere’.

* The recent visit by S.T. Joshi made me aware of the wider Weird Fiction Collections at Brown University. It’s not just the Lovecraft letters.

* Brown University Master of Fine Arts student Roman Johnson is reported to have been given the latest S.T. Joshi Fellowship by Brown University. No details yet about his research topic or aim.

* A Masters dissertation for Texas State University, “Our Eyes are Yet to Open: H.P. Lovecraft and Modernist Horror” (2023). Freely available online. The abstract shows a clear focus and the author examined the essays and letters as well as three tales…

examines Lovecraft’s essays and correspondence to highlight his concerns and philosophical perspectives with his modernist contemporaries. [A study of three tales shows that] Lovecraft’s fiction exhibits various themes and techniques associated with literary modernism more prominently than one might initially assume. [Integrating aspects of early modernism] allowed him to express his fears and philosophical viewpoints about modernist concerns through terrifying and cosmic imagery.

* Robert Silverberg on HPL’s “gloriously overwrought” Shadow Out Of Time, an article extracted to HTML from Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (December 2005).

* Now on Google Books with a preview, the new biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* In the field of vintage comics appreciation, Deep Cuts has a new long post. Finding that there was an Italian edition of the Heavy Metal magazine ‘Lovecraft special’. The images shown reveal that the cover used an enlarged and coloured version of that issue’s fine b&w Moebius drawing. The long post has exhaustive details of the different editions, and many interior page and details. Here’s a good cover image I snagged from eBay, where collectors will still find several copies of the Italian edition for sale.

* Newly listed on eBay UK, Lovecraft’s Selected Letters: 1929-1931 from a UK seller and at a sensible £20 price. Though sadly there’s no ‘Click & Collect’ on offer, or I’d have had it. Still, some Tentaclii reader (with a big and accessible letter-box, able to take chunky books) may want it at that price.

* And finally, also on eBay and new to me, the Necronomicon Pop-up Book (2017) by ‘Skinner’ and Rosston Meyer…

— End-quotes —

“144. Hideous book glimpsed in ancient shop — never seen again.” — from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story germs and ideas.

“To Whomsoever May Open This Book: This is set down as a Warning to you, Sir or Madam, that you are not to open this Book beyond the Place mark’d by a red Riband. It wou’d be better for you to throw the whole Book unopen’d into the fire; but being unable to do so myself, I cannot hope that you will. I do nevertheless adjure you to look nowhere in it beyond the Riband, lest you lose yourself to this World, Body and Soul; for truly, it is a Tomb for the Living.” — Lovecraft pens an original ‘book warning’, in his best circa-1780 style, in a letter to Morton of March 1937.