The somewhat Lovecraftian (in my opinion) art of Caspar David Friedrich is on show at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, until 1st April 2024. Wasn’t Hamburg the place where they did all that Lovecraftian promenade theatre in 2023? Yes, that’s right they had a “Summer of Lovecraft”. Now it’s a winter of the Innsmouth-evoking shore-scapes…

Scientists discover that acoustic stimulation makes fungi grow bigger and better. Unspecified “70 dB and 90 dB soundscape treatments” were played to the fungi. The result was “increased fungal biomass” and better “spore activity”, compared to controls.

90db is very loud, and Lovecraftian metal at that volume through good speakers would apparently make your body feel some physical force as if from unseen entities. One wonders if the fungi then have preferences for particular types of extreme sonic sussuration?

Heading that Lovecraft letter, the huge letter to Woodburn Harris (“WARNING! Don’t try to read this all at once”), Lovecraft uses for his letterhead…

Valentine Boiling Fitz-Randolph Byrd, of Virginia
10 Barnes Street
November 9, 1929

Why does he assume the first name “Valentine”?

Well, firstly because he could. Valentine could be a real name of the period in the English-speaking world. For instance, a Canadian-born colleague of Tolkien’s was named Eric Valentine Gordon (‘E.V. Gordon’). And an Edwin Valentine Mitchell edited The Pleasures of Walking (1948). The name was not uncommon.

It was more common in the U.S. state of Virginia. In a letter of 1936 Lovecraft suggests “Henry S. Valentine” as an ideal name for a fictional man from Richmond, Virginia. Thus the “of Virginia” bit of his 1929 letterhead. Lovecraft had been in Richmond, and had probably encountered a number of men by that name.

Lovecraft the Roman was also familiar with Emperor Valentinian, the last great western Emperor of Ancient Rome.

He would also have know that the Valentine Museum was one of the best known Poe museums of the period. Lovecraft also knew of the then-venerable sculptor Edward Valentine, who he envied because as a boy Valentine had known Poe.

He may have had a more personal fondness for the name because it occurred in his family tree. His aunt Annie E. (Phillips) Gamwell had several cousins of that name. Also in the family tree was a Rev. Valentine Rathbone b. 1724. This vicar was in the line that distantly connected him with Barlow’s family tree. The connection is discussed in a letter to Barlow of 22nd May 1936. The printed Barlow letters (O Fortunate Floridian) appear to omit a note enclosed with the letter, which read: “P.S. I burst this letter open again for nothing! My aunt recalled hearing of a Valentine Rathbone”.

As for the other names… “Boiling” is certainly not a common first or middle name, though it may perhaps be a self-depreciating allusion to ‘pot-boiler’ stories. “Fitz-Randolph” evokes the high British aristocracy, but also his own Randolph Carter fictional alter-ego. While “Byrd” was the name of the famous Antarctic explorer of the era.

I’ve released a minor updated version of my 2022 ‘Lovecraft birthday present’, a readable edition of the previously uncollected letters of E. Hoffmann Price to H.P. Lovecraft. The 350-page ebook of the scans complements the recently-published edited volume of the letters from Lovecraft to Price. The 2024 update was just to fix a couple of silly-but-annoying typing errors, nothing major. It’s available free on Gumroad, as a PDF.

Download: Get the .PDF free on Gumroad. For the most stable download I’ve put it on Gumroad. If you downloaded it there before, you should have had an email about the free update.

Well, that’s January done with. How fast it goes each year. But let’s recap what it held here at Tentaclii…

I posted a long and fairly comprehensive overview of Lovecraft related activity in 2023 in various fields.

In my regular ‘Picture Postals’ posts I took a look across the city of Providence in 1896; shivered in the New York weather of January 1925; poked into Lovecraft’s letter-box; and even gazed into Lovecraft’s Eyes (purely in the interest of scientific research). I also found what must be the exact location for “Martin’s Beach”, along with a picture postcard.

In scholarship the only big book news this month was the discovery that the substantial book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy had slipped out just before Christmas 2023. Two journals also appeared, the new Dead Reckonings: A Review of Horror and the Weird in the Arts, and The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (13.2). In individual scholarly articles, I dug up a number of new items in languages other than English.

In comics the publisher Dark Horse announced a ‘Deluxe Edition’ of Gou Tanabe’s adaptation of “At The Mountains Of Madness”. I found a peep inside the new graphic novel Le Dernier Jour d’Howard Philip Lovecraft.

Not much in audio but I was pleased to belatedly spot a multi-voice unabridged The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, available for free.

In events the passes and tickets for NecronomiCon Providence went on sale in mid January 2024. The London Lovecraft Festival (stage theatre) also started booking.

I noted and linked several artbooks, such as Called by Cthulhu: The Eldritch Art of Dave Carson; the forthcoming illustrated Annals of the Jinns (Barlow), some forthcoming Chaosium product (RPG sourcebooks, but they kind of count as artbooks), plus Francois Baranger’s Innsmouth (due 2025). I also noted several small end-of-career art exhibitions which might otherwise have been overlooked.

The craft and technology of AI image making continues to hurtle forward at full speed, and I brought readers some of the best and most interesting LORAs for AI powered image generation. Including a new Solomon Kane character LORA, for R.E. Howard’s Kane. I imagine your AI would also obligingly clothe Lovecraft in the same vintage Puritan togs, if prompted. I also perfected a ‘Moebius emulating’ Stable Diffusion 1.5 workflow, or as close as you can get to ‘perfected’ with the wayward SD. Elsewhere I continued to update my directory of worthy AI LORAs for artists and makers of comics.

My Tolkien Gleanings #8 is underway, a round-up and ‘zine for Tolkien scholars. Expect it in a few weeks.

I’m pleased to report that I’ll soon have a bit more money to buy Lovecraft and Tolkien books, since I have a part-time job at last. I clean and clean toilets early each morning, which is all I could get after a year of no professional interviews, but it’s regular and it pays. Many thanks to all those who have donated or helped via Patreon over the last 18 months. The new job does mean I’ll have less time and energy, and as a result certain time-sinks will have to go. But Tentaclii won’t be one of them. On the plus side, the job means I can restore the flow of ginger beer to the taps of Tentaclii Towers, at last. I’ve even discovered that the little ‘Caribbean food’ nook in my supermarket holds an “extra fiery” version of the regular ginger beer can. This rare type is not on the usual shelf and I didn’t know it even existed.

The German Lovecraftians have a “new newsletter format” for members under the title Lovecraft Lore… “In which we send daily emails about events in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.”

That sounds interesting. I guess one could now have an AI extract any ‘date like strings’ from within the Lovecraft fiction corpus, covert them to a consistent date format and then sort them into a per-month year list. And alongside each, the story title and a snippet of the original context. The Python-based open source datefinder looks like it’s half way towards that.

The booklet The Chronology Out of Time (1986) made a first try at a simple megalist of dates in Lovecraft’s fiction. But it is now well out-of-print, and not on Archive.org. Perhaps time for a new AI-assisted expanded edition?

A new carnivorous plant has been named after Derleth’s Cthugha, Dionaea Cthugha (2020)…

Defined by a very mutant and deformed trap which becomes deep red.

In the first news post of 2024, S.T. Joshi reports that August Derleth’s main regionalist fiction is back in print in Joshi-scrutinised editions. These being Place of Hawks (1935), Evening Spring (1941), Shield of the Valiant (1945), part of the set known as the Sac Prairie saga. Joshi also reports that…

I have now completed work on a volume of previously uncollected Sac Prairie stories, Gently in the Autumn Night

A half dozen or so Sac Prarie volumes can also be found on Archive.org in scans of varying quality, “to borrow”. In a 1963 book, Derleth lists the titles of his Sac Prarie saga…

Talking of Derleth, I took another look for a Solar Pons collection, Derleth’s Sherlock Holmes -alike detective. Back in 2020 I determined in a Derleth survey that The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus would be the best collection, being the one from 2000 with uncorrupted text, but it was then ridiculously expensive. Now also unavailable, I find.

To my 2020 survey I can now add that he wrote the less heavy “Gus Elker Stories”, these being rather more amusing stories of Wisconsin country life than those of Sac Prarie. But these had to wait a long time to be collected, as Country Matters (1996). For which the blurb read…

Here are 35 rolicking misadventures of Sac Prairie’s most engaging characters, Gus Elker, Great-aunt Lou and Great-uncle Joe Stoll. Nineteen of these stories have never appeared in any book or anthology. Since this collection was released, 17 additional unpublished stories have been found and will be published in the near future.

I can’t immediately find news of the second Gus Elker volume, so there may be an opportunity there for a publisher to pick it up? Or perhaps produce an audiobook with all the stories?

A new Terror Tales LORA for the Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI. A LORA is a ‘plug-in’ that aims to steer SD’s image generation towards a certain character or type of artwork. In this case the covers of the 1930s Terror Tales pulp magazine. SD is going to mess up the typography, but you could probably cut out the best images and paste onto a template made by vectorising one of the original covers.

Also note the new backdrop generator LORAs Realms of Darkness (generic medieval — streets, castle dungeons, old cemeteries, etc) and Fantasy Underground (generic fantasy) and Fantasy Tavern (generic fantasy). These do look very generic and formula, but you might be able to get something more interesting out of them.

Joschek’s Artstyles: Caspar David Friedrich, possibly useful for eerie sea-views of Innsmouth and its reef. If a full set of Friedrich works was used to train the LORA. Untested by me, as yet.