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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: New books

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

05 Wednesday Mar 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in 3D, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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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 #23 – REH letters, Loved Dead, geometries of terror, Arkham grows, pyramids, pixels and more…

29 Wednesday Jan 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, New books, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #23.

* Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf has a long and detailed review of A Means to Freedom, the two-volume edition of the letters of Lovecraft and REH. With footnotes, even.

* The latest SFFaudio Podcast #823 is “The Loved Dead” by C.M. Eddy and H.P. Lovecraft. With discussion and a full reading by Jim Moon. The story is now public domain at last, due to the recent lapse of copyright.

* A November 2024 group interview in a literary magazine, with the Italian Lovecraftians, or at least those who congregate on the Lovecraft channel of the Telegram social-media service. Freely available, in Italian.

* In Italy in November 2024, a third conference / talk-series on “Geometries of Terror: The rhetorical space in the weird literature”. I see a 66-page publication from the event, freely available in Italian as a flipbook. Several Lovecraft items are seen on the contents page. This, however, turns out to be a free extract from the forthcoming 316-page printed book of the conference proceedings (all three of them?) which is set for February 2025.

* Also in Italy, what appears to be a Kindle edition of an Italian translation of the Rodionoff / Breccia graphic novel Lovecraft. Due February 2025.

* In French with an English abstract, “Esthetique de l’horreur et influence des motifs lovecraftiens dans le cinema de Stuart Gordon et Brian Yuzna: (2024). (‘The aesthetics of horror and the influence of Lovecraftian patterns in the cinema of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available for download.

* Here in the UK the London Lovecraft Festival website has now updated, and has the February 2025 details.

* Antihero magazine reviews the new “Monumental Journey Through Lovecraftian Horror and Black Metal Majesty”. This being the new album Kadath by the band The Great Old Ones. The review finds it…

an intricate and absorbing black metal masterpiece that honors Lovecraft’s vision while pushing their sound to new heights. This is not just an album; it’s an experience — a deep dive into a world of cosmic horror and surreal beauty.

* A new Lovecraftian picture series, “The Arkham Growths”. All are under Creative Commons Attribution, should you wish to re-use them.

a series of glass-plate pictures from the late 1920s. The weird plants were grown from seeds collected by an expedition from Miskatonic University into a blighted district located “west of Arkham” in the late 1920s. The plants were found to be bioluminescent, and these ten low-light images are now the only surviving relics of the Miskatonic investigation.

* Apparently set for publication in English in July 2025, the Tanabe manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. The English cover has been released…

* Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Comics Omnibus Vol. 6 is due to be published on 6th August 2025. It should weigh in at over 1,000 pages. Reprinting the Savage Sword of Conan magazine-format comic #73-87 from the early 1980s, plus a 1977 special.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Forrest J. Ackerman’s The Frankenscience Monster, a book length collections of essays on and tributes to the early horror-movie star Boris Karloff.

* Isaac Asimov’s Invention & Discovery Cards… “all 1,477 entries from Asimov’s encyclopedia are now represented as illustrated cards” and these are presented in an interactive adjustable web display/timeline.

* New, the pixellated 1990’s Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Adventure Shadow of the Comet – “Remastered”…

Shadow of the Comet is a great game, but it’s also quite a broken one. So in this special edit I’ve addressed its most glaring issues to make it a more entertaining experience. It required thousands of edits and an entirely new custom subtitle track. […] The video [a three-hour playthrough of the fixed game, on YouTube] also includes the bonus ‘Lovecraft Museum’ at the end. The Museum features lots of cool cosmic horror relics including the Necronomicon.

* From the Public Domain Film Contest 2025, the short film “Road Trip”, which (among others) samples from “The Dunwich Horror” and the Lovecraft-fave philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

* Found, another picture of the location of ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop on Weybosset in Providence. See my contribution to The Lovecraft Annual 2023 for details of the man and his shop, well known to Lovecraft and many of the Lovecraft Circle.

* And finally, a new survey of “Pyramids on the Cover of Weird Tales“.


— End-quotes —

“It was not like any city of earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires, and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus; towers, spires and pyramids that no man could fashion, but that bloomed flower-like and delicate …” — May 1922, Lovecraft to Moe. On his first sight of the evening lights of New York City coming up, seen from across the river.

“I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — Lovecraft’s revised vision of New York City, in the short tale “He”.

He would also encounter evocative pyramid-shapes in graveyards…

After briefly greeting such of the family — mother and sister — as were present, I departed with Edgar for the ancient shades of Amesbury […] “We alighted at the ancient graveyard” [where we] “marvell’d in the sombre pines and willows, slabs and monuments. Edgar reveal’d an imagination of high quality, and upon one occasion call’d my attention to the inimitably Babylonian effect of a certain granite memorial of pyramidal outline, as glimps’d thro’ distant trees against the iridescent sunset.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 1st May 1923. On visiting the schoolboy Edgar Jacobs Davis in Merrimac.


HPLinks #21 – Spectral Realms, Spanish Lovecraftians, Madness on the London stage, Azoth 1918-1921, and more…

15 Wednesday Jan 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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HPLinks #21.

* New on the Hippocampus Press website, the annual weird poetry journal Spectral Realms No. 22. There are a few ‘classic reprint’ poems as well, including… “a rare poem from Weird Tales by pulpmeister E. Hoffmann Price”.

* In Spanish, a new open-access journal article in the latest Signa: Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Semiotica. This focuses on discussion of two… “spearheads of genre fiction in our country: Emilio Bueso and Guillem Lopez, [who adapt] the Lovecraftian model to their own distinctive styles and obsessions”. Freely available online.

* In English in the latest edition of the Hungarian journal Patchwork, Escape from Innsmouth and The Shadow over Innsmouth: The Role of The Reader and Player in Postmodern Multimedial Narratives. Freely available online.

* The latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast hosts, as a guest, the author of the new book Ripples From Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes and True Detective (2024).

* French blog L’Antique Sentier translates part of the letter from H.P. Lovecraft to Helen V. Sully, 5th March 1935.

* Another 2025 London Lovecraft Festival theatre listing, for At The Mountains Of Madness at the Drayton Arms Theatre, 16th February 2025. Booking now. As yet, no sign of a 2025 programme at the official Festival website.

* Spraguedecampfan has a detailed review of Planets and Dimensions by Clark Ashton Smith. As I blogged last week, a scan of this 1970s book collection of CAS’s essays is now free on Archive.org.

* New from Scriblus, an 8,000-word article on “The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (1969-74): An Introduction”.

* Frontier Partisans trails the forthcoming “comprehensive and meticulously curated” 646-page new edition of the Western Tales Of Robert E. Howard. Due from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press in February 2025.

* Modern Age magazine suggests “It’s Time for a Walter Scott Revival”… “He’s known for his swashbuckling tales but offers much more.”

* Free on Archive.org, Azoth: The Occult Magazine of America (1918-1921). Of possible interest to Mythos writers seeking deep background on the immediate post-war period, which were also the years in which Lovecraft started to write stories again.

* Inverse reconsiders Underwater, a submarine horror box-office flop of a movie. Has major spoilers.

“Five years ago, Underwater did what many Lovecraft adaptations couldn’t. […] The film isn’t adapting any particular [Lovecraft] story, but a dedicated watch reveals details that are intentionally [Lovecraft] lore-consistent”.

* And finally, Beth Murray was a photographer who made a fine set of 1940s views of Providence, which I collected in a blog post a while ago now. Later I found one more from the set, which was later issued as postcards. I’ve now found another card not seen before, showing the Seekonk River near Red Bridge. Small size, but clear enough to suggest that it was still very much a working river when Lovecraft was alive. The river was strongly tidal and salty.

Red Bridge on the Seekonk, Providence, in the 1940s.


— End-quote —

Lovecraft at the Red Bridge: “I was standing on the East Providence shore of the Seekonk River, about three quarters of a mile south of the foot of Angell Street, at some unearthly nocturnal hour. The tide was flowing out horribly — exposing parts of the river-bed never before exposed to human sight. Many persons lined the banks, looking at the receding waters & occasionally glancing at the sky. Suddenly a blinding flare — reddish in hue — appeared high in the southwestern sky; & something descended to earth in a cloud of smoke, striking the Providence shore near the Red Bridge — about an eighth of a mile south on Angell Street. The watchers on the banks screamed in horror — “It has come — It has come at last!” — & fled away into the deserted streets. But I ran toward the bridge instead of away; for I was more curious than afraid. When I reached it I saw hordes of terror-stricken people in hastily donned clothing fleeing across from the Providence side as from a city accursed by the gods. There were pedestrians, many of them falling by the way, & vehicles of all sorts. Electric cars [tram-cars] — the old small cars unused in Providence for six years — were running in close procession — eastward away from the city on both of the double tracks. Their motormen were frantic, & small collisions were numerous. By this time the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus. Suddenly a glare appeared in the West, & I saw the dominant landmark of the Providence horizon — the dome of the Central Congregational Church, silhouetted weirdly against a background of red. And then, silently, that dome abruptly caved in & fell out of sight in a thousand fragments. And from the fleeing populace arose such a cry as only the damn’d utter — & I waked up …” — Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, May 1920.


HPLinks #20 – Lovecraft’s copy of Landmarks of New York, rustic Derleth, Ancient Egypt, future-oracles, and more

09 Thursday Jan 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, New books

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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.


HPLinks #11 – Germans and Germany, meteors on film, flaming politics, roaring music, and more

26 Saturday Oct 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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HPLinks #11.


“… fat boars we shall tear limb from limb with our hands, and gnaw with our sharp teeth. Great Thor, but this is life! We ask no more! We know the cool of deep woods, and the spell of their gloom and the things void of name that lurk or may lurk in them. Bards sing them to us in the dark with great hoarse voices when the fire burns low and we have drunk our mead.” — Lovecraft empathising with the pre-Christian forest-life of the Germanic tribes, in a Christmas letter to Frank Belknap Long in December 1923. Selected Letters Vol. 1, page 275.


* There’s now a firm date for the forthcoming German book Kulturelle Spiegelungen zwischen H.P. Lovecraft und Deutschland (‘Cultural Reflections: H.P. Lovecraft and Germany’). Amazon UK lists it as 11th November 2024 in hardcover from WGB Academic. It appears to focus around the… “German influences [that] are extremely numerous in the writer’s stories, poems, letters and essays, [plus the] German characters appearing in the tales [and] Lovecraft as influenced by the First World War”. One wonders if it also considers the correspondents and friends who had various links to Germany in the inter-war years?

* In The Cape Cod Chronicle, “Chatham Orpheum Theater To Conjure Up ‘Strange Magick'”. Being an interview with the maker of a new film Strange Magick: A Documentary which reportedly strains to bring Lovecraft and the occultist Aleister Crowley together in history. Though billed as a ‘documentary’, from what I’ve read it seems to be best viewed as a ‘what if’ movie? For instance, the interview notes the source book used for Crowley in the USA, Secret Agent 666, which centres on Crowley in 1914 – 1919. We learn there that Crowley wrote columns for such [pro-German] weekly newspapers as The Fatherland [and in one of these] he is said to have “sowed rationalizations for destroying the Lusitania” (i.e. the notorious sinking of a British passenger ship). A paragraph or two after these apparent facts the reader is also given the name of Crowley’s propagandist… “employer, George Sylvester Viereck”. This combination of published sentiment and infamous paymaster would have made Crowley forever anathema to Lovecraft, even if they had indeed met or corresponded somehow. There is talk by the movie’s makers of “Lovecraft, Crowley’s and Little’s acquaintanceship”, but I’m uncertain as yet if it’s claimed that Crowley and Lovecraft actually met in person or perhaps corresponded.

* A documentary film directed by the German director Werner Herzog, which had escaped my notice, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020). The last film I saw from him was the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010, documentary on the mysteries of Europe’s famous prehistoric cave-paintings) and I’m glad to find there’s another like it. His new film takes the topic of flaming meteorites, ‘shooting stars’, deep-impact craters and more. A new open-access paper in the journal RuMoRes draws attention to a possible Lovecraft influence on this film. Since it observes that both men… “use similar settings, such as remote places, frozen lands or volcanic areas, and extreme natural phenomena, such as the fall of meteorites”.

* New to me, Lovecraft et la Politique (2023), in French. A translated selection of his writing on politics and political philosophy, plus the new essay ‘Lovecraft: the Marx of nightmares’. Currently available in paper.

* New in the July 2024 edition of the journal Science Fiction Studies ($ paywall) “The Non-Euclidean Gothic: Weird Expeditions into Higher Dimensions and Hyper-Matter with H.P. Lovecraft”… “The first part of the paper reviews the suite of mathematical and scientific discoveries informing Lovecraft’s treatment of higher-dimensional and Non-Euclidean geometries in his mythos.”

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has a long report on a recent trip to Mexico. During which he bravely battled with our future insect-overlords, in the form of eating a dish of fried grasshoppers (“not terribly appealing”). He also endures a long trek to reach an “immense R.H. Barlow Archive”. There he was able to obtain addresses for, and then to see on Google StreetView, two former Barlow residences in Mexico.

* Joshi also reports that his own ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale “In His Own Handwriting” is now a free and authorised HorrorBabble audiobook on YouTube (36 minutes). It turns out to be a fun combo of the ‘shaggy dog’ / ‘what if?’ tale, written for an audience of learned Lovecraftians. Though with an ending I felt might have had more punch.

* S.T. Joshi’s chunky annual journal Penumbra No. 5 (2024) is now available from Hippocampus Press. Includes, among others, “John C. Tibbetts present[ing] an interview and analysis of the weird work of Brian Aldiss”, the 1960s/70s British science-fiction writer.

* An Interview with Eric Williams, who recently collected the best translations published by the old Weird Tales magazine, in a new book now available called Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (2023). In the interview he states…

“Weird Tales continues to dominate pop culture to this day. [Creators] all have Weird Tales in their DNA.

True. And Lovecraft in particular, who is often found to be thoroughly intertwined, once you know what you’re looking for. For instance I recently encountered Harlan Ellison’s two-issue stint with The Incredible Hulk (Avengers #88 crossing over into Incredible Hulk #140), which to my surprise opened with a Lovecraft quote and then went on to gleefully and freely mix several Lovecraft story-ideas (from “Cthulhu” the swamp-bachanal scenes, hideous idols connected across cultures, south Pacific co-ordinates, from “Pyramids” the giant paw, and for good measure Harlan also threw in an evolved-insect ‘space god’ who serves the unseen ‘Dark Ones’. There’s even a 1930s pulp ‘Lost Race tale’ princess).

Most of the nods-to-Lovecraft would have sailed over the heads of most readers at that time, unless they knew their Lovecraft as early as 1971. And I suspect that Harlan dashed off this creaky collage of a story in an hour or two. But it’s fun on the page, and is an example of a nod to Lovecraft in the classic Marvel Comics. I must have read it as a boy, though it seemed new to me in 2024.

* On DeviantArt from the artist, a sample preview page for the first Randolph Carter graphic novel. This made me look again, and I now see a January 2025 publication date for a Vol. 2.

* Also on DeviantArt, an impressive new AI-generated image from Anavrin-ai…

* New to me, Amazing Figure Modeler magazine #68 (2020), which was a Lovecraft special. The issue can still be picked up for a reasonable price on eBay…

* The Great Old Ones to release new studio album Kadath in January 2025. The concept album by the French metal band offers a… “descent into the Dream Cycle [of Lovecraft…] an odyssey through the realms that teeter between fantastical wonder and cosmic dread.” On YouTube there’s already a sample track, “Me, the Dreamer”.

* In the U.S., a university “Music Department hosts an eldritch performance”. This being a 60 minute opera/reading-performance of “The Dunwich Horror”, with an ensemble of classical musicians, no less. Sounds to me like they’re building up to a fully fledged screeching-and-wailing costumed opera performance, at some point in the future.

There were three scenes within the performance, each being about 20 minutes long. Each scene had their own setting and characters, with the performers rotating off of the stage in accordance with their characters in the opera. They also had costumes fitting their unique characters, and acted along with the words being sung.

* The blog Bibliotheque de H.P. Lovecraft looks at The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of natural history and rural life (1878), a book owned and presumably read by Lovecraft in the latter part of the 1920s. Though not listed in my old copy of Lovecraft’s Library (update: it’s in the 2024 edition), and one has to wonder if the apparent HPL name inscribed in the book may actually be another example of Loveman’s late penmanship. The book detailed the hunting and shooting life of the English countryside, through the eyes and work of a gamekeeper, in the 1870s. Unmentioned in the blog post, though some readers will recall it, is that Lovecraft had once been a crack shot with a rifle and once had a large collection of guns. Thus the book would have been doubly appealing to the Anglophile Lovecraft.

* Coming soon, a single-volume collection of Two-Gun Bob’s Adventures in Science Fantasy, checked against the original manuscripts and published by the REH Foundation.

* The new Daniel Crouch Rare Books Catalogue XXXIX: “I wisely started with a map…” – a celebration of fictional cartography (2024). £50 in paper, or you can download the sumptiously illustrated PDF for free.

* At Tentaclii this week, I note “Some changes at Amazon”. Where did all those Warehouse Deals on books go? Turns out they’re still there, but hidden and only accessible via a special kind of search. You’re welcome.

* And finally, talking of affordable books for scholars, The Internet Archive is back online. No personal logins at present, so you can’t yet change your password to a new secure one. Or upload new items. Or ‘search inside’ the text of books and magazines. In the meanwhile I’m sure they’d welcome a ‘happy to see you back’ donation.


— End-quote —

“… Cyclopean phantom pinnacles flowering in violet mist, surging vortices of alien life coursing from wonder-hidden springs in Samarcand and Carthage and Babylon and AEgyptus, breathless sunset vistas of weird architecture and unknown landscape glimpsed from bizarrely balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces, glittering twilights that thickened into cryptic ceilings of darkness pressing low over lanes and vaults of unearthly phosphorescence…” — H.P. Lovecraft, recalling his early experience of the sunset cityscapes and towers of New York City, in a letter of 18th January 1930.

HPLinks #4 – table-trembling translations, Polish letters, Martians in 1924, ‘Little Bobby’, Tom Sutton, Lovecraftian tabletop gaming, and more

09 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

HPLinks #4.

* French publisher Gallimard is to publish a huge table-trembling single-volume slab of Lovecraft’s tales in French. Recits (‘Tales’) is due shortly before Halloween 2024, and has 29 new translations in 1,408-pages. I’m told the La Pleiade imprint being used is highly prestigious in France.

* A new Polish edition of Lovecraft’s selected letters, Lovecraft Listy Wybrane 1906-1927 (‘Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1906-1927’). Due for publication in a 544-page hardback by Vesper, on 13th September 2024. The book’s cover doesn’t inspire, but I dug up the publisher’s page and this reassured me. At the end of the blurb found there, one reads that…

The letters were selected and translated by Mateusz Kopacz. He is a Lovecraft expert and translator of, among others, the major Lovecraft biography by S.T. Joshi.

* Edgar Pera’s new feature-length film Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), now on the film festival circuit. It’s getting a lot of flak from the AI-haters, it seems, as he used Stable Diffusion to make the movie.

   i) The Trailer.

   ii) An ICS review… “avatars of Pessoa and Lovecraft speak to one another … Pera introduces two thematic threads that both Pessoa and Lovecraft believed to be the foundation of humanity – fear and madness – and explores how they both influence artistic expression”.

   iii) A Cineuropa review of Telepathic Letters… “The film seamlessly shifts between documentary and portmanteau horror, and its multifaceted formalism could also be seen as a video-art piece – a collage of bizarre, unsettling and otherworldly imagery”.

   iv) The Hollywood Reporter had an interview with Edgar Pera about the new film, in English. ($ possible paywall, but I had the whole interview).

… while preparing The Nothingness Club, about Pessoa’s heteronyms, I found many more invisible links between them. Now I have tons of their books, [where I have] written in the margins “Link Lovecraft” or “Link Pessoa.” And since we were already preparing then The Spiral of Fear, a Lovecraft feature, I thought that making a film about them might be a good way to make Pessoa and Lovecraft readers meet.” (Pera)

   v) A long interview on Telepathic Letters in the open-access journal Rotura, with choice screenshots. In Portuguese.

   vi) The Portuguese newspaper Espresso has what might be a new profile-interview with Pera, but it’s behind a $ paywall.

* Postscripts to Darkness has a new long article on “”The dread contemplation of infinity”: Some Thoughts on George M. Gould and Cosmic Horror Before Lovecraft”. Continued in the follow-on long post “Lovecraft, Lucretius, and Leonard’s Locomotive-God: Further Thoughts on Cosmic Horror”. The latter essay…

further explores Lovecraft’s developing conception of cosmic horror by focusing on another of Lovecraft’s under-recognized contemporary influences; namely, the American professor, poet, memoirist, and translator, William Ellery Leonard.

* Centauri Dreams tunes in to “The ‘Freakish Radio Writings’ of 1924”. In August 1924 the earth seemed to be receiving radio messages from a fast-approaching Mars, at least according to credulous press reports. It was actually bona-fide research that…

was serious SETI for its day. A dirigible was launched from the U.S. Naval Observatory carrying radio equipment for these observations, with the capability of relaying its signals back to a laboratory on the ground. A military cryptographer was brought in to monitor […] any signals from [the closely approaching] Mars as detected by the airship

Very likely to have been a point of discussion with Lovecraft at the Kalem Club, I would imagine. And even today it may be a real-life hook on which some Mythos writers could hang a 1920s story.

* Congratulations to all involved with The Fossil, journal of the historians of amateur journalism. It has now reached issue 400 (July 2024). The issue is freely available online in PDF, and includes… “Past Editors Ken Faig, Jr. (2024-2012) and Don Peyer (1996-1997) recalling their years editing The Fossil, and Monica Wasserman describing the involvement of Sonia Greene Lovecraft in amateur journalism.” Plus a note about the mysterious listing of a “H.P. Lovecraft in the 1917 Los Angeles City Directory”. Another real-life hook which may interest some Mythos writers, I’d suggest.

* Wormwoodiana reviews the new book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy…

Anyone interested in how a modern literary estate was usurped can learn from the vitriol and scheming profusely detailed in this book. […] Derleth comes across as scheming, duplicitous, and extremely petty. The evidence is all here.

* Deep Cuts has a new long article on the scholarly Mexican work of Lovecraft’s young friend Barlow, “Deeper Cut: R.H. Barlow & the Codex Huitzilopochtli”.

* An article in the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Exotika e Outer Ones”, sees a connection between a 1927 lecture heard by Lovecraft, given by Sir James Rennell Rodd on classical antiquity, and the story “The Whisperer in Darkeness”. In Italian, with English abstract.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the French journal Revue Roumaine for April 1966. In a review of a volume of the poetry of Emil Botta, one finds…

For in Emil Botta’s poetry there is nothing more striking than this feeling of perpetual flight towards a ‘beyond’ that the poet tries to evoke. Botta’s poetry is an attempt to fly over a territory, completely unknown, in a strange and sad universe above a “no man’s land” located between life and death. Let us note a striking resemblance, although devoid of any material possibility of filiation, between Botta’s lyrical adventures and the dreams of another great dreamer of our time, Lovecraft. There are almost disturbing correspondences here that seem to suggest a coherence of their dream universe. But while Lovecraft is a narrator whose descents into the depths of dreams are pregnant with dark events, Botta’s poetry pilots brief, violent, exhausting plunges into this obscure empire of shadows.

* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.

* DMR has new review of Tom Sutton’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” Portfolio (1978). An item new to me, and with impressive penmanship judging by the scans shown…

See also the 2023 Dark Worlds Quarterly article “The Lovecraftian Tom Sutton at Charlton Comics”. I think I actually had a couple of his Charlton issues in my collection, back in the day. Long lost, now. But I see that a 148-page collection of the best of Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things (Charlton) was issued in 2015, and still appears to be available in a $90 hardback in the USA.

* Said to be newly available on a streaming movie service in the USA, the HPLHS movie adaptations The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. Though they seem to be region-locked, and thus are not yet available for me in the UK…

* The religious multi-author online magazine Protestia reports “Oldest Baptist Church in America Hosts Cthulhu For Horror-Themed NecronomiCon”, with some interior pictures of the event. Reports ‘with a frown’ and a wry tone, I note. But that modest reaction in itself shows how far we’ve come, from the foaming-at-the-mouth of the 1980s evangelical ‘satanic panic’.

* Mysteries of Montreal has a short overview of the NecronomiCon 2024 RPG gaming-related panel discussions which he attended, and some criticisms.

* RPG maker Chaosium’s Fall and Winter Releases list for 2024. Includes a new Investigator’s Guide for Cthulhu by Gaslight (the Lovecraftian RPG set in late Victorian / early Edwardian Britain, as I recall). I imagine this may interest both Mythos and Sherlock Holmes writers, as well as the intended audience of RPG players. Also due from Chaosium before Christmas is At The Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, which looks amusing.

* And finally, an online museum dedicated to the various felines Famous On th InterWebz. Lovecraft’s cat not yet among them.

New book: Theory of the Weird Tale

24 Wednesday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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S.T. Joshi has updated his blog. Among other news, news of a new Joshi-edited collection titled The Theory of the Weird Tale. It appears to be an anthology of master practitioners (rather than critics or academics), writing about their chosen form. Available now as a budget Kindle ebook.

New book: Fantasy Aesthetics (open access)

16 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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Some scholars may be interested in the new book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (July 2024), which I find can be freely had in open-access, as a .PDF file. It has chapters on, among others, ‘Visualising the Elves throughout the Centuries’; William Morris’s enduring influence on fantasy visuals; the challenges of fantasy maps; medievalism in science-fiction; fantasy novels as shovelware commodity; and… unicorns in contemporary pop culture.

New book: H.P. Lovecraft: Midnight Studies

11 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

Scholar Jan B. W. Pedersen’s site has a cover and a table-of-contents for his new 170-page book H.P. Lovecraft: Midnight Studies published by Peter Lang. And I see it’s now on Amazon in ebook and paper, and appears to be shipping.

Foreword by S. T. Joshi.

Introduction.

Chapter 1: On Lovecraft’s Lifelong Relationship With Wonder.

Chapter 2: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Romantic on the Nightside.

Chapter 3: ‘Now Will You Be Good?’: Lovecraft, Teetotalism and Philosophy.

Chapter 4: Lovecraft’s Garden: Heart’s Blood at the Root.

Chapter 5: Weird Fiction: A Catalyst for Wonder.

Chapter 6: H. P. Lovecraft and the Dunsanian Conjuration.

Afterword.

I recall that one or even two of these have been in The Lovecraft Annual.


Also, in the left-leaning Times Literary Supplement this week ($ paywall), a review of the academic book Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft by another author. Rather amusingly, the reviewer implies that the book’s author has not read “The Horror at Red Hook”, which one might think would be the vital ur-text for such a study. He also notes that several of the biographical details are off…

[his explanations] can seem heavy-handed and his belabouring of the author unconvincing. […] why call Thomas F. Malone the “privileged, white, Anglo-Saxon protagonist” of “The Horror at Red Hook”, when he is an Irish-American policeman, described as “the sensitive Celt”? […] Steadman’s Lovecraft, meanwhile, can do nothing right (his mother’s mental state is blamed on the fourteen-year-old Lovecraft’s inability to get a job)…

Armitage Symposium programme

09 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

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The Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon Providence (August 2024) now has a full programme online. Including, among many others…

* The Phonotactics of Fear: H.P. Lovecraft and ‘Unknowable’ Languages.

* The Shadow Over Lake Erie: A Trip to Cleveland and its Influence on H.P Lovecraft’s Innsmouth.

* Time as a Narrative Tool in “The Silver Key”: A Figural Interpretation of Randolph Carter.

* Rhode Island in 1912 AD: Immigration, Catholicism, and the Nativist Grotesque.

* Madness and Psychosis in Lovecraft’s World.

Note that Hippocampus also has a new page for Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 5, being the Armitage Symposium proceedings for 2022. No table-of-contents, as yet.

Tanabe’s Cthulhu – re-dated, in English

04 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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After countless aeons of waiting, Gou Tanabe’s mountainous 288-page graphic-novel adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu finally surfaces as an English translation. Due from Dark Horse, 15th October 2024. Re-dated, as it was originally July 2024. Why the heck are translations of graphic novels so slow to appear? It’s 2024 and the AI revolution is full flow. The publishers should have AI and virtual assistants all over this sort of thing, and it should be done in a week.

Vita (e morte) di un gentiluomo

30 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

New to me, a 376-page 2022 Italian bio-book on Lovecraft that’s not a translation of Joshi.

It’s not a complete life, which would require 3,500 not 350 pages, but instead focusses on the childhood and the death…

With this volume, edited by Pietro Guarriello, we have tried to look more deeply into these two aspects, the most hidden, of Lovecraft’s life: his childhood and his death, essential phases to understand how he developed his philosophical though and then his mature thought. We therefore find collected here a series of biographical materials, some of which are truly rarities, documenting those still rather elusive years of HPL’s life. Between testimonies of those who knew him as a young man and critical writings by major specialists, aspects of Lovecraft as a man are reconstructed which will not fail to illuminate and surprise, but also to move. These testimonies range through the memories and tributes of his friends in Weird Tales, or the reconstruction of his last harrowing days in hospital which also saw him draw up an infamous Death Diary, translated here for the first time in Italy. All documents have been meticulously annotated by the editor, and are important to understanding who Howard Phillips Lovecraft was and why he wrote what he wrote. As Gianfranco de Turris underlines in his Preface, “this is not a picky snooping, but a sincere interest in details, even minor and minimal, of a life which deserves to be investigated to fully understand this personality who endlessly fascinates us.”” (Auto-translation, tweaked for sense in English).

Well-illustrated, according to the blurb.

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