HPLinks #68.

* Just released, the long-awaited new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Available in hardback or paperback, and I see the book is already on Amazon UK.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the British fanzine Dagon 17 (April 1987). Among other items, there’s an article by Robert M. Price on Lovecraft’s uses of Theosophy, and another by Will Murray asking “Was there a real Brown Jenkin?”.

* In the latest edition of the journal Revista Helice, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2025-2026), “Que opinaba Borges de Lovecraft?: nueva revision de argumentos” (‘What did Borges think of Lovecraft?: A new review of the arguments’). Freely available online.

* Feuilleton has a long article on “Illustrating Hyperborea”, which surveys the illustrations for the tales of Clark Ashton Smith.

* Grognardia considers Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” (1922).

* An unusual self-published pamphlet in Italian, newly published on Amazon, Tolkien vs Lovecraft: Confronto sul concetto di Morte (‘Tolkien vs Lovecraft: A comparison of their concepts of death’).

* The 2026 Robert E. Howard Awards are open for nominations.

* The Thorgal artist is to have a major new exhibition, opening in France in June 2026. Thorgal is a long-running Norse adventurer character who stars in a series of Belgian BD’s (short graphic-novels in the form of finely-produced oversized books).

* “The Magic Lantern Call Of Cthulhu”, to be presented at the Drayton Arms Theatre in February 2026. On other dates in that month, also a staging of “From Beyond”, and a new “Dunwich Horror Opera”. All part of the London Lovecraft Festival, 6th-22nd February 2026 in London, UK. Tickets on sale 1st January.

* And finally, new on YouTube is All the Lovecraftian references in DOOM: The Dark Ages. Which is the latest blockbuster entry into the DOOM series of videogames, and a game which is said to be very indebted to Lovecraft.

— End-quote —

from “BELLS” (Lovecraft, December 1919).

I hear the bells from yon imposing tower;
The bells of Yuletide o’er a troubled night;
Pealing with mock’ry in a dismal hour
Upon a world upheav’d with greed and fright.
[…]
In fancy yet I view the modest spire;
The peaked roof, cast dark against the moon;
The Gothic windows, glowing with a fire
That lent enchantment to the brazen tune.
Lovely each snow-drap’d hedge beneath the beams
That added silver to the silver there;
Graceful each cot, each lane, and all the streams,
And glad the spirit of the pine-ting’d air.
[…]
But on the scene a hideous blight intrudes;
A lurid nimbus hovers o’er the land;
Demoniac shapes low’r black above the woods,
And by each door malignant shadows stand.
The jester Time stalks darkly thro’ the mead;
Beneath his tread contentment dies away.
Hearts that were light with causeless anguish bleed,
And restless souls proclaim his evil sway.
Conflict and change beset the tott’ring world;
Wild thoughts and fancies fill the common mind;
Confusion on a senile race is hurl’d,
And crime and folly wander unconfin’d.

mead = a field of thick moist meadow-grass

HPLinks #67.

* In the new 2025 edition of the journal Synergies, “”There’s something those fellows catch — beyond life”: Visual Suggestions in Lovecraft’s Narrative” ($ paywall). From Italy, in English, the article is on Lovecraft and fine art and…

highlight[s] the visual roots of Lovecraftian aesthetics, [defining] its main characteristics, tracing them in the works of artists explicitly referenced by Lovecraft, such as Johann Heinrich Fussli, Francisco Goya, Anthony Angarola, Sidney Sime, Gustave Dore, John Martin, his friend Clark Ashton Smith and Nikolaj Roerich. Furthermore, by adopting a reversed perspective, the essay also aims to suggest that Lovecraft’s literary universe can influence the interpretation of the artworks he admired.

Yes, that can be true. When one looks at what happened to the people of the region Roerich so ably painted, it’s a real-life horror-story on a vast scale.

* An interesting obscurity I discovered via Archive.org. Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” as published in the China Mail newspaper (English-language, Hong Kong under British rule), in time for Christmas 1932.

* It’s reported that South America’s 7th H.P. Literary Festival (2025) has been successfully held simultanously in Mexico and in Argentina. The organisers have a Linktree page at Avalon Club de Rol, but unfortunately it appears their Festival information is only online at Instagram. Though perhaps the Argentine wing of the event is that mentioned by S.T. Joshi in his latest blog post (9th December 2025).

* Now available, the contents-list for the sumptuous new ‘Icons of the Fantastic’ exhibition catalogue…

Plate 1. is Hannes Bok’s “Pickman’s Model” (1950). The font and formatting of the online contents-list does not reflect the fine design of the book’s interior.

* From Spain’s Diabolo Ediciones, what looks like a fan-book titled Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft. La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1. (2025)…

In this first volume of We Will Always Have Lovecraft, Fernando Lopez Guisado explores the magnitude of his influence on popular culture, from music to board-games.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post reveals he has collected the work of a regular British contributor to the early Weird Tales magazine, which will appear in early 2026 as The Nameless Mummy and Others.

Arlton Eadie (1886–1935) was one of the relatively few English writers to appear regularly in the American pulp magazines. Some of the stories in my volume first appeared in Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine in Great Britain. Many of his stories have a distinctively English feel to them (one of them, “The Immortal Hand,” involves the resurrection of the hand of William Shakespeare) — which makes me wonder why the devout Anglophile H.P. Lovecraft didn’t find them worthy of note. But I find almost no mentions of Eadie in his surviving correspondence.

I see Eadie’s Weird Tales stories are also available in French translation in three volumes. A little searching just now reveals some outlines of his biography. Real name, Leopold Leonard Eady. Born in the military barracks town of Woolich, Kent, he came of age at the height of the British Empire in 1904. Found working as a men’s tailor in the city of Newcastle, Northumberland in 1914 (Kelly’s Directory of Northumberland, 1914), then Army records show he served in the Northumberland Fusiliers during the First World War. Married an Anna Frances [Eady]. He was a mystery novelist published in hardbacks, as well as a short-story writer. He died in the English seaside resort of Lancing, Sussex in 1935, leaving a modest estate valued at approx. £15,000 (in today’s money), and presumably also his book rights.

* Also due soon is S.T. Joshi’s collection of August Derleth on writing, titled When Imagination Ends: Essays on Speculative Fiction. This will include… “My Twenty Years with Ghosts” (1959), an [unpublished] essay dealing with his publication of weird writers with Arkham House”. Joshi also notes, from a French writer, a forthcoming “profound monograph on R.H. Barlow”.

* Geoliminal has a long illustrated article on “The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales”, with many clippings.

* New on Archive.org, H.P. Lovecraft’s coat of arms & bookplate as good scans.

* And finally, Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys the “Idols of the Cthulhu Mythos” to 1948.

— End-quotes —

“With the insatiable curiosity of early childhood, I used to spend hours poring over the pictures in the back of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary — absorbing a miscellaneous variety of ideas. After familiarising myself with antiquities, mediaeval dress and armour, birds, animals, reptiles, fishes, flags of all nations, heraldry, etc. etc., I lit upon the section devoted to ‘Philosophical and Scientific Instruments’, and was veritably hypnotised with it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Wilfred Blanch Talman of Spring Valley, New-Netherlands. He blowed in Friday morning, & has since been engaged in the noble task of getting Grandpa interested in heraldry. Never before was I so conscious of my humiliating ignorance of a subject of which every armigerous gentleman ought to possess at least a smattering; & I have now resolved to make a study of the subject, employing the famous & standard treatise of Fox-Davies. Friday afternoon Talman took me to the genealogical department of the publick library & shewed me how to look up the arms of various lines which converge in me, & he also was kind enough to draw several different coats of which I have possessed verbal descriptions only. This is a late date at which to rectify my ignorance, but better late than never. […] I’ve always had the [family] description, which I was too ignorant to interpret”. — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1927 (?).

“These damn things [family heraldic shields] seem to vary so much that a guy can never be sure of what’s right. Suppose one had one’s coach-panels and silver plate all fixed up one way, and then along came some evidence that it ought to be t’other way ! It’s a tense and exacting game, kid!” — Lovecraft to Talman, June 1928.

It was indeed an amusing game, and one which in 1927/28 no doubt helped him to recover from the trauma of New York City. But he would later rail against…

“The utter ignorance & sappiness of the snivelling, myth-swallowing, church-going stuffed shirts who go about cackling dead slogans & spreading the heraldic tail-feathers that proclaim them self-conscious members of a close corporation of “best people”! Not that they’re necessarily any more stupid & irrational than the rabble they hate, but that they add to an equal stupidity & irrationality the intolerable assumption of some mystical superiority unbased on personal merit.” — Lovecraft to Catherine L. Moore, October 1936.

HPLinks #20.

Not much to glean this week, which I guess is due to the usual ‘slump’ over Christmas / New Year. And most of the items below are only tangentially related to ‘Lovecraft himself’.

* Up for sale, what appears to be Lovecraft’s copy of the book Landmarks of New York (1923), with bookplate and signature date for May 1928. Which suggests this was a memory-jogger of the New York of 1922, rather than a pocket-guide used at that time or in the later New York Years. The seller notes… “This title does not appear in Lovecraft’s Library nor any of Lovecraft’s published letters”. Not on Archive.org, so we can’t be sure it’s actually New York City. It might be ‘upstate’ New York.

Also at Honest Abe’s site, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in Czech. A uniform set titled Volani Cthulhu, with variant dustjacket colours for each volume. Here we seen the green one, which shows off the artwork to best effect.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a joint mini-review of “three interesting H.P. Lovecraft-related items”. The Starry Wisdom Library, The Dagon Collection, and the map-set H.P. Lovecraft and His Environs.

* Beyond Lovecraft: A Companion is the mooted title for an academic book collection now being assembled. Will apparently have chapters discussing various recent adaptations and (details are scant, so I’m guessing) possibly even those ersatz ‘barely-adaptations that use the Lovecraft name’? (Perhaps we need a name for such cruft, these days? ‘Lovecruft’?)

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Planets And Dimensions, a 1973 book which collected… “the most important non-fiction prose of Clark Ashton Smith”. Includes tributes to Lovecraft.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and among other matters he brings news of the publication of various new August Derleth books, among which the complete Gus Elker farm/rural humourous stories in two volumes. Buck in the Bottoms: Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls and Wild Plums: More Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls. Of these, Joshi writes…

David E. Schultz […] did yeoman’s work in unearthing both uncollected and unpublished stories that had gone unnoticed by Peter Ruber, whose compilation Country Matters (1996) purported to include all the Gus Elker stories.

I wonder if Derleth ever sometimes thought of himself as following Lovecraft in this? After all, the master had once penned the comic tale “Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl”, about the daughter of a Vermont backwoods bootlegger.

* Nominations now open for the 2025 Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.

* In Portugal until February 2025, a substantial retrospective exhibition of the comics work of Liam Sharp. Science-fiction, fantasy, and some Conan.

* Newly officially free on the Poe Society website, the book Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986).

* The latest edition of the open-access journal Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt is a special on Ancient Egypt in science-fiction and related modern pop culture. Also note the new book Alternative Egyptology: Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt (2024), which is available free-to-read online at the publisher website.

* Talking of ancient Egypt, I spotted an interview with the author of the new novel Tomb of the Black Pharaoh. This is part of his Danforth: Eldrich Tales of WWII series, which fuses… “Lovecraftian horror, Egyptian myth & WWII-era espionage”. Sounds fun.

* And finally, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a new exhibition on “Oracles, Omens and Answers”, showcasing the material and mental cultures involved in supposed ‘divination of the future’ prior to the advent of science-fiction. Has an accompanying book. A timely show, given that our fast-evolving ‘AI oracles’ may soon offer us various forms of precognition. Or, appear to do so. Related: Wormwoodiana has a new post this week on The Tarot in England.

— End-quotes —

“It must be understood that the real developments of the future are utterly beyond prediction, since wholly unseen or wrongly appraised factors may swing matters in totally unexpected directions.” — Lovecraft, in his essay “Some Repetitions on the Times”.

“So far as future history is concerned, I’m damned if I know what lies ahead. […] Nobody knows what factors will pop up to prove the decisive ones. What will the next war bring — and leave? […] How fatal will be the decadence or collapse toward which both western and eastern cultures seem to be moving? Will the modified behaviour-patterns, created by the lapse of certain traditional beliefs, produce unforeseen results? [Thankfully] The northern and western countries seem to have a knack of readjusting their government, economics, and society to meet changing needs without explosive disaster, and if they can be left free to evolve without encroachment, they probably have quite a future.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“The past is real — it is all there is. The present is only a trivial and momentary boundary-line — whilst the future, though wholly determinate, is too essentially unknown and landmarkless to possess any hold upon our sense of concrete aesthetic imagery. It is, too, liable to involve shifts and contrasts repugnant to our emotions and fancy; since we cannot study it as a unified whole and become accustomed to its internal variations as we can study and grow accustomed to the vary’d past. […] it seems to me all one can do at present is to fight the future as best he can.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

“… anyone’s emotional attitude toward the future is essentially a matter of chance and of taste. [Those involved in] the impersonal and objective matter of calculating what the future is likely to be [will of course draw on the] different emotions [that] give different individuals different habits of perception, appraisal, and reasoning-habits which importantly affect all conclusions save those depending on the very simplest, clearest, and most concrete data. One really ought to think of the future apart from all likes, dislikes, and personal perspectives. He would then see a transformation [that is even now] in process; likely to invalidate most of our present standards, thought-habits, and pleasure-sources, and to substitute another set of these things which — though no doubt satisfying to those born under its aegis — will call forth less of the varied pleasure and thought-potentialities of mankind than the systems of the past and present have called forth. He needn’t call this a tragedy if he doesn’t wish to — for of course he will not live to reap its worst effects, while his great-grandchildren will be too steeped in the newer order to miss any other.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.