Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts

HPLinks #34 – Providence, Witch House, cosmic DC, Dexter Ward and more…

16 Wednesday Apr 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #34.

* In the new April 2025 issue of the academic journal Horror Studies ($ paywall), the lead article is “Dark Epiphany: The Lovecraftian in twentieth-century existential literature”.

* A call for papers from the British Fantasy Society. Their BFS Journal plans a special issue on ‘War in Fantasy’. I’m guessing that an article on “Dagon” and “The Temple” as wartime stories might have a chance? Or perhaps Derleth’s elaboration of the Mythos as a cosmic battleground?

* Newly published, issue 25 of the scholarly journal The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural, and Fantastic literature. A special issue on the author Le Fanu, it includes an overlooked poem by him and “a recently rediscovered monograph of Le Fanu written by his publisher”. Also a topographical article on his associations with places in Dublin.

* HorrorBabble has a new free audiobook of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”. This is a new 2025 recording and also includes subtitles (presumably for those who like to ‘read along’, or perhaps who need to see words spelled as they are spoken?).

* New on YouTube, Ray visits “H.P. Lovecraft Locations in Providence, RI”. He offers a swift 13 minute tour, made with a more-or-less steady camera and deftly edited.

* S.T. Joshi has also been in Providence, and his latest blog post is “A Trip to Providence”. Joshi dived into the immense Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown, which he catalogued forty-five years ago, but which he can now survey with a more experienced eye. He found, among other items, more unpublished letters (now destined for the “forthcoming edition of Smith’s Miscellaneous Letters”), and nine unpublished juvenile stories.

* Joshi’s new blog post also notes that the Best Adventures of Solar Pons is appearing in two paperback volumes, with the first having already appeared. These are the Sherlock-alike stories penned by August Derleth. Looks very affordable and the tales are something I have wanted to read for a while now, but… at present Amazon UK is iffy about shipping to the UK and there’s no eBay listing.

* New this week. “From Beyond: Five DC Titles that Scratch that Cosmic Horror Itch”. It’s a glossy listicle, but one from DC Comics itself. As such it’s a useful survey of Lovecraftian themes in their titles, made even more useful by good page illustrations from the comics discussed (DC being notoriously touchy about others showing their interior artwork).

* Talking of comics, some readers may be interested in the newly published book Drawn to the Stacks: Essays on Libraries, Librarians and Archives in Comics and Graphic Novels (March 2025). Apparently the first such book on the topic. The contents list suggests it is heavily and predictably leftist, but also that it has a number of essays addressing specific weird and supernatural titles. Also of note are the new books Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and the Divine (2024), and Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (2025).

* The new ‘post-apocalypse in the English countryside’ videogame, Atomfall, apparently has a touch of Lovecraft. The indie British-made game is described by DigitalSpy as a blend of…

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – whose name is given to Wyndham village in the game – and [the 1970s British TV series] Survivors, with some Wicker Man thrown in, and a bit of eldritch flair akin to something from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space.

* A new free reading of a long ‘El Borak’ desert adventure tale by R.E. Howard. “Hawk of the Hills” runs just over two hours, and has a good narrator.

* Robert E. Howard Days 2025: Events Schedule for June 2025. This year’s theme is ‘100 Years of Robert E. Howard’.

* Also R.E. Howard related, I note a minor update for the Stable Diffusion LORA plug-in Stygia, now at version 1.2. Designed for generating background images suitable for Conan tales set in Stygia or similar. These early (and arguably the most ‘creative’) SD releases are now very well supplied with LORAs and the tide is ebbing. Thus from now on I shall probably only mention Lovecraft / R.E. Howard / 1930s-noir SD LORAs in HPLinks — rather than in their own post.

* Talking of AI, AI 2027 is a dedicated and new ‘future scenario’ website, which actually goes out to 2030. Gripping, detailed, very lengthy and fairly plausible stuff which arises from serious think-tanking and war-gaming. Possibly of interested to Lovecraftians, in terms of the competing visions of future-AI as a blind tentacular all-devouring Lovecraftian monster, or a benign super-shoggoth that will “advance civilization by decades in a year or two”.

* And finally, I see from a current eBay listing there was a 1974 Signet mass-market U.S. paperback reprint of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, although this was “abridged”(?) and the book padded by Derleth with several other tales by other authors. New to me…

— End-quotes —

“One long-destroyed tale [I wrote as a boy] was of twin brothers — one murders the other, but conceals the body, & tries to live the life of both — appearing in one place as himself, & elsewhere as his victim. (Resemblance had been remarkable). He meets sudden death (lightning) when posing as the dead man — is identified by a scar, & the secret finally revealed by his diary.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1916.

“[Dexter Ward] may get to 75 pages or so before its natural and logical conclusion appears. It centres around old Providence…” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“… of the tale now drawing toward its close [in its writing], and which I shall call either The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or The Madness out of Time. Like Midas of old, curs’d by the turning to gold of everything he touch’d, I am this year curs’d by the turning into a young novel of every story I begin. [… Ward ended up as 51,500 words, but… ] the typing of manuscripts of this length is utterly beyond the powers of a feeble old gentleman who loses interest in a tale the moment he completes it.” — Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, February 1927.

HPLinks #33 – Two Hearts, death and rebirth, mapping Lovecraft, Kitbash Kit, Cairn RPG as 1920s Lovecraft, and more…

09 Wednesday Apr 2025

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HPLinks #33.

* New from the HPLHS, Two Hearts That Beat As One is Sonia’s autobiography…

Businesswoman, milliner, writer, publisher, patroness — known to many as the woman who was married to famed ‘weird fiction’ writer H.P. Lovecraft — Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis was a woman of many names because she lived a rich and fascinating life. Scholar and editor Monica Wasserman, working with Helios House Press, is delighted to be publishing a beautiful case-bound hardcover edition of Sonia’s autobiography.

* Also new from the HPLHS, a set of HPLHS Vintage Prop Maps, including what appears to be a newly-made one showing the unexplored parts of the world at the start of the 1930s.

* Inklings-Jahrbuch 41: Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic, being the proceedings of a 2023 Symposium in Magdeburg, Germany. Now newly and freely available online. Includes, among others, “Death as a Character and Its Philosophical Depiction in Children’s Books” and “Immortality and Digital Rebirth in Science Fiction”.

* New in the open-access education journal Writing in Practice #9, the long article “Maps to Arkham: Lovecraft, Landscape and Visual Poetry”. Discusses creatively approaching Lovecraft via Situationist methods of walking in a city…

… his walking habits still embody a radical response to place and his negotiation of urban commercialism, coupled with a sense of alienation from the normal life of that environment, has fed into some of the fragmented visuals in ‘Maps to Arkham’. The sense of failure and the city are bound up in his fiction, much of which revolves around nightmarishly huge and hostile urban environments

* New on the Kitbash store, a Lovecraft Kit of 3D models of buildings, which you can then use royalty-free to assemble custom scenes for use with 3D digital artwork or games. A hefty price, but Kitbash are known for quality and they sometimes give away complete kits free — so it might be worth checking their store at Halloween 2025 for a freebie or two.

This Kit brings eerie New England streets to life, with shadowy apartments, a looming city hall, a forgotten library filled with forbidden tomes, and a museum hiding unspeakable artifacts. A solitary lighthouse stands against the dark, its beam barely piercing an endless mist. From dimly lit taverns to cursed houses, every corner whispers madness.

* Free on Itch.io from 2024, “a re-skinning of Cairn RPG, so that it takes place in a 1920s Lovecraft inspired world”. In a 71-page A5 PDF illustrated booklet for RPG gamers, which gives Cairn a comprehensive makeover. The adapted Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike source, Cairn RPG is new to me but appears to be a streamlined game with very compact rules and thus suitable for absolute beginners. It has a strong fan-base and is popular because free/easy/fun. The description for its ‘Seven Silver Spheres’ introductory fantasy-forest adventure gives a flavour of a typical setting. I see the free ‘Barrow Delver’ is the game’s solo play ‘oracle’ and the free Cairn: Pocket Edition is a two-page at-a-glance wall-chart for the rules. There appears to be no AI-powered version of all this, at present, so you’ll need pens, paper and various gaming dice.

* Thomas Phinney’s Cristoforo font, free in .OTF format and free for any re-use. Be warned, however, that I think that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ done in this typeface would probably infringe a key Chaosium trademark. The font is a revival of Hermann Ihlenburg’s Victorian era typeface Columbus.

* Amazon UK is now listing the English translation of Gou Tanabe’s 194-page manga-style graphic novel of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. Due on 1st July 2025, from publisher Dark Horse.

* In Italy, the first issue of the new VersiPellis: rivista di miscellanea a tema fantastico e weird (February 2025) has, among others, the article “Lovecraft and Theosophy: an unconscious inspiration?”, and…

an editorial which makes it clear the desire to build a project that is not a simple container of stories or articles, but a meeting point between enthusiasts and scholars of the fantastic.

“23 pages of comics”. The editors are not averse to considering AI-assisted comics for publication, which may interest some.

* And finally, H.P. Lovecraft Ghibli edition, created with the new type of image generating AI. This works more like a Photoshop filter, in terms of being faithful to the input image, and need only a mimimal prompt for style rather than content. The image itself is not amazing, but works as a demo for the ‘style overlay’ technology behind it. This method of using existing images will change a lot of things in the creative world, once it’s open sourced and can easily be run locally on a PC. Currently, it’s only available as part of ChatGPT 4o.

— End-quotes —

“A drawing of myself by myself would have to be something like the accompanying enormity — which succeeds marvellously in looking like nobody I ever saw in or out of the mirror. I might get a job drawing portraits for Wonder Stories.” — Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, August 1931. Lovecraft includes a rough pen-sketch of his side profile.

“I have a curious and anomalous sense of kinship with the hawk-nosed, broad-templed Roman physiognomy. […] All other non-Nordic physiognomies repel me violently but the Roman features […] as displayed in the realistic portrait statuary of the republican age [of Ancient Rome], produce in me a profound feeling of stirred memories and quasi-identity. I have the curious subconscious feeling not only that people around me once looked like that, but that I once looked like that. Which is rather amusing in view of the fact that I am actually the utter reverse of Roman in appearance — tall, chalk-white, and of a characteristic and unmistakable Nordic English physiognomy.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, December 1933.

“It is said that the Belgian stratospherist Prof. Piccard cuts his own hair — but when I look at the result in newspaper portraits I feel I am the greater artist!” — Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933. In later years Lovecraft cut his own hair with clippers, to save money.

HPLinks #31 – letters for sale, astronomy talk, REH, “From Beyond” filmed, Great Old Ones return, and one last Houdini ‘miracle escape’ (perhaps)…

26 Wednesday Mar 2025

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HPLinks #31.

* For sale, “Three autograph letters from Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 1929”. Newly at Honest Abe’s pulp and paper impoundment, but they could be liberated for a mere third-of-a-bitcoin. In one of these Lovecraft observes that…

Today neither Poe nor Baudelaire could expect the slightest hearing in a standard magazine.

* New on YouTube, a reading of “The People of the Pit” (1918) by A. Merritt, Since the tale was a precursor to the famous Lovecraft-fave The Moon Pool of the same year, it seems highly likely that Lovecraft encountered this story at some point. It’s here read, across 46 minutes, by the very able Josh Greenwood.

* On YouTube, a recording of “When The Stars Are Right: H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy, a one-hour talk by Edward Guimont at the Seagrave Observatory, 5th October 2024. Starts at 2.00 minutes in, when the audio improves greatly.

* New and free in open-access, the academic book Fear of Aging: Old Age in Horror Fiction and Film (2025). Includes the chapter “‘With Strange Aeons Even Death May Die’: Aging in the World of Cthulhu”. Meaning in Lovecraft’s Mythos, not the wider mythos, games, movies etc.

* New from the University of North Texas Press, the chunky new hardcover book Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Released 15th March 2025, apparently. It’s on Amazon UK already but is oddly listed in the “Paranormal” category, and it seems only Amazon US is able to ship it to the UK.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press report that they are now shipping new “Ultimate Editions” of the letters.

* And there’s a further rich haul of R.E. Howard, in the latest LibriVox Ghost and Horror Collection #78. Public-domain readings of four REH tales including “The Skull in the Stars”. Also one by August Derleth.

* New on Archive.org, Mad Dreams And Monsters: The Art Of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studio.

* Some New York City readers may be interested in Syd Mead: Future Pastime, a large retrospective exhibition of the paintings by the science-fiction master. Being staged at a venue near Madison Square Gardens, New York City, and open from 27th March – 21st May 2025.

* An open-access / Creative Commons Attribution book review in Spanish, of El Gabinete Magico: Libro de las bibliotecas imaginarias (2023) (‘The Magic Cabinet: A Book of Imaginary Libraries’). The review is in HTML, and thus easy enough to auto-translate. The book is the…

product of almost thirty years of reading” and writing, distilled into “seventy-five entries”, a book in which “a tremendous amount of work is crystallized, tracing sources and organizing data”… “As an additional tool, the work’s name index, arranged in double columns and with a smaller font size, contains fifty-four tight pages that include the names of the writers and literary works, characters, films, articles, stories, and poems cited, not excluding the implicitly alluded references, identified in parentheses, and the authors or works where the aforementioned characters are located, preceded by an arrow. In this way, the interested reader can independently track down a specific writer or character in imaginary libraries, among other information.

Given this amount of effort, it seems curious Lovecraft is never mentioned in the book (I have access to a copy that can be searched). One would have thought that “The Shadow Out of Time”, at the least, would have merited a passing mention.

* I spotted another eBay scan of a postcard that may be of use to Lovecraftian RPG gamers, as a ‘vintage’ game prop…

U.S. Navy Hospital Corps training lab, Newport, Rhode Island.

* Here in the UK, “Filming set to begin on new horror film”. Billed as… “a respectful and faithful adaptation” of “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft and with some substantial acting names attached to the project. But also…

stretching the boundaries of the genre with modern, scientific concepts” and modernising the tale… “a physics researcher tracks down her disturbed mentor to stop an experiment that could rip open a portal to a dimension of unimaginable horrors.

* Veteran Lovecraftian band The Great Old Ones release their new Lovecraftian album Lands Of Azathoth on 27th March 2025.

* Did you think the Fanac Fan History project had come to an abrupt halt? Nope, it’s just that the Site Update History has moved to a new URL. Today’s additions, one sees, include the [ERB] Burroughs Bulletin #23 (New Series). Lots more scans of ye olde skool fanzines to discover, and all free. Dig in.

* The Cancer of Superstition has supposedly been “found” and was due to be published as a new book on 24th March 2025. Paper only, and I guess it should be arriving in the mail about now for the pre-order buyers. Probably best to wait to see what the reaction to the actual book is on the Houdini forums, before ordering, I’d suggest.

* And finally, an excellent new March 2025 reading of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” from The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. The very listenable voice of Josh Greenwood reminds me a little of the great Gordon Gould, but with more rumble and bounce. There’s an advert and intro, then the story. The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is definitely one worth following.

— End-quotes —

“Most of my nearly 43 years in New-England I have spent in semi-numbness & shivering from the rarely-interrupted cold […] as you can well appreciate from remembering [how] the poor old man shiver’d in Cleveland back in [19]’22, when the 5 o’clock lake breeze began to rattle the library windows!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, June 1933, delighting that he at last has reliable steam-heat in his rooms (he had moved to 66 College Street, and a house supplied with abundant heat by the adjacent boiler-room of the John Hay Library).

“At about 12:30 a.m. I was seated at my table writing when a curious & persistent popping or crackling outdoors arrested my attention. Lifting the dark curtain & peering out, I beheld a red world as light as day, with the falling snowflakes glittering weirdly. Seeking the source of the uncanny glare, I repaired to a north window. There, in full view, was the most impressive sight my eyes have ever beheld. Where that evening had stood the unoccupied Chapman house, recently sold & undergoing repairs, was now a titanic pillar of roaring, living flame amidst the deserted night — reaching into the illimitable heavens & lighting the country for miles around. The heat was intense — even here in the house — & the glare was stupendous. […] A high east wind was blowing, & the sparks flew freely, but ice-coated roofs saved the neighbourhood.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1920.

“And it is recorded that in the Elder Times, Om Oris, mightiest of the wizards, laid crafty snare for the demon Avaloth, and pitted dark magic against him; for Avaloth plagued the earth with a strange growth of ice and snow that crept as if alive, ever southward, and swallowed up the forests and the mountains. And the outcome of the contest with the demon is not known; but wizards of that day maintained that Avaloth, who was not easily discernible, could not be destroyed save by a great heat, the means whereof was not then known, although certain of the wizards foresaw that one day it should be. Yet, at this time the ice fields began to shrink and dwindle and finally vanished; and the earth bloomed forth afresh.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, 1935.

“I literally don’t know what it is to be too hot. The hotter it gets, the more energy I seem to have — mental and physical alike. I perspire freely, but am comfortable for all that I can relish temperatures of 97° and 98°, and never want it cooler than 80°. Of course, I don’t know how I’d be in those inland regions [of the USA] where the summer temperature gets up around 120° — but judging from the available evidence I could stand it better than most.” — Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, October 1935.

HPLinks #30 – Dragon-Fly, insectile Lovecraft, weird spaces and landscapes, dead goths, AI Shadow trailer, Barry’s Library, and more…

19 Wednesday Mar 2025

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

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HPLinks #30.

* On eBay, “two issues of Barlow’s The Dragon-fly, 1935 and 1936. The listing offers some interior pictures.

* New in open-access, the Routledge book The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human (2023)… “tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still-life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film.” Includes the chapter “The Insectile Informe: H.P. Lovecraft and the Deliquescence of Form”…

What resonates not only throughout Lovecraft’s work, but also across the scholarship establishing and legitimising him as a writer stretching his ear towards the non/in/anti-human, is the discourse of the valorisation of form: ‘man’ — the ultimate apparition of form— emboldened against the murmur, the buzzzzzzzzz of a background without form.

* A new open-access book from Italy, in Italian. In translation the title is Geometries of Terror: architectural spaces and weird literature (February 2025). Includes, in Italian…

   — The Localization of the Supernatural Between Weird and Modernism

   — Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” and the Representation of Places of the Unknown

   — The Word and the Void: Ghostly Spaces in Western Literature

   — The Architecture of the Unconscious: Hauntings, Places and Non-Places in the Works of Robert Aickman

The book is under Creative Commons Non-commercial, thus translations for a non-profit ‘zine or blog are possible.

* The open-access Journal of the Short Story in English has a new special issue on ‘Creative and Critical Responses to Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction’ (2024). Includes “Fragmented Temporality, Digression and Experiments in Consciousness Representation: Arthur Machen’s “The White People””.

* Leslie Klinger, talks about his annotated books in a new podcast interview, including his two hefty volumes of annotated Lovecraft.

* I’ve newly found a postcard of the “Dunwich Woods”. Actually of the English Dunwich, perhaps circa the 1920s, but it could easily be from Lovecraft’s Dunwich. Possibly of use to RPG gamers, as part of a prop pack?

“Dunwich Woods”

* The editors of the Cardiff University open-access journal Studies in Gothic Fiction have issued a February 2025 official notice — they have suspended activities and are no longer accepting submissions. The seventh and final issue was themed ‘The Popular and the Weird: H.P. Lovecraft and Twenty-First-Century Adaptation’, and is still available online for now.

* More Lovecraft and modern philosophy. In the Italian PhD thesis Ontologies of the Future in Contemporary Philosophy: Stiegler and Meillassoux (2021), near the end one finds the long chapter “Overpassing Mediation: Meillassoux and Lovecraft”. Meillassoux being a French philosopher. Freely available online, in English and open-access.

* In Spain, the event CTHULHUton 2025 at the end of March 2025…

* Comic-book industry/history magazine publisher TwoMorrows has been left unpaid, following the financial collapse of the huge Diamond distributor. Diamond had long distributed comics and associated niche magazines to retail stores. TwoMorrows ask readers of their long-running ongoing magazines (Cryptology, RetroFan, Comic Book Creator, Jack Kirby Collector, etc), to “renew their magazine subscriptions” if possible, to help with cashflow. To those of us in the UK they’re offering “new lower international shipping rates” or bookshop distribution via Turnaround Distribution. Lovecraftians everywhere may be especially interested in the one-off monster books page.

* On YouTube, an impressive trailer/visual-pitch for a big-budget movie adaptation of “The Shadow Out of Time”.

* And finally, the sumptuous illustrated catalogue for the auction of The Library Of Barry Humphries, 26th March 2025. Freely available online, as a .PDF file. Slaver over the gothic and weird goodies you could have had, if only you’d sold a couple of bitcoins and the auctioneer’s hammer had fallen in your favour.

— End-quotes —

“[On the streets of College Hill] I acquired a fascinated reverence for the past — the age of periwigs and three-cornered hats and leather-bound books with long-fs. My taste for the latter was augmented by the fact that there were many in the family library — most of them in a black windowless attic room to which I was half-afraid to go alone, yet whose terror-breeding potentialities really increased for me the charm of the archaic volumes I found and read there. […] Living in an ancient town amidst ancient books, I followed Addison, Hope, and Dr. Johnson as my models in prose and verse; and literally lived in their peri-wigged world, ignoring the world of the present.” — Lovecraft, “Ec’h-Pi-El Speaks”.

“As a devotee of the past, I have naturally read more English than American books, and have felt profoundly the charm of those scenes and events amongst which my race-stock was moulded and developed; so that my conception of home and of natural beauty has come to centre in that soil around which so vast a majority of ancestral associations hover — “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” — Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”.

“I am not really literary in the purest sense of the word. Books & authors, as such, do not interest me; since I want only what they transmit. It is beauty — the beauty of wonder, of antiquity, of landscape, of architecture, of horror, of light & shadow, line & contour, of mystic memory & hallowed tradition — that I worship, & I never think of talking about books when I can talk of the stars or the hills or the abbey towers of dim, far lands or the steep roofs that cluster on the slopes of archaic towns. That is why I have read so relatively little, & why science with its breathless mysteries & inconceivable vistas has so often crowded mere letters from my sphere of paramount interest.” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“So many promising & deeply interested weird fans live in places where bizarre books are unobtainable — places like Milltown, Mont., Asotin, Wash., Auburn, Cal., West Shokan, N.Y., &c. &c. — that we feel we ought to give them the benefit of whatever volumes of the sort we may chance to possess. Hence a rather active programme of borrowing is carried out among ‘the gang’. And it is not only the small-towners who need to borrow — for even the largest city libraries are sometimes devoid of the most important weird items.” — Lovecraft, to Natalie H. Wooley, January 1935, on the ‘underground library’ he helped to run in the 1930s.

HPLinks #29 – Schultz, Pera, ‘We Are Providence’ stage play, Faunus in PDF, a pagan thesis, antique monsters, clouds and more…

13 Thursday Mar 2025

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HPLinks #29.

* Deep Cuts has a guest article examining “The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz”. A man well known to Lovecraftians as one of the editors and annotators of the triumph-of-scholarship that is the Lovecraft’s Letters series of books.

* A Spanish news site has a new article on “Filme de Edgar Pera com Pessoa, Lovecraft”, which reveals the director is set to follow his acclaimed ‘Lovecraft meets Pessoa’ movie Telepathic Letters (2024) with… “an upcoming project inspired by Lovecraft tales”. No further details as yet.

* Popping up on Abebooks, a 1983 French ‘BD’ comic-book adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth”. New to me…

* Forthcoming on the New York stage, two plays about Lovecraft’s life. ‘Lovecraft in Brooklyn’ has been staged before, but is now being paired with ‘We are Providence’ which is billed as… “a new play set in Providence, Rhode Island”. The two plays are part of a spring and early-summer series that also features one with R.E. Howard…

On 24th April 2025, the series continues with ‘I have Known Many Grim and Loveless Gods’ [about] creator Robert E. Howard on the last day of his life reckoning with his creations and his mother’s illness.

* Robert E. Howard Days: The 2025 Howard Days Official Poster, revealed.

* Now in Kindle ebook, the first two volumes of Roy Thomas’s Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian. The third has yet to be an ebook, and note that Amazon misleads by selling a “Barbarian Life (3 book series)” that only has two ebooks. The three-book paperback set is significantly more expensive than the ebooks, at £45 UK.

* A new archive for Faunus, the Arthur Machen journal…

all [50] back issues of Faunus will shortly be available to members to download in PDF format for the first time

* All copies of the core An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia have suddenly become insanely expensive on both Amazon and eBay. Time for a budget ebook edition?

* New from Spain, “Revising paganism in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft” (2025), in English. It appears to be a Phd thesis, for the University of Granada. Judging by the contents pages it seems something of an encyclopedia on the topic. Freely available online.

* Set for June 2025, the new Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters.

* S.T. Joshi’s new The Wind in the Portico: Horrors from Classical Antiquity (2025). Available now, a collection of…

instances of horror fiction, poetry, drama, and other work from classical authors (some of them translated by myself—taken from my book Classical Papers), but writings by John Buchan, H.P. Lovecraft, Edward Lucas White, Rudyard Kipling, and many others utilising classical myth and history for their horror tales.

* Newly on Archive.org, the article “The Vortex of the Weird: Systemic Feedback and Environmental Individuation in the Media Ecology of Ito Junji’s Horror Comics”. This led me to track down its source, Stockholm’s Orientaliska Studier No. 156 (2019), a special journal issue on ‘Manga, Comics and Japan’. Now freely available online.

* A new £130 academic book from Springer, “The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games” (2025). Includes the chapter “Departing the Place Once Familiar: Lovecraft’s Eco-Weird Thought”.

* Back in 2019 I looked at Lovecraft’s spring 1931 musing on the possibility that rain clouds and drizzling mists might be partly influenced by fluxes in incoming cosmic-rays. 1931 was long before the idea was first proposed in 1959 by Ney in his Nature paper “Cosmic radiation and weather”. In 2025, an interesting bit of additional research evidence… “Cosmic-Ray Showers Play Pivotal Role in Triggering Lightning Flashes” on earth.

* Some of the indie titles among this week’s wave of Lovecraftian videogame news, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss (first-person thriller/investigation), The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu (four-player co-op adaptation of “The Mound”, by the makers of the worthy game Zeno Clash), and Cthulhu’s Reach: Devil Reef.

* Newly released and of possible interest to Mythos writers, the desktop writing assistance software NovelForge 3.x now has full LLM AI assistance. Still standalone and affordable, at $60. AI’s can be used free, and there’s a video showing how.

* And finally, some readers may be interested in seeing the documentary movie We Are As Gods (2021), on the life and legacy of the counterculture publisher and Long Now thinker Stewart Brand.

— End-quotes —

“Effective weird-fictional language, through rhythm & associative word-values, must always have a certain undercurrent of menacing tensily — shadows, gathering clouds, & all that. […] Very, very few things in Weird Tales ever achieve the desired degree of atmospheric menace” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“In Quebec one of the most striking things is the sky — the odd cloud formations peculiar to northern latitudes and unknown in R.I. [Rhode Island]. Mist and vapour assume fantastic and portentous forms, and at sunset on Labour Day I saw one of the most impressive phenomena imaginable from my vantage-point on the Citadel overlooking the river and the Levis cliffs beyond. The evening was predominantly clear; but some strange refractive quality gave the dying solar rays an abnormal redness, while from the zenith to the southeastern horizon stretched an almost black funnel of churning nimbus clouds — the small end meeting the earth at some inland point beyond Levis. From a place midway in this cloud-funnel, zigzag streaks of lightning would occasionally dart toward the ground, with faint rumbles of thunder following tardily after. […] With such bizarre skies, I do not wonder that the northern races excel those of the south in fantastic imagination.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, September 1933.

The young Lovecraft photographs cloud types, New Year 1907…

CLOUD PHOTOGRAPHY. This work was performed by a new 6.5 × 8.5 camera. The following types were taken:

 Cumulus
 Cirrus
 Stratus
 Cirro-Stratus
 Cirro-Cumulus
 Cumulo-Stratus
 Cumulo-Nimbus, or Thunder-Cloud.

Celestial views were also taken.

“It seems, in the light of recent discoveries, that all matter is in a state of balance betwixt formation and disintegration, evolution and devolution — and that the infinite cosmos is like a vast patch of summer sky, out of which little cirrus clouds gather here and there, presently to be dissolved into blankness again. The universes we know correspond to the little cirrus clouds of that summer sky, being merely transient aggregations of electrons condensed from that field of ungrouped electrons which we call space, and soon to be dissolved into that space again. This process of formation and destruc­tion is the fundamental attribute of all entity — it is infinite Nature, and it always has been, and always will be.” — Lovecraft, “The Materialist Today”, 1926.

HPLinks #28 – Whelan and Mountains, authenticity, REH Borak audiobooks, Sinking City 2, and more…

05 Wednesday Mar 2025

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HPLinks #28.

* Artist Micheal Whelan recalls his career breakthrough 1976: Year in Review (Part One)…

Staking everything on a letter from Donald Wollheim that promised a [book] cover assignment, bolstered by recent success selling his work at conventions, Michael packed his VW Beetle and with trailer in tow headed to New York City to pursue illustration…

At the foot of this portion from his pleasingly-illustrated memoirs, Whelan also notes that he will shortly be…

adding a small preliminary painting from [Lovecraft’s] “At The Mountains of Madness” to our shop. An exclusive preview of the original art will be available for our paid subscribers on Substack before the art is released to our shop on Wednesday, 5th March [2025] at 11am EST

* In the new £140 academic libraries book on Authenticity and Adaptation (Palgrave, Feb 2025), the chapter “”I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror”: The Authentic Lovecraftian Image in Film and Television”. Seeks to identify an authentic core of Lovecraft-inspired visual media, amid its exuberant abundance…

The ‘Lovecraftian’ can be seen everywhere in twenty-first-century visual culture.

* New in Italian and available via Amazon Italy, Yog-sothothery, Oltre La Soglia Dell’immaginario Di H.P. Lovecraft (‘Yog-Sothothery: H.P. Lovecraft Beyond the Threshold of Imagination’) (October 2024). Being a multi-author volume of what sounds to me like literary essays, in Italian. The essayists explore Lovecraft’s…

fantastic stories, considered among the most innovative and intense ever committed to paper, [in] seven essays […] which take the premise that ‘to appreciate Lovecraft you need to have suffered a lot’.

* At the University of Rennes, France, the three-day Le Festival Sirennes. Set for 20th-22nd March 2025…

* In Spanish, another journal review of the book A traves del abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024) (‘Through the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’). Freely available in open-access.

* The German Lovecraftians want a team leader for their Literature Team, which is…

currently working on a volume of essays from German-speaking countries, and a translation project of Lovecraft’s letters and essays

Also, some readers may wish to know that the Tolkien Society’s Amon Hen mag-a-journal is still seeking a volunteer graphic designer, and has been for over a year now.

* New on YouTube, Robert E. Howard’s “Blood of the Gods” (featuring his El Borak adventurer character) in audiobook, Part One and Part Two (120 minutes total). Plus another El Borak tale “The Daughter of Erlik Khan” (150 minutes). Both with a good professional reader. Since the 2012 El Borak audiobook is off-the-market (read from the Del Ray collection by another reader, Michael McConnohie) and totally unavailable, these seemingly-new El Borak recordings are very welcome. Several commenters complain about “ads” in these YouTube readings, but I assume they’re somehow clueless about ad-blockers and/or .MP3 YouTube downloader freeware such as that offered by MediaHuman.

* Want even more desert adventure from Robert E. Howard? Yup, there’s more, via a free audiobook from Horrorbabble reading “King of the Forgotten People” (53 minutes). 1930s adventurer Jim Brill goes seeking a missing scientist in the far reaches of the Gobi Desert.

* Also of note in free audiobooks. New and free on Librivox, the collection The Lost Valley and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood. Also The Magician by Somerset Maugham. The latter centres on a lightly disguised Aleister Crowley circa 1907/08, and… Lovecraft it is not. Though the final description of the creepy Victorian house interior in the Staffordshire Moorlands is well done.

* One of the best big-budget Lovecraftian videogames of recent years now has a Kickstarter page for its planned sequel, The Sinking City 2. The campaign launches on 6th March 2025.

* Possibly of use for Mythos writers for games, the free Llama-3.1-8B-BeyondReality, a relatively lightweight free and local AI specifically designed for suggesting “interactive fiction scenarios” for “text-based adventures”.

* And finally, E-Arkham makes a growing series of fab monsters for the free 3D software DAZ Studio. Load, pose, choose a suitable eerie lighting preset, and then render in 3D. And potentially also then use these renders as seeds for AI enhancements / stylisation in Stable Diffusion. All his items are rather expensive at present, but those experienced in DAZ and Poser know to Wishlist and then come back when the big 70%-80% discount sales are on. All royalty-free, so you can use your renders commercially if you wish.

— End-quotes —

“The advent of Spring — even technically — is surely pleasant to think of. — […] a warm day sent me splashing through the mud & melting snow of the fields & woods […] I never before saw the ponds & brooks so high — & when I crossed the broad gorge of the Blackstone I found the lower banks [of the river] completly over-flowed; with great trees & cottage roofs projecting above an aqueous expanse like reliques of sunken Atlantis.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, 29th March 1934.

“A sense of rushing through chartless corridors seized me, and I saw dates dancing in aether—1923—1924—1925—1926—1925—1924—1923—crash! Two years to the bad, but who the hell gives a damn? 1923 ends 1926 begins! Even the spring had delay’d so that I might see it break over Novanglia’s [New England’s] antient hills! I have lost 1924 and 1925 [to New York City], but the dawn of vernal 1926 is just as lovely as I view it from Rhodinsular [Rhode Island] windows! […] There is no other place for me. My world is Providence. […] The vista from my pseudo-ariel desk corner [at 10 Barnes St.] is delectable — bits of antique houses, stately trees, urn-topp’d white Georgian fence, and an ecstatic old-fashion’d garden which will be breathlessly transporting in a couple of months. Westward, from the brow of the hill, the view is awesome and prodigious — all the roofs, spires, and domes of the lower town, and beyond them the violet expanse of the far rolling rural meadows. [The State House and its] proud copper dome is the dominating feature of the Providence skyline. The view from this dome is said to be absolutely unparalleled — countless steepled towns, league on league of undulating countryside, and the beautiful blue bay to the south, gemmed with emerald islets. One can, the genial sexton says, see as far as Newport on good days; and he has promised to let me up there with a spy glass whenever I feel like making the climb.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, 1st May 1926, on Lovecraft’s return home from his long exile in New York City.

“… glimpses of a charming and mysterious gap in the far-off, vapour-wreath’d purple hills. There birds sang, and the sun filter’d down thro’ delicate vernal foliage and trac’d strange faery patterns on the grass and sand of the lane.” — Lovecraft describing his habitual place of outdoor writing, used daily while visiting Dwyer in “the West Shokan hinterland”. — Lovecraft, Travels in the Provinces of America, 1929.

“And so I emerg’d from under the Roman arch and beheld the city. The morning sun was high and brilliant, and the summerish air told me at once that I had at last set foot in that gentle Old South of which I have so often dream’d. Green and white were omnipresent — springtime leaves and grass, and delectable expanses of aethereal cherry-blossoms …” — Lovecraft in Washington, to Aunt Lillian, 21st April 1925.

HPLinks #27 – Lovecraft in Welsh, Providence Film Fest dates, book covers, Night Wire, Lovecraft in a cleft, and more…

26 Wednesday Feb 2025

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HPLinks #27.

* Hippocampus Press now has a page for A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long and the pre-order discount is active. This page is for the 500 limited-edition hardcover, said to be due in March 2025.

* New and free in open-access, the book Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond (2025). This touches on various topics of possible interest to Lovecraftians, such as Roman antiquity and its legacy in horror, hybrids in Ovid (again), and Mythos writers may also be interested in discovering new gobbets of true-grue in the chapter on ‘Recipes for Horror in Graeco-Roman Magic and Medicine’.

* The ultimate horror, having to read Lovecraft in Welsh. Now you can, as there’s a new book of translations titled Galwad Cthulhu a Straeon Arswyd Eraill (Feb 2025). Translated by…

acclaimed Welsh novelist and short-story writer Peredur Glyn, whose story collection Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi was shortlisted for Welsh Book of the Year in 2023.

* “Existentialism as Cosmic Indifference in Works of H.P. Lovecraft” (2020), an undergraduate dissertation. Currently under embargo, but I see it’s set to be available for public download on 17th June 2025.

* The forthcoming 2025 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – Providence has dates, 22nd to 24th August 2025.

* The organisers of the 2025 Howard Days have a new blog post, which notes that…

The Windy City Pulp & Paperback Convention is happening 4th-6th April 2025 in Lombard, Illinois, where they are kicking off the ‘100 Years of Bob Howard’ festivities! Windy City is one of the best Pulp Cons in the country, and will celebrate Ol’ Two-Gun with dealers, auctions and a REH panel.

* Edward Gorey at 100, from the Gorey Charitable Trust. A round-up of Gorey events for his centenary year.

* Medievalists.net on “Laughing at Evil: The Hidden Purpose of Gargoyles” in churches.

* Another ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale, discovered. Equoid (2013) by Charles Stross. A novella, at 109 pages and one that is seemingly now collectable in hardcover. But there’s also an affordable Kindle ebook. The cover illustration and blurb are spoilers. But suffice it to vaguely say that a British secret-agent is sent to probe strange doings in the Sussex countryside, and these events are then interwoven (in the first half) with H.P. Lovecraft’s confession of his youthful encounter with an ancient horror.

* A new AI 1970s Sci-Fi Book Covers generator, on Glif.app. Glif.app appears to be yet another of those ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ online AI generator sites at which you buy credits. But it has enough free-trial credits to try it out about ten times.

* New on Archive.org, the 1974 UK edition of New UFO Breakthrough. This is a real 1970s paperback and I had it when I was a lad. I would have read it alongside Lovecraft and R.E. Howard. Wow… looking at the book now I see I was sipping from a “big ol’ keg o’ hot moonshine”. Not just normal cloud-skimming UFOs here, but also orgone accumulators, serpent people from Atlantis, underwater UFOs, alchemists, and polar entrances to an ‘inner earth’. Great stuff for the imagination, though, and possibly also a sort of youthful ‘innoculation’ against pure moonshine.

* Talking of which, Erik Davis (author of the classic Techgnosis) has a new long review, of the 1990s The Invisibles DC comic-book series. One I missed encountering back then, as the comic-book scene largely crashed and burned. But according to Davis…

one of the great representative works of the 90s […] a sometimes brilliantly illustrated tale of a team of colorful mutant punks taking on Lovecraftian archons in a metaphysical postmodern blender […] the last gasp of high and mutant psychedelic subculture that stretches back through Hakim Bey, the Church of the Subgenius, Illuminatus!, the Merry Pranksters, and the Discordian Society

* And talking of boyhood influences equally as whacky, but rather more British, I see the BBC has newly turned their old Radiophonic Workshop core sound-bank into a purchasable archive for download. Doctor Who’s old sci-fi wooshes, splurts, blips and whizzles, yours to re-use… for $200. Or sci-fi/horror audio crafters could just pop over to the huge Freesound.org (which incidentally has recently been ingested into Stable Audio Open, the AI sound-FX generator) and get much the same for free.

* New on YouTube, the classic “The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold (1926, Weird Tales). With period audio FX and a dramatized reading, in 22 minutes. In 1936 Lovecraft thought it one of the few old Weird Tales stories worth reprinting. He wrote of… “certain obscure but desirable items which have anciently appeared in W.T. [Weird Tales] or elsewhere. It would have been simply barbarous [for lack of reprinting] to prevent the present generation from reading The Canal, The Night Wire, Bells of Oceana, The Floor Above, Beyond the Door, etc.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, 1936.

* ‘Call of Cthulhu Live’ in summer 2025. An official five-city tour of the UK for Chaosium’s flagship tabletop RPG game.

* The usual tidal-wave of Lovecraftian videogames thunders in each week and Tentaclii never has the time to comb the beach afterwards. But this week I noticed not one but three new one-man indie videogames, and liked the sound and look of all of them. Do No Harm: A Doctor Simulator with a Lovecraftian Twist; The Stamp; and HPL: Nyarlathotep Rising.

* And finally, a thought. President Trump has several times expressed a hankering for a huge new ‘Garden of National Heroes’. It sounds like a new National Park that would contain many thousands of statues and other forms of sculpture, most likely set along verdant long-distance walking trails. Far bigger than a sculpture park, but smaller than the regular-size National Park. It thus occurs to me that, once the bidding-war is over and the winning U.S. state begins to establish the new Garden-Park, it might offer a secure home to the currently-homeless Lovecraft statue? Perhaps the statues of the nation’s horror writers (possibly only the greats who had to struggle heroicly for their art — Poe, Lovecraft, Smith?) might be displayed inside a deep and dark natural rock-cleft? That would afford some protection from spray-can jockeys, while also offering suitable ambience and lighting. A cleft with the stars still visible above at night.

— End-quotes —

[I found myself in …] “a dank, foetid, reed-choak’d marsh under a grey autumn sky, with a rugged cliff of lichen-crusted stone rising to the north. […] I ascended a rift or cleft in this beetling precipice, noting as I did so the black mouths of many fearsome burrows extending from both walls into the depths of the stony plateau. At several points the passage was roof’d over by the choaking of the upper parts of the narrow fissure; these places being exceedingly dark, & forbidding the perception of such burrows as may have existed there. In one such dark space I felt conscious of a singular accession of fright, as if some subtile & bodiless emanation from the abyss were ingulphing my spirit; but the blackness was too great for me to perceive the source of my alarm. At length I emerg’d upon a table-land of moss-grown rock & scanty soil, lit up by a faint moonlight which had replac’d the expiring orb of day. Casting my eyes about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately quitted. […]” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, November 1927.

The poet enters a dark, sinister and ever-narrowing valley …

The walls contracted as I went
Still farther in my mad descent,
Till soon, of moon and stars bereft,
I crouch’d within a rocky cleft
So deep and ancient that the stone
Breath’d things primordial and unknown.
My hands, exploring, strove to trace
The features of the valley’s face,
When midst the gloom they seem’d to find
An outline frightful to my mind.

— Lovecraft, part of a poem he sent to Kleiner, 1918.

HPLinks #25 – Crypt opens slightly, Lovecraft’s stage-play performed, audiobooks, freeware, CAS, handwriting and more…

11 Tuesday Feb 2025

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HPLinks #25.

* New on Archive.org, Crypt Of Cthulhu #14 (1983) and Crypt Of Cthulhu #57 (1988) as scanned PDFs. These were not previously online. Back issues of Crypt are no longer available to buy as PDFs, so this sort of occasional fan-scan release is all we have.

* Alfredo; A Tragedy, free online…

H.P. Lovecraft wrote one play, that never made it to the stage. Here we present it in [full-cast] audio drama form.

* In French on YouTube, but YouTube can auto-translate, Interview with Francois Baranger (November 2024).

* The Breathing Abyss, a new free Lovecraftian mod for the popular RPG videogame Skyrim (Special Edition)…

The Breathing Abyss is an ocean-based quest mod centred around finding out what a mysterious entity is, where it’s from, and how it can be stopped. The mod features incredibly high-quality voice acting, a unique story, and custom assets.

* The Daily Express (a questionable British tabloid newspaper, inclined to clickbait) has a short player review of the new £10 Steam game Dreams in the Witch House…

the mixture of point-and-click adventure, life sim and role-playing works extremely well. […] With multiple endings and outcomes, this sub-£10 adventure is great value for money

* John Coulthart writes…

I’m currently putting together a revised edition of my Lovecraft book, so that’s one thing which may emerge at some point in the new year [2025].

* New on Librivox, public-domain audiobook readings of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter in the Dark” and “The Thing on the Doorstep”. Both read by Ben Tucker.

* Talking of audiobooks, there’s now a CPU-based local audiobook creator that uses local AI-generated voices. The latest Audiblez is free, open-source, installs on pure Python 3.x (no CUDA or PyTorch dependences, which are roadblocks for Windows 7 users) and generates speech locally on the CPU. The new version, released this week, adds a useful Graphical User Interface. Thus Audiblez may interest those with older PCs, who are otherwise unable to run local text-to-speech AI systems.

* I see that another excellent genuine freeware has also updated. Anytxt Searcher can now also run on Mac and Linux, as well as Windows, and has various other enhancements. Useful for scholars, it quickly searches across the text inside your desktop PC’s documents, including .ePUB files. For proximity-search, turn on Anytxt’s Regex ability by selecting ‘Regular Match’ in the search-type drop-down, and use (for example)…

\b(?:eldritch\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?tentacles|tentacles\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,9}?eldritch)\b

A bit of a mouthful, but it works. This example will find all instances of ‘eldritch’ if the word occurs within nine words of ‘tentacles’. Note there are two instances of 9 in the regex, as well as the search-words. Both numbers need to be changed, if you’re expanding the seek-range.

* The Spiral Tower has a new long and cogent essay on “Sword and Sorcery Fandom: When Enthusiasm Becomes a Commodity”, in the hands not of corporates but rather of individual ’empire builders’ who are following the monetisation playbook…

… growth brought with it a new phenomenon: ‘enthusiasm opportunists’. These individuals, exploiting the community’s passion, began leveraging their fandom for personal gain through Kickstarter campaigns and other monetized ventures […] Over time, this monetized culture eroded the DIY ethos that had made the fandom vibrant. […] I voiced my discomfort with this shift, arguing that the commercialization of fandom was compromising its authenticity. However, my critique was poorly received, particularly by those who tied their monetized ventures to progressive [i.e. leftist] activism. My reluctance to uncritically endorse these ventures was cast, inaccurately, as opposition to their broader causes …

* New in English in the open-access journal Revista Laboratorio, “The Fallen American Adam In Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Maze Of The Enchanter””.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a very short review of The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith (2006) and Clark Ashton Smith: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2020).

* And finally, Lovecraft Copywork is a new free online site. It suggests you train to write in the manner of Lovecraft. Copywork is an old-school method of teaching good writing style. Each and every day one carefully and slowly copies a small portion of a great writer’s text, using one’s best handwriting (though here re-typing is suggested). Over time, one learns to intuitively emulate how the author wrote. The technique might also, I’d suggest, be paired with repeated listening to the same text-portion as read by a good audiobook reader.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft on handwriting…

“Lonely philosopher fond of cat. Hypnotises it — as it were — by repeatedly talking to it and looking at it. After his death the cat evinces signs of possessing his personality. N.B. He has trained cat, and leaves it to a friend, with instructions as to fitting a pen to its right fore paw by means of a harness. Later it writes with deceased’s own handwriting.” — Lovecraft’s story germ #88, as noted in his Commonplace Book of story ideas.

“… the process of handwriting is no effort at all unless one aims for great legibility & ornamentation. The reason moderns think handwriting is hard, is that they have never practiced it enough to get used to it. […] It is, of course, perfectly adequate for careless & hasty letter writing, where no delicate plot-nuances have to be managed, & where the most slipshod sentence-structure can get by without criticism. Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man’s style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace. That is why I write so long & so many letters — because I take no pains at all with the language.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1931.

HPLinks #24 – Wayne June, audiobooks, Angouleme, The Haunted Forest, cats and more…

05 Wednesday Feb 2025

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HPLinks #24.

* Rest in peace, Wayne June (1954-2025), the man who read Lovecraft’s tales so expertly in the form of the Dark Worlds audiobook series and “The Shadow Out of Time”.

* New to me, an unabridged vintage recording of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Freely available on YouTube, as a six-hour reading. Read by David Palmer, though his voice is remarkably similar to the outstanding ‘Books for the Blind’ Lovecraft reader Gordon Gould. If a bit more wistful, perhaps. The Online Catalog of recordings for Books for the Blind etc reveals Ward was issued on tape way back in 1982.

* Just released, the LibriVox Short Horror Collection #77, this time containing a feast of R.E. Howard, Derleth, Lovecraft, Whitehead, and Wandrei. All recordings are issued as public-domain audio readings.

* Conan Chronology has a new and fascinating side-by-side look at exactly how the Comics Code censorship operated on the page in the U.S., followed by a long look at “How Conan Conquered the Comics Code”. Yes, Marvel’s Conan adaptations and adapters led the charge for the de-censorship of U.S. news-stand comic-books.

* “U.S. Govt: AI-assisted Works Can Get Copyright with Enough Human Creativity”. Good to know that such common sense is now official, at least in the eyes of the U.S. copyright office. So just because something used AI in some part, don’t assume it’s therefore freely redistributable.

* The new open-access journal, Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media hails from Denmark, and is published in English under Creative Commons Attribution. The journal has so far published three issues.

* In the latest edition of the Spanish journal Theory Now, an open-access review of the book A traves del abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024) (‘Into the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’).

* New from Iceland in English, the 2024 Masters dissertation “Adapt and Die: Ecocriticism and the Lovecraftian Sublime in Rainworld, Outer Wilds, Frostpunk, and Factorio”. Freely available online.

* A delayed Masters dissertation from Norway in English, on “Lovecraftian Horror and the Role of Truth”. It will be freely accessible from 20th November 2025.

* Just finished a few days ago, the giant Angouleme comics-arts event in France. This saw major exhibitions on…

   — The Lovecraft adaptations of Gou Tanabe, now standing at twelve book-length adaptations. [ Radio France one-hour special ] [ In-gallery video and video short (loop) ] [ Printed catalogue currently available, but very likely to sell out ]

   — The “cult Vikings series” of comics, Vinland Saga. [ In-gallery video, a bit wobbly but not sea-sickness inducing ]

   — ‘The City in Science-Fiction Comics’, with selected works from 150 artists including Moebius, Druillet, Bilal, Frederik Peeters and Francois Schuiten. The focus was on “BD” comics format, common in continental Europe. Rather than on the comics of the USA, Britain or Japan. [ There doesn’t seem to be a catalogue ]

   — A survey of BD comics adapting fairy tales for young children. [ Again, no catalogue ]

Incidentally, the UK’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival now has dates — 26th-28th September 2025. This is now the UK’s only potential challenger to France’s giant Angouleme event in the future, after the regrettable lockdown-demise of Shrewsbury’s ambitious comic arts festival.

* Issued in France in French, at the end of January 2025, Gou Tanabe’s adaptation of “The Cats of Ulthar”, as Les chats d’Ulthar. The book is as yet unknown to Amazon UK.

* In Spain in February 2025, the 2nd ‘Ferroviaria Fantastica’, and this year the event has a Lovecraft theme throughout. The title translates as ‘Fastastic Railways’, but sadly it does not appear to be a festival of Lovecraftian scale-model electric railway layouts (now there’s an idea for a railroad-builder videogame). Seems more of a general regional one-day festival of the fantastic, with talks and creative workshops?

* Also in Spain, a regional gallery show ‘The Cthulhu Mythos’, with a substantial set of online gallery pictures.

* I’m pleased to see that Murray Ewing is slowly reviewing the novels of British novelist John Gordon at his blog. Who knew that there were many more novels, after the children’s classic The Giant Under the Snow? Not me, until now. Ewing’s latest review is of The Edge of the World (1983). The thought strikes me that a full-cast / full-FX unabridged audio reading of The Giant Under the Snow would be quite something.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he brings news that the summer 2025 issue of the weird poetry journal Spectral Realms will contain the poem “The Haunted Forest”, liked by Lovecraft and compared by him to Poe. Thought lost, the poem has now been re-discovered in the January 1915 edition of Outward Bound.

* The German Lovecraftians now have dates for their major annual RPG convention anRUFung 2025, now set for 17th to 20th July 2025. They also report that the dedicated Lovecraftian Miskatonic Theatre, a real theatre in Hamburg’s Harburg district, has successfully crowdfunded $15,000 to replace all its stolen gear. It’s reported that this specialist ‘horror theatre’ has so far put on stage its adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

* Marzaat unearths a substantial Lovecraft Mythos tale by John Brunner. Who knew? Marzaat’s blog post is however one to read after reading the tale itself, since we get a complete plot synopsis and plot spoilers. The tale itself is found in Weird Tales v55 #31 1992, and in Robert M. Price’s themed anthology The Necronomicon (Chaosium, 1996). A review of the Price collection called the Brunner tale the… “gem of the collection”.

* Due in early 2025 from Chaosium, a new $50 hardback edition of the Keeper’s Guide for the RPG Cthulhu by Gaslight, intended for the game masters who run RPG game sessions. New cover art by Loic Muzy. The book may also be of use to writers using the setting of late Victorian Britain and the nation’s wider British Empire.

* Elsewhere, I’ve reached seven years of producing my regular 20/20 : Tracking Optimism links newsletter, which tracks causes for rational optimism about the future, and notes substantial debunkings of doom-mongers and alarmists. 20/20 is definitely not one for those inclined toward gloom and doom. I’ve also reached issue #275 of my regular Tolkien Gleanings links newsletter, which tracks interesting Tolkien scholarship and other Middle-earth and mediaeval-fantasy related items that catch my eye. Again, not one for those who are allergic to elves and hobbits and the like. But some readers of Tentaclii may be interested.

* And finally, news just in: the cats of Ulthar reported to have withdrawn from their emergency military alliance with the cats of Scotland! (aka: The Scottish government will not, as was widely mooted in the media, ban the keeping of pet cats in Scotland).

— End-quote —

Lovecraft on northern Scotland…

“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. The races entering into the composition of the Gaels must have been largely Nordic, with a touch perhaps of Alpine (Slav) & Mediterranean. Whence, then, came this peculiar physiognomy?” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“The cult [of witchcraft] does not seem to have crossed into Britain till late in the 15th or early in the 16th century; and it there found its chief seat in Scotland.” — Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, October 1930.

“… how much I enjoyed The House of the Isles, which swept my imagination along with a kind of feudal pageantry all the more potent because it was real family history, & written by one of the characters of the pageant itself, as it were. […] It is certainly a vivid & dramatic chronicle [of the feudal clans of Scotland], & gripped my imagination strongly enough to send me more than once to histories & reference works for parallel background-material & scenic colour. […] The long pedigree [i.e. ancestral line, detailed in the book] is certainly a matter of the keenest interest — both the actually historic portion, which may be taken as extending back to the generations just preceding Somerled, & the earlier parts in which legendary & oral tradition blend gracefully into an increasing twilight of poetic narrative. […] I am very grateful for the loan of The House of the Isles, & would be glad to see the subsequent volume some time if it be of convenient mailing proportions. [… Of course] In actual detail, the period of romantic mediaevalism contained repellent amounts of crudeness. There is little doubt but that neither Somerled nor Bandoin Ui Niall could write his own name, & both probably ate half-cooked meat with unassisted hands, wiping their greasy fingers on their garments. But taken in its entirety, with all its proud, violent feelings & ruthlessly energetic deeds, it has the inestimable quality of typifying concretely & dramatically those basic thoughts, feelings, attitudes, & motive-patterns from which the whole fabric of Aryan life has flowered, & which have characterised the experience of the race during the longest part of its history. It is a symbol of the utmost potency, & has a natural hold on the deepest hidden psychological processes of the European personality. The ending of a stream of experience based upon the approximately similar conditions which have always surrounded us hitherto, & have thus become the indispensable background & reference-points of our habitual thoughts & feelings, is tremendously to be regretted. It is a tragedy because it deprives us of that reservoir of precedent which has so much to do with our sense of the value & significance of things — throwing us back to the beginning, as it were, & placing before us the task of founding a whole new tradition based on the newer conditions of living.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, February 1929.

Wayne June (1954-2025)

31 Friday Jan 2025

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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Red Hook Studios and others have confirmed that Wayne June — for many ‘the voice of Lovecraft’ — has recently passed away. June’s signature weighty voice is heard on many of the finest audiobook readings of Lovecraft’s tales. In these, he has left us a great legacy.

June also billed himself as “audio producer, drummer, singer”. Born in 1954, he began performing with a rock band when aged 15, and he continued to play with a wide variety of 1970s and 80s live and studio bands on a paying basis. He later spent seven years touring every U.S. state, and also internationally, with his guitar hero Johnny Winter. June was the drummer on Winter’s acclaimed album I’m a Bluesman (2004).

Establishing himself as a professional voice artist circa 1998, he was able to draw on his extensive studio experience. But he also trained his voice to audiobook perfection with lessons at Edge Studios in New York, by volunteering for many and varied recordings at Recording for the Blind (RFB&D), and by taking acting classes. His voiceover and audiobook business appears to have been based in Shelton, Connecticut (near New Haven and a little north-east of New York City).

Having grown up reading horror, science-fiction and Lovecraft paperbacks, it was natural that he would want to professionally record such material in readings. His breakthrough narrations were of Lovecraft (the extensive Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft series), three volumes of Poe and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (for his own AudioBookCase venture), and many others (for AudioRealms and others). In recent years he was best known as the narrator (‘The Ancestor’) of the popular Darkest Dungeon videogames (2016-, Red Hook Studios), an extensive performance and a core part of the game’s experience.

A relatively recent horror fandom podcast interview with him is still online, Final Guys #70 – Wayne June Interview (2018).

Doubtless someone with the required skills will be compiling a comprehensive Wayne June discography in due course. Possibly some ‘lost’ recordings will also be uncovered. For instance, he talked of recording Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but (if recorded) this is apparently unreleased.

Four more LORAs, and a CivitAI block tool for UBlock

30 Thursday Jan 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

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A few more recent LORAs, which are kind of ‘style-steering add-ons’ used with MODELS based on Stable Diffusion 1.5. All free. Local AI image generation will ideally require a PC with at least an NVIDIA 3060 12Gb graphics-card.

Not many, as Lovecraft-ish LORAs have been few and far between over Christmas and New Year, what with all the many distractions of those weeks. These are the only worthy ones I’ve spotted, since my last such posting back in 8th December.

18th century men LORA for Rococo clothing, makeup, wigs, from Lovecraft’s beloved 18th century. For use with a MODEL which ‘knows’ what Lovecraft looks like, such as Photon.

Neo Noir v1.0 LORA. Dark film noir with modern slightly CG vibe in the demos, but obviously also able to do more of a ‘1940s publicity shot’ look. Appears to know clothing.

FantasyMapCreator LORA. Doesn’t appear to have gained many users, but some may want to test it.

And a new updated 1.2 version of Realms of the Dead LORA, and some new pictures (prompts included) show what can be done with it in terms of generating images of Ancient Egyptian passageways…

Incidentally, for those doing their own browsing of CivitAI, the key repository of LORAs, here is how to blank unwanted items in the search results. In UBlock Origin’s Filters list, add your tailored variant of this and save the list…

civitai.com##a[href*=”keyword”]

As the page of search results loads, this blocks the image in each target panel — but not the panel itself. It blocks the image only when it finds keyword in the panel’s href (its Web link), so replace keyword with whatever you need. This block thus squishes unwanted ’empire builders’ who are out to build a series of LORAs — all with the same brand-name. Their endless production of new LORAs can feel a lot like spam. Now you can cosmetically filter them out of results, by name.