HPLinks #5.

* Applications for The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft, at Brown University in Providence, are due by 17th January 2025.

* I note that Brown University has a list of theses and dissertations that were done at Brown and relate to Brown and the parts of Providence adjacent to the university campus. Of possible interest to Lovecraft researchers are: Fox Point: the disintegration of a neighborhood and the related Community building: The Azorean, Cape Verdean, and Continental Portuguese in Fox Point, 1900-1940; Arsenic contamination in Providence’s East Side (relevant to “Colour”?); The problem of academic reputation at Brown University in the 1930’s which might perhaps marginally illuminate Lovecraft’s presence on the edge of the campus at that time; and Choosing Genes: the eugenics of Herbert Eugene Walter [1867-1945]. The latter was a full Biology professor at Brown from 1923, a leading heredity expert, and he later also taught at the Marine Biological Institute of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. As such he sounds like a rather interesting figure to include as a character, or to at least reference, in a 1930s New England Mythos adventure.

* H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest Kickstarter, live and… already funded in a flash! The event is now set for 3rd-6th October, and note that the online “Streaming Program is 18th-22nd October” 2024.

* Nighttide Mag has a report on Dreams of Light and Shadow: TL Wiswell’s Shadow Puppet performances… “At this year’s NecronomiCon, Tonnvane ‘TL’ Wiswell performed shadow play adaptations of two of H.P. Lovecraft’s weirder short stories.”

* The Rise of Cthulhu blog has the post “NecronomiCon Providence 2024 part 1” which has notes on the panels he attended. Part two remembers the spectacular Lovecraftian WaterFire parade of 2013 in Providence.

* In France, Actualitte takes a closer peep at the handsome new Druillet et Lovecraft artbook.

* An Italian Lovecraftian points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for publication in the Californian for summer 1935).

* A call to contribute to The Pulpster #34, which for 2025 will have the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. The theme centering being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, original King Kong movie script). The editors also seek articles on your favourite villain from the pulps.

* The new paper “The Law is Weirder than AI” (2024)… “Primarily through the lens of author H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales, I argue that the law is very weird [and this then leads me] to an assessment of the weird claims surrounding ‘artificial intelligence’.” Freely available online.

* From the Ukraine, a new short discussion paper on “The horrors of Lovecraft: disgust and repulsion”. In English and freely available online.

* Egregoric Times has a blog post that briefly considers “H.P. Lovecraft, Horror Writing and ‘Transliminality’. The author wonders if there may be neurological basis for openness to what appears on the surface to be “paranormal or extrasensory experiences”, especially in certain conducive places and atmospheres. I recall I read a weak one-page guest-article on a very similar topic, in New Scientist magazine, a few weeks ago.

* DMR reviews The Best of Jules De Grandin by Seabury Quinn, one of the most popular Weird Tales writers… “I kept thinking, ‘How on earth was this guy more popular than Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft?'”.

* Coming in October from Hippocampus, the book Where the Silent Ones Watch, a chunky anthology in which… “twenty-seven authors and poets visit William Hope Hodgson’s worlds and concepts, to dig deep into his mythologies and delve into fresh mysteries in unexpected times, locations, and interpretations.”

* The following paperback covers are completely new to me. I had thought (though not as a collector) that I was broadly familiar by now with the 1970s paperbacks of the British publisher Panther. But who knew they put out two volumes of Machen? Not me. Vol. 2 being dated 1975. Neither appeared later in the used bookshops I frequented, in all the time I was assiduously browsing and purchasing. Ah, for the long-lost days of the 50-pence second-hand paperback, or ‘three for £1’…

* Also new to me, I see The Meeplesmith has a nice line in Lovecraftian miniatures for tabletop gaming. Lots of them, relatively affordable and nothing ‘sold out’ as yet. There’s a tiny figure of Lovecraft himself. But there’s no stylised Lovecraft Circle (imagine: a bespectacled young Barlow, the old anarchist Morton, the New York dandy Belknap Long, straight-man Leeds leading his freak-show friends, etc) as yet, and no Erich Zann-like figure that I could see. Which seems a missed opportunity.

* A real-life “Sahara Expedition – In Search of the Unknown 2024”, happening 23rd – 27th Oct 2024 in Tunisia. A 1930s Lovecraftian LARP adventure in a real desert.

* And finally, the sometime-Lovecraftian creative Alan Moore on language…

Q: Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?

A: My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult.

Moore also has his own book coming soon, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

Welcome to HPLinks #3.

* New as a limited-edition hardcover book from Hippocampus, Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations): A Variorum Edition…

“this final collection includes all known revisions and collaborations undertaken by Lovecraft on behalf of his friends and clients. As with previous volumes in this series, the texts preserved herein scrupulously follow archival manuscripts, typescripts, or original publications, and constitute the definitive edition of these stories. For the first time, students and scholars of Lovecraft can see at a glance all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story—manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications. The result is an illuminating record of the textual history of the tales, in an edition that supersedes all those that preceded it.”

The Eddy collaboration tales, which I seem to recall are now out-of-copyright, are able to be included.

* The latest Lovecraft Annual scholarly journal also appears to be shipping from Hippocampus Press. Or at least, Amazon UK says it can whizz me a next-day copy if needed, and Joshi reports that he has had his editor’s copies in the mail.

I see that the 2024 contents list includes an essay by Joshi on “The Lovecraft Letters Project”, as well as an advance review of the forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

Note: If you can’t get to the Hippocampus Press website, change your DNS provider in your Web browser. Cloudflare in particular doesn’t seem to be able to access the site.

* A new book-chapter by philosopher Graham Harman “The Weird and the Absurd” ($ paywall, but with a free abstract). He contrasts the weird (H.P. Lovecraft) with the absurd (Dali), with a view to characterising the contours of knowledge itself.

* EuroSiberia has a new long essay on “Lovecraft and Multipolarity”.

* From Switzerland, a long article in French on “Le naturaliste danois qui avait ete ressuscite par Lovecraft” (‘The Danish naturalist who was resurrected by Lovecraft’). Which means Olaus Wormius (1588-1654), ‘Old Worm’.

* From the Ukraine’s Forum for Linguistic Studies, a new multi-author paper on “Proper Names as Presupposition Triggers in the Horror Story — Semantic and Functional Aspects”. Being a linguistic study of the names in Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear”. Freely available online, in English.

* The new short book, Ripples from Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes, and True Detective (July 2024) is now available as a 142-page paperback. The Amazon blurb is not especially illuminating. However, the back-cover blurb is much clearer and more enticing. This suggests a close and fan-friendly scholarly study of the sources for the first season of the U.S. True Detective TV series (2014, eight episodes). Of which… “first and foremost, there is H.P. Lovecraft…”. No reviews that I can find as yet, though I see that in 2023 S.T. Joshi perused an advance copy. He described it as… “a searching examination of the first season of True Detective and the influence of Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Chambers upon it.” (Note: buyers should not confuse it with the Chaosium RPG book of the same name).

* I don’t normally note the ongoing wealth of Lovecraftian anthologies, but since I enjoy Sherlock Holmes tales I’ll make an exception for the new Sherlock & Friends: Eldritch Investigations (June 2024). The book arises from a successful $3,000 crowd-funder, and offers “nine adventures” across some 80,000 words. Publisher Tule Fog Press has the contents list, and this also notes the protagonist(s) in each story, e.g. “The Adventure of the Cats of Ulthar” is a tale of “Miss Lois Cayley, a spirited young bicycling adventuress”. No reviews as yet, but one of the editors usefully added on his blog that the aim was for a collection of… “tales [which] ‘channel the spirits’ of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who graced the dime novels and pulp magazines”. Sounds fun. A free-sample and a £5 Kindle ebook makes it less of a gamble, should you be tempted.

* Also of note, but also an unknown quantity, the anthology Bound in Blood: Stories of Cursed Books, Damned Libraries and Unearthly Authors (Sept 2024).

* Also coming in September 2024, a Kindle ebook in Italian, Atlante delle terre del sogno di Lovecraft (‘Atlas of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands’). The blurb has it as… “compiled by Carlo Baja Guarienti, aided by the pencil of Alberto Ponticelli, with an afterword by S.T. Joshi and the map drawn by Francesca Baerald.” It’s to be an ebook equivalent to 155 pages, according to Amazon. Sounds to me like a gazetteer of places, with a single map, rather than an atlas with lots of map-plates.

* Hamburg, Germany, again. The city seems to have a thing for Lovecraft theatre. Indeed, they now actually have a Lovecraft theatre. In Hamburg… “the new Miskatonic Theater opens on September 6th with the play “The Call of Cthulhu” based on the tale by H.P. Lovecraft.”

The new theatre building, the only dedicated horror theatre in the world, here looking very suitable as a home for a ‘Miskatonic Theater’.

Sadly, after a great deal of hard work to open this new venue, the nearly fitted-out theatre was then gutted by burglars. Who appear to have stolen everything not nailed down. Apparently the police had no cameras in the area, since “unknown persons” is the only description of the crime that I can find. Anyway… no-one has recovered the stolen property and thus the Theatre now has a crowd-funder campaign to replace what was stolen. This campaign is currently only half-way to raising 15,000 euros and still needs support.

* A new movie from the acclaimed director Edgar Pera, billed as Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), imagines that letters flowed between the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft. But via the dreamlands, and… “with a dreamer’s logic [in which] Pessoa’s multiple personalities meet the nightmare creations of Lovecraft”. The film is currently appearing on the German film-festival circuit, with a mid September date in Oldenburg. I’ll try to link reviews in next week’s HPLinks #4.

* The Ephemeral New York blog investigates a topographic aspect of Lovecraft in New York City, and finds a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse, in… “the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways”. With photographs.

* A new 23-minute making-of video on YouTube, “Making a Lovecraft-inspired light-up water-well diorama”, as in the well and well-sweep from “The Colour Out of Space”.

* New to me, from France, the free open-access academic journal Imaginaires (2019—). Special issues since 2019 have included: ‘Gothic, Teen, and Pop Culture’ and ‘Ireland: Spectres and Chimeras’.

* At VoegelinView, “The Theology of Fantasy”, reviewing the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* And finally, one of the more pleasing bits of Yog-Sothery I cooked up with the AI image-generator Stable Diffusion, and which was then tickled with Photoshop. Feel free to colorise, use as a book cover or album cover, etc. I place this image under Creative Commons Attribution.