Category Archives: Podcasts etc.

HPLinks #57 – 16mm Lovecraft’s pals doc revived, graphic novel about Lovecraft’s cat, new article by Lovecraft’s uncle, and more…

30 Tuesday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #57.

* Here in the UK, Edinburgh Napier University newly posts some details of what sounds like an important H.P. Lovecraft Documentary Project which is well underway and about to launch a crowdfunder…

Restoration of archival 16mm footage shot by Sean Martin in 1989/90 about writer H.P. Lovecraft, featuring unique footage of Lovecraft’s then surviving friends and colleagues. Work-in-progress cut was screened at the Lovecraft Centenary Conference at Brown University in 1990. Project received ENU research funding in 2024 to digitise footage. This has now been completed (90 mins of material digitised), and a crowdfunder is being launched in autumn 2025 to raise monies needed to digitise the remaining footage. Industry contacts are in place to assist with restoration and additional postproduction.

* Another ‘Lovecraft as character’ graphic novel, from Argentina, which Deep Cuts usefully reviews this week…

… a story about a boy [Lovecraft] and his cat. It is not a historical work that delves into the nuances of the cultural forces that went into such names, [but rather for those who] want a heartwarming fantasy about Lovecraft and his beloved pet, which has gained a kind of literary immortality.

I found a review from Harartia magazine in Argentina, which concluded the book was… “essential reading for both lovers of horror literature and for those who seek stories that, in their apparent simplicity, hide a moving depth.”

Sounds good. I certainly hadn’t spotted it here, and the news is very welcome. It was published in Argentinia by Jano Comics in 2023, and runs to 103 pages. There’s no sign of it on Amazon or eBay. The closest I can get to a possible store source is AleComics in Buenos Aires, which appears to be selling it locally by mail-order.

* Talking of cats, Grognardia this week considers “The Cats of Ulthar” and points out that… “in its conception of a higher, more mysterious order” of justice, it “stands in marked contrast to the cosmic indifference of Lovecraft’s later, more famous works”. In this sense it shares, I’d add, something with his “The Street”.

* I found a real-life ‘horror story’ from Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark (d. 1915), writing in 1876. Friend’s Review reprinted his survey article in the Sanitarian, on a horrible pig parasite which also infects and quickly kills humans. Eeek!

* The latest Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast tackles the two ‘most Lovecraftian’ tales of Borges, “There Are More Things” and “The Book of Sand”. It seems the podcast’s Patreons also get a bonus interview with Andrew Leman of the HPLHS.

* A new book chapter on “The Visual Realization of Fantastic Worlds in Book Cover Design”. Now free and open-access, as part of the book Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 (2024). This is No. 4 of a German publisher’s The Middle Ages and Popular Culture series, but the text is in English.

* Just published (according to Amazon’s date and reviews, though shipping seems uncertain), the popular culture history book Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries. This comprehensively surveys movies and TV series / specials… “positioned as documentaries, that began with Chariots of the Gods (1970) and ended with The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981)”.

* The Hippocampus Press website now has “December” as the shipping date for the forthcoming A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

* In the related world of R.E. Howard, another fine free audiobook reading from Gates of Imagination, Robert E. Howard’s substantial Solomon Kane tale “The Moon of Skulls”, first published in Weird Tales over two issues in summer 1930. A few years ago Jeffro’s Space Gaming blog was reading through Kane and found that with this tale Kane became… “even more heroic, more imposing, more inspiring, and more awesome than his preceding tales could indicate.” The new reading of “The Moon of Skulls” runs over two hours. There may be frequent ads if you just listen on YouTube, thus an .MP3 download will be far more enjoyable.

* Open Letters Review reviews a new graphic adaptation of “The Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard. One of my favorite Conan tales, and here paired with art by Valentin Secher. Not really a graphic novel, by the looks of the samples. More of a sumptiously illustrated tale that might work well if paired with an English audiobook reading. At least, it would if you’re someone who doesn’t already have their own very clear visualisation of this classic ‘young Conan the thief’ tale.

The review states the 2022… “Bragelonne original was nearly 11-by-15 inches” and that the new small Titan printing in English is very inferior by comparison. Bragelonne has a page which reveals the French title was Conan illustre : La Tour de l’Elephant, and a title search reveals that Amazon FR and Amazon UK have the same two copies left in stock. Personally, the art really doesn’t fit how I’ve always visualised the tale (too brightly lit, too cliched) or Conan (too old, too steroid-pumped), so the book is not for me. But some collectors may want a big French copy of the book, before they sell out.

* I’m pleased to hear about the second issue of the revived Heavy Metal comics magazine, and the vibes coming from a few trusted HM connoisseurs feel good. My look at the contents-list reveals a new strip by HM veteran Enki Bilal, and even a revival of “The Bus” strip. A reasonable $30 gets you a one year digital subscription to the new quarterly, though sadly it’s a “subscription starts with the current issue” sub. Those only now discovering the HM revival may well want a “start me with issue one” sub, which doesn’t appear to be on offer.

* From Poland, a 2025 B.A. dissertation abstract for “Digital character sheets in RPGs, exemplified by the Call of Cthulhu system”. Not available in full-text. Examines…

… character sheets in role-playing games (RPGs). It also presents the design and implementation of the web application SheetKeep which serves as a virtual character sheet. […] Discusses the history and theory of such, and then] formulates the application’s design requirements. The outcome of this analysis is an application that enables users to create and manage character sheets for the Call of Cthulhu system within their own campaigns.

* And finally, a free HMS Challenger Botanic illustrations LoRA for use as a ‘style plugin’ with Illustrious. Based on scans of Ernst Haeckel’s book, presumably. Lovecraft’s uncle lyrically explains the historical context…

What beauties, what wonders, then, are found miles beneath the sea? The great steamship, the Challenger, sent out for a four years’ cruise by the English Government, has now returned. It has brought back with it the story so long concealed in these darksome and almost fathomless depths; the story of that great and strange and hitherto unknown country stretching for 140,000,000 square miles beneath the dark blue waves.” (Lovecraft’s uncle, Franklin Chase Clark, 1878).

Lovecraft knew and was strongly influenced by Haeckel’s anthropology and philosophy, but if he knew Haeckel as an artist of bizzare marine biology is unknown. The LoRA’s demo images are poor, but I was able to easily generate satisfactory ‘pages’ such as this…

— End-quotes —

“As for sea-food — it is simply intensely repulsive to me. […] From earliest infancy every sort of fish, mollusc, or crustacean has been like an emetic to me.” — Lovecraft on his disgust at the smell of fish out of water, to R.E. Howard, November 1932.

“Miami did not produce much of an impression [but I] sailed out over a neighbouring coral reef in a glass-bottomed boat which allowed one to see the picturesque tropical marine fauna & flora of the ocean floor.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, July 1931.

The Miami boat… “gave splendid views of the exotic tropical flora and fauna of the ocean floor — grasses, sponges, corals, fishes, sea-urchins, crinoids, etc. A diver went down and brought up a bucket full of sea-urchins for distribution among the passengers, but I restored mine to its native element because I had no means of preserving it.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1931.

“Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, written 1934-35.

“[… The madman said] “It is amphibious, you know — you saw the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm deep sea. It can’t stand up in there — too tall — has to sit or crouch.” […] The madman was bidding him hear the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door — and now, God help him, he did hear it! […] Phobic paralysis held him immobile and half-conscious, with wild images racing phantasmagorically through his helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There was a padding or shuffling, as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was approaching. …” — Lovecraft, “The Horror in the Museum” (written 1933).

HPLinks #54 – Poet of the Abyss, Crypt unearthed, Angell Street, Coq translated, The Spark Devil and more…

12 Friday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #54.

* The latest The Vermilion reviews a new Italian book whose title translates as H.P Lovecraft: Poet of the abyss (2025). Not on Amazon UK, or even Amazon Italy.

The review is in English but seems to have been auto-translated from the Italian into English. Thus I’ve clarified it in this quote…

… an exhaustive manual [of Lovecraft], full of information of all kinds, suitable for readings of different intensity, and with a narrative that includes biographical details and curious anecdotes, together with an in-depth analysis of the entire work and exploring the literary, philosophical and esoteric connections of its production. The book does not neglect a critical and attentive look at the vast secondary literature …

* I seem to have missed noting a ‘zine release. Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu #115 was published back in summer 2023, and I see it can still be had as a digital ebook. Mostly fiction, but there’s also an interview with Richard A. Lupoff, and an essay comparing “At the Mountains of Madness” with the 1933 novel which was later made as the ‘finding Shangri-la in the mountains’ movie Lost Horizon.

* The HPLHS has announced their new edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street, being the 1961 book of Eddy memories of their knowing Lovecraft in the Providence of the 1920s. The new $65 edition is described as a… “substantially expanded and embellished edition … more than doubling its size” to 174 pages. I should note that some of these supposed memories have been criticized as “fabrications” (Joshi and Schultz, Lovecraft Encyclopedia), and one hopes these will be footnoted as such. But the book’s page has nothing on that point. Indeed, we’re not even told if buyers will actually get any new information about Lovecraft. Nor do we see a contents-page. The new expanded edition is set to ship in September 2025, and is currently pre-ordering.

* New in the Spanish open-access scholarly journal Alambique, two reviews of the recent book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book…. “seeks to fill [a] historiographical gap by exploring the Spanish roots of epic fantasy through a theoretical analysis and an anthology of representative texts.” Review 1 and review 2. Freely available online, and both reviews are in Spanish.

* I see that Maurice Sand’s Conan-like epic fantasy novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867) has been reprinted in paperback in France, by PRNG in 2024. The book…

… reads as one of the first heroic fantasy or even sword-and-sorcery works ever written in modern times. The ‘rooster’ of the title looks and acts in a similar way to Howard’s Conan. Its fictional world is also fully Howardian both for its themes and its style.” (from the journal article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe”).

The new paperback of Le Coq is in French, and scans of the original book are not on Hathi or Archive.org. However, there is now a free English translation PDF on Archive.org.

* The Sprague de Camp Fan blog has a new and lengthy survey of publications related to Robert E. Howard’s early schoolboy writings.

* VoegelinView reviews the new book John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism (2025) and asks why this English author is today “ignored by readers and academics alike?”. Well… he’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I did try to read his A Glastonbury Romance once, having managed to actually find a copy in those pre-Internet days. But I recall he was just so boring that I gave up after a chapter or two, and for £1 passed the then-scarce book on to a colleague who was seeking a copy. The new review does interest though, since it reveals something new to me, that… “his last novels are ‘fantasies’ that can read like a kind of futuristic science-fiction”. SF Encyclopedia notes the relevant titles and some details of contents, remarking that his final works are… “fabulations, some of them unhinged”.

* A new podcast “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett”, a long interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries. Possibly a useful backgrounder for Mythos writers and RPG makers?

* The latest Appendix N Book Club podcast discusses H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of From The Sorcerer’s Scroll a long-ago ‘zine which had the article “The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons” (1978). Last month Grognardia had a post on this same seminal article. It appears to have been one of the very earliest attempts to translate what was then the “Lovecraftian Mythos” into role-playing games (actually it was Lovecraft + Derleth, but few could tell the difference back then).

* Grognardia is also developing a new RPG for Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and now has a public comments and suggestions post on his blog, which welcomes ideas and suggestions.

* The HPLHS has a pre-order page for their The Spark Devil, this being a complete prop-heavy Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure set in Providence in 1935. It… “makes extensive use of real Providence history and locations to create the most authentic setting possible”. Set to ship in October 2025. Also includes audio-props, which play via this device-prop which is included in the boxed-set…

* I see another nice set for luxury tabletop gaming, seemingly this very week. New Call of Cthulhu collector editions… “for Pulp Cthulhu, The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic, and the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep [adventure, in two volumes]”.

* And finally, LongPage is a new dataset of 300 novels with applied… “multi-layered ‘planning traces’ including character archetypes, story arcs, world rules, and scene breakdowns.” It’s free, uses public-domain, and seems useful for training AIs to plot and plan (or even write) novels in a coherent manner. I guess RPG makers may also find a use for this.

— End-quotes —

— Lovecraft on Angell Street —

[On the death of his beloved grandfather in 1904, Lovecraft at age 13] … mother and I were forced to vacate the beautiful estate at 454 Angell Street [built by his grandfather in 1880–81, and then numbered 194] … My home had been my ideal of Paradise and my source of inspiration — but it was to be profaned and altered by other hands. Life from that day has held for me but one ambition — to regain the old place and re­establish its glory — a thing I fear I can never accomplish.”

“… my grandfather transferred all his interests to Providence (where his offices had always been) & erected one of the handsomest residences in the city — to me, the handsomest — my own beloved birthplace! [in Angell Street]. The spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees, & a delightful fountain. Back of the stable is the orchard, whose fruits have delighted so many of my sad (?) childish hours. The place is sold now, & many of the things I have described in the present tense, ought to be described in the past tense. The house has been sold to one purchaser; the stable & orchard to another; & an ugly garage now smells to high heaven where once the crystal waters of the fountain played! Such degeneracy! Why could not the purchaser have kept his car elsewhere, & suffered the ancient fount to sparkle as of yore?”

“I never liked any other colour combination so well as black-and-gold. To my naive and undeveloped aesthetick sense that represents about the apex of dignified beauty — perhaps because that was the scheme in the front hall of my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. […] Ebony and gold is the aesthetick mixture [I like] — although old gold and rose is a great scheme, as the front parlour of my birthplace amply proved. There was an almost Oriental richness in that room, as in the palace of a caliph — I used to read the Arabian Nights there with an especial zest.”

HPLinks #48 – Lovecraft and music, new and old comics, D&D 5.5e Lovecraft, and more…

31 Thursday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #48.

* The Great Dangerous Books podcast this week on H.P. Lovecraft & The Apocalypse. Discussing the… “philosophical implications of Lovecraft’s stories, particularly the themes of knowledge, reality, and the human condition.”

* In France, the 23rd Festival de Bourgogne (seems to be in Burgundy, France) is to offer a two-day “The World of Lovecraft” event in late August 2025…

Films by Marc Thomas Charley and Martine Chifflot will introduce the world of Lovecraft to mark his birthday on 20th August 2025. Three short biopics, and bio-fiction films in the evening. The 21st August meeting will then address the themes of witchcraft, documentaries, and Lovecraftian fiction. Two documentaries, three biopics, and audience discussions will take place before another evening screening, which will feature a documentary by Marc Charley, “The Curse of the Feathers,” a true case of witchcraft, followed by a new black-and-white version of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in The Witch House”. “Ritual” will be shown that evening. Followed by discussions with the audience, these screenings revive the spirit of the Festival’s film club by presenting inventive art-house films. A moment of sharing, discovery, and emotion for all in the Chauffailles cinema.

* In the latest Cryptology #3 (Spring 2025), Lovecraftian Will Murray has an article on the Charlton horror comics. I recall some of these titles fondly, when they were unusual items found in the dusty bargain-boxes of British comics shops.

Writer Will Murray does the first part of “A Requiem For Charlton Horror”, looking at their early horror titles with a selection of covers.

* Also in comics, Broken Frontier reports this week that Gou Tanabe’s Comics Adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ “is to be translated and published by Dark Horse” in English. Set for January 2026.

* Feuilleton has “Lettering Lovecraft”, meaning hand-lettering.

* DiGRA 2025 now has its papers and abstracts online. This year’s major videogames think-fest will offer papers such as “Tentacle to the Metal: Ecosophy, Metamodernism, and Splatoon 3″, “The Fractured Imbunche: a Study of Chilean Horror Games”, and (abstract only) “Ecology of Killer Insects and Violent Nature in Grounded”.

* Also in the world of games, Form of Dread has a new and very detailed and technical review of Cthulhu by Torchlight. This new gamer book is meant to transform the core tabletop RPG game D&D 5.5e into a Lovecraftian world.

The single biggest highlight of Cthulhu by Torchlight are the subclasses, which are among the better-designed out of all those that I have seen made for 5e. [But the] bestiary [is disappointing], specifically the statblocks of the Mythos Deities. These are genuinely underwhelming, having few options to influence the battlefield and generally being ‘bruisers with one extra trick up their sleeve’.

Not to be confused with Cthulhu by Gaslight.

* A fledgling attempt to pin down some of the linguistic specifics of a R’lyehian language.

* Forthcoming, a French edition of Encyclopedie H.P. Lovecraft, being the encyclopaedia by Joshi & Schultz. Due in mid October 2025 from Bragalonne, according to Amazon UK. 500 pages and newly illustrated.

* A very niche new survey of a subset of Lovecraftian tales, the illustrated Powerpoint presentation “Cthulhu Returns to Camelot: New Works of Lovecraft-Inspired Arthurian Fiction” (May 2025). Available from academia.edu, and note that a Google Scholar search will get you an open PDF download without having to sign up to academia.edu.

* Seeming to me to be relevant to Lovecraft’s travels and campaigns to keep venerable old buildings, and his sense of resigned loss when they were demolished, is the new journal article “Spectres of gentrification: Towards a hauntological framework for exploring the impacts of gentrification” (2025)…

Using a case study of a gentrifying neighbourhood in New England, this article describes the utility of the hauntological framework in understanding ‘more than material’ impacts of gentrification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, alongside photovoice and walking interviews with long-time residents, this article describes how participants and residents are often haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood.

* A new book chapter, “Empty horizons: Library music and the occult”, meaning stock ‘music library’ tracks which were licensed by production companies and broadcasters and used to accompany supernatural scenes. Part of the new book Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2025).

This essay focuses on a particular strain of library music that engages with the occult and the supernatural, produced at a time when there was a countercultural fascination with esoteric belief systems. New technologies such as the Moog and Arp synthesizers were able to create other-worldly sounds, the like of which had not been heard before

* And finally, in keeping with this HPLink’s focus on comics and music, “The Music from Beyond”. A Chamber of Darkness comic-book adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Zann”.

— End-quotes —

“Decidedly, Grandpa is an eye-man & not an ear-man! If any one thing killed my musical taste it was the violin-lessons I took betwixt the ages of 7 & 9. Back in ’97 I thought I liked music, but a year or two of classico-academic drill on a 3/4 size fiddle soured me completely. They wouldn’t let me scrape the tunes I wanted, but confined me to useful exercises & insipid folk-tunes out of a book. As a result, practicing became a hell, & the whole damn practicing became a hell, & the whole damn business drove me so close to nervous exhaustion that two physicians (I was little short of a neurotic semi-invalid as a kid) told my mother that a halt would have to be called. […] Today I can scarcely tell one end of a violin from another, & don’t recall a cursed thing about reading music” [i.e. from sheet music] — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., December 1936.

“Merely because the world is haphazard & imperfect, with certain satisfactory [aesthetic] adjustments attainable by only a part of the population, he jumps to the erroneous & irrelevant conclusion that nobody can attain such adjustments; that those who say they do merely pretend it, & that it is a waste of time to seek such a type of felicity. In other words, because some people can’t appreciate music, it is foolish for anybody to seek the pleasures of harmony.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, October 1933.

“I revel in absolutely frivolous light opera & musical comedy airs, I cannot bear serious Music with a capital M. However, I am not so narrow that I do not understand its aesthetic value, & I never laugh at it in the manner of Lord North and other celebrated anti-musical personages. So fond am I of light and catchy music, that I tried to write a comic opera when about ten years old!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Despite my vast ignorance [of music], there are musical compositions which tend to evoke from my imagination certain definitely visual concepts which could be expressed (had one the skill) either in poetry or painting.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, May 1934.

HPLinks #47 – vitalist Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the Po Delta, re-evaluating CAS, a new Lovecraft Atlas, and more…

24 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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HPLinks #47.

* More Lovecraft + philosophy. New from Hungary, “Lovecraft, antimodernism and new vitalisms” (2025)… “H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre is considered as a specific genre iteration of antimodernist themes, but also as a formative influence on the philosophy of speculative realism.” In Hungarian from the Dept. of Philosophy at Zagreb, and freely available for download.

* Overthink podcast Episode 134: Weirdness with Eric Schwitzgebel, interviewing Eric about his philosophy book Weirdness of the World (Princeton University Press, 2024). With a substantial discussion of the book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

* Aetherium Arcana blog has a new short article on “Lovecraft and the Unconscious Structure of Empire”, followed by the new longer essay “Self-devouring Racism: Subversion and Collapse in Lovecraft’s Mythos”.

* New from Spain in English and open-access, “Development of Expert Systems by means of Large Language Models”. The authors feed Lovecraft’s fiction to a leading AI LLM, and have it try to find and map connections. Freely available online, those the images are rubbish quality and partly unreadable even in the source zip. This is as good as they get…

* Strange Aeons has a Catalog and Contacts link-list for the Italian Lovecraftians. Seems to have first appeared in 2023, and was last updated on 23rd July 2025.

* Also in Italy, Wu Ming 1 on Lovecraft, appearing at the Lunatico Festival. On 25th July 2025 he presents his new novel featuring Lovecraft-as-character, and then… “the geographer Francesco Visentin and Andrea Olivieri will dialogue with the author”. Followed by a presentation of…

The graphic-musical project [that depicts] the imaginary journey of H.P. Lovecraft in the Po Delta in 1926, between hallucinated visions, esoteric confraternities and monstrous water creatures. Designed by the Italian-English musician Jet Set Roger and the Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograph, preseting a concert event that merges music and literature in a game of cross-media references with the Wu Ming novel.

* Decadent Serpent considers “The Reevaluations of Clark Ashton Smith”. Part of the discussion is of “The Quest of Iranon” by Lovecraft, compared to “Xeethra” by CAS.

* Black Gate has a long event-report with excellent photographs, “Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days” 2025.

* A useful new survey article of all the “Biographies of Robert E. Howard”, issued prior to the new and well-reviewed biography from the University of North Texas Press.

* Forthcoming in French, Atlas Lovecraft, a 180-page book that sounds like a cartographic atlas for Lovecaft. Due in October 2025 from reputable publisher Bragelonne.

A completely unprecedented atlas offering tangible geographic and cartographic representations of the emblematic places of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. An illustrated work in colour presenting plans of Providence, the State of Massachussetts, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich and its region, a map of the Antarctic Expedition and a cartographic statement of mountain areas… [etc]

* And finally, a LoRA add-on for Flux, meant for generating images of whimsical toon Happy Shoggoths. Not on CivitAi, thankfully — since (as of today) the go-to site for creative AI is effectively banned here in the UK. I’m happy now that I nipped in just in time with my Windows 11 Superlite upgrade, and thus I now have the SD 1.5 turbo LoRAs, SDXL, Flux Kontext and Wan2.1 all downloaded and set up with workflows and ComfyUI to run them.

— End-quotes —

“I have always been fond of maps & geographical details (I’ve drawn a map of “Arkham’ to keep my local references straight), & my lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., February 1936.

“I used to row [in a boat] considerably on the [River] Seekonk, which you’ll find on your city map … and also on general maps of R.I. Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, April 1934.

[Lovecraft is delighted to find that he can circumnavigate the city of Charleston entirely via its many graveyards …] “the President of the Charleston Garden Club some time ago form’d the notion of mapping out an idyllic cross-town walk which might include as many as possible of these with a fair degree of continuity.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

[Lovecraft rises to the very top of the highest building in New York City …] “The assembled clan’s first move was up — clean up to the top of N.Y.! It costs half a ducat [dollar] per rube [person], and is worth it. Loveman was dizzy, but your grandpa wasn’t — gawd knows how hard I worked when I was ten years old to conquer my native tendency to dizziness from altitudes! I walked on high railway trestles, and hell knows what not! But I digress. All Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City lay below, outspread like a map — in fact, I told Mortonius [Morton] that the city-planners had done an excellent job in making the place almost as good as the map in my Hammond Atlas at home.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1922.

HPLinks #44 – Whelan in the Mountains, Howard Days recordings, sea serpents and saurians, and more…

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

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HPLinks #44.

* Deep Cuts this week examines “Black Thirst” by C.L. Moore and notes Lovecraft’s several reactions to the story when it appeared in Weird Tales in 1934.

* From the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, a Musical Engineering team issue a final report for 2025. Freely available online…

We chose the Cthulhu mythos as a conceptual anchor — not for its narrative, but for its emphasis on the “indescribable” and the unseen, which aligns with sound’s capacity to express fear beyond the visual realm. Guided by psychoacoustic theory, we designed two contrasting video clips with different sonic objectives.

* On SubStack, “The Life of Michael – artist Michael Whelan at 75”. Showing and discussing his painting “The Astrophysicist” (2008). Elsewhere, DMR brings news that Whelan is not resting on his 50 years of laurels, and that… “he is, at this moment, finishing up a glorious illustrated version of Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ for Centipede Press.”

* Broken Frontier reviews Gou Tanabe’s “The Colour Out of Space” graphic-novel in its just-released English translation. Spoilers-alert (for those who haven’t read the tale, which apparently includes at least one of Lovecraft’s most vocal critics).

* The latest The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast has a long discussion of “Art and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and the topics-list suggests the listener will enjoy widely-spiralling flights through esoteric dreamlands.

* From an Argentine journal, a new survey of “Nueva ficcion extrana Latinoamericana: hibridaciones narrativas, cine y juegos de rol” (‘New Latin American Weird Fiction: narrative hybridations, cinema and role-playing games’) (2025). Freely available online.

* Faunus 51 has been published, this being the scholarly journal devoted to Arthur Machen.

* A new scholarly overlay journal which may interest some, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism. The editors welcome your news of items and links of interest.

* Lots of R.E. Howard audio material this week, in the wake of the annual Howard Days event in Texas. Recordings now online include “Bob Howard & the Spicy Adventurers” (from PulpFest, rather than Howard Days), “Robert E. Howard in 1935, Professional and Personal”, “What’s Up with REH?” (on new publications coming down the dark river), “Spear & Fang” (REH’s first published story), and “Bob’s Photos”. Also, new on YouTube is a good free reading of the Solomon Kane tale “Rattle of Bones” by Robert E. Howard. A weary Solomon visits a forest inn for the night, with a travelling companion.

* Talking of rattling bones, a free LoRA add-on for models based on the AI image generator SDXL titled Wizard’s Vintage Creepy Creatures. This is Wizard as in ‘the vintage weekly British comic’. This well-loved title may recalled by British readers of a certain age, who may also recall the ‘Ken Reid’s Creepy Creations’ splash pages.

Ken (or perhaps a company heavily inspired by him) was also into generative art long before anyone else, shipping a long-ago ‘dial a monster’ cardboard-constructed frame to toy shops. Cleverly constructed with knobbed-dials which changed the head, eyes, nose, mouth/chin parts, to assemble an ever-changing random ‘creepy portrait’…

I recall it fondly from boyhood, but have never been able to find any trace of it since it was jettisoned during a house move. Until a Facebook page popped up recently, from the owner of what must now be one of the rarest vintage toys in the world. He too had been utterly unable to discover anything about it, but he managed to obtain one after a long search.

* Talking of generative image-making, I’m currently testing the new free image-editing AI called Flux Kontext Dev run in ComfyUI. I find it excellent for difficult watermark removal (e.g. a slip of cellophane with lettering on it saying “DO NOT COPY”, placed over the image of an eBay postcard). But it’s too crude for auto-colorisation of b&w images, compared to online services such as Palette or Kolorize. That’s a pity, and its line-art/comic style-transfer also leaves much to be desired in terms of subtlety. It can however easily take a head-and-shoulders picture and envision the person in a new environment. Such as Lovecraft riding the ‘last bus to Innsmouth’, here made by using Khoi Nguyen’s digital sculpt of Lovecraft’s head as the seed…

I’ve yet to explore its similar full-body capabilities, which apparently include the ability to keep intact the character costumes in the seed image (e.g. full-body character concept-art).

* For the real Lovecraft, visit the Wisconsin Historical Society H.P. Lovecraft | Photograph page, as there they offer the option to purchase a large version. Hopefully without what looks like a dreadful bit of scanner-moire across HPL’s cheek. Though perhaps that’s there to stymie AI upscaling using Gigapixel AI. Or maybe just original protective cellophane. From their ‘Harold Gauer papers, 1935-2008’.

* Now that I run Windows 11 as my OS, I can also test various locally-run “LLM” AIs. Next up, installing LM Studio AnythingLLM MSTY and trying out some of the local AIs. Eventually ones for audiobook and music/FX production, and Zork-style ‘choose your own adventure’ text-RPGs. Not to mention eventually distilling a ‘Lovecraft reanimated’ AI chatbot. I know… it’s a pleasant summer (for once) in England and I should be jigging around and eating dodgy hot-dogs at music festivals etc. However, living the high-life costs $’s and AI is free. No contest, and no dysentery.

* Talking of audiobooks… Librivox has just released a Weird Tales Double Feature public-domain audiobook. This being “The Salem Horror” by Henry Kuttner and “The Black Kiss” by Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.

* In the latest edition of The Fossil, the worthy and long-running journal of the Historians of Amateur Journalism… “David Goudsward describes a sea serpent that was the subject of a 1923 story written by Sonia Greene [Lovecraft’s wife]”. Freely available online.

* Hot from Pulpfest, a recording of a panel on Pulp Paleontology”, on dinosaurs and dinosaur-hunters in the pulps.

* And finally, talking of digging up fossils… “Startling Percentage of Neuroscientists Say We Could Extract Memories From Dead Brains”, referencing a paper published in the open-access megajournal PLOS One. Maybe we could store them inside the Moon in future?

— End-quotes —

“A few days ago I went over to Anastasia Island […] Tall trees casting a sinister twilight over shallow lagoons — funeral garlands of trailing Spanish moss — and the whole ground surface alive with scaly, wriggling saurians” — Lovecraft visits an alligator island in Florida, May 1925.

“… many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance — scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling.” — from “The Nameless City”.

“I am not only a non-modern but a violent anti-modern. Intellectually I believe in nothing; aesthetically I believe only in the irradiate dreams of childhood. Sophistication I loathe and abhor with all the venom inherited from aeons of reptile and saurian ancestors in palaeolithic abysms of terrestrial history, and I even despise intellect when not directly concerned in the process of philosophical and scientific intellection. By this latter paradox I mean that I see nothing of beauty or pleasure in intellect, but only the hideous fascination of the forbidden Golden Door for the miserable Agib who stands before it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1921.

HPLinks #42 – Florida, Lovecraft’s Last Day as animated series(?), NYC Lovecraft Festival, Arcade postcard and more…

20 Friday Jun 2025

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HPLinks #42.

I’m pleased to say I’ve survived installing the latest version of Windows 11. Not many do survive, it seems, judging by the dire headlines in the techie news outlets. But this was a special ‘superlite’ installer — no bloat, no Microsoft account, no adverts, no ‘apps’, no ‘your hardware is insufficient’, no forced updates, etc. And it’s the version after Microsoft’s many problems of the last nine months have (hopefully) been fixed. There were many roadblocks, but they were pushed through. It’s all faster and snappier than Windows 7, and even looks like Windows 7 (install Open Shell + StartAllBack, and change the wallpaper). Many bits of freeware now have better versions, or replacements if they no longer work (e.g. Text Cleaner becomes UnWrap 2.1, the old Explorer++ becomes the native Explorer + QTTabBar for persistent tabs). I’m still getting peripheral software installed, presets re-loaded, my Lovecraft caches indexed for keyword-search, and various small shoggoths are continually being encountered and squished… but another weekend and it’ll be done. Due to this intense activity, here is another shorter-than-usual weekly HPLinks, and with a postcard instead of the usual quotes. Thank you for your patience.

* Wormwoodiana has news of the new book Borderlands and Otherworlds (2025)…

“The essays discuss in particular supernatural fiction of the Nineteen Twenties, occult thrillers of the Thirties, and the English Fantastic in the Forties and Fifties.”

* New at the Cabinet Obscura blog, “Three “Weird Tales” Writers in Florida, 1933-34”.

* The French ‘BD’ (short graphic novel) Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft (‘The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’) is reportedly to have an official English translation. It appeared in French at Halloween 2023.

This graphic-novel is also to have what might be an animated screen adaptation(?) in the hands of a substantial commercial studio… “BOOM! Studios Adapts The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft“. Hence the English translation, presumably. Unless the English translation is to appear as a series of ‘adapted’ floppy spinner-rack comic-books? It’s all rather unclear.

* Broadway World reports Radiotheatre to stage 14th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Festival, 23rd-27th July 2025 in Greenwich Village, New York City…

Now in its 22nd Season, the multi-award winning, critically acclaimed Radiotheatre brings a true American theatrical tradition to the stage….the live spoken word drama…only with 21st century technology to make it a truly unique experience. For their 14th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Festival, Radiotheatre presents “The Whisperer in Darkness” live including a great cast, original orchestral score, fantastic projections, and cinematic sound design.

* A new German podcast on YouTube has the editors discussing their essay collection Kulturelle Spiegelungen zwischen H. P. Lovecraft und Deutschland (a new book on Lovecraft and Germany). In German, but don’t forget that YouTube now has all sorts of new-fangled AI auto-translate.

* The R.E.H. Foundation has announced the 2025 Robert E. Howard Awards Winners, and I see there’s also now an online “What’s Up with REH?” panel recording from the Howard Days 2025 event.

* New on Archive.org, R.E. Howard’s poetry collection Singers In The Shadows, as a scan of the 1977 edition.

* Also new on Archive.org to download as a PDF, Lin Carter’s Dunsany paperback collection Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), as a good clear scan.

* Newly for sale at Honest Abe’s Pulp & Paper Emporium, “Dagon” in The Vagrant (1919), and the rather less expensive The Arkham Sampler Volume 1 Number 3 (special ‘Lovecraft photos issue’, 1985).

* And finally, new on eBay is this fine postcard of The Arcade in Providence, with a flanking store. Seen here in its 1900s prime, the Arcade was a key place in Lovecraft’s childhood. I recall he continued visiting after childhood, in order to have his hair cut. Note the tall ‘Lovecraft-alike man’ lurking between the columns, whom the colourist has done her best to make inconspicuous in the picture.

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

19 Wednesday Mar 2025

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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 #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.

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.

Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in audiobook

06 Saturday Jul 2024

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Something for the weekend? Here are some listenable choices for hearing an unabridged reading of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in audiobook.

* By the venerable HorrorBabble, free on YouTube. Four hours. The closest to a British accent.

* By Dagoth Ur, free on YouTube. Three hours and 40 mins. Good, but you may want to de-echo it with iZotope RX 7 and then slow it down a bit in the player. Too fast, too much ballroom echo.

* As the SFFaudio Podcast #354, freely online. Nicely paced in five hours, but still a difficult listen in terms of distinguishing the separate words. That may just be down to a variety of American accent unfamiliar to my ear, though. You may have more success. Download available. The discussion came later, in another podcast.

* In paid-for there’s the HPL Historical Society’s Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft audiobook. A clear steady reading by a professional actor. Probably the best choice if you can afford the £40. Too fast for me, at four hours and 23 minutes. For the AIMP player I used a speed of 93%, ‘Voice’ preset in the Equalizer, and a Bass boost.

* You might even pop the text into a Word .DOC, then make sure there is no text that flows across page-breaks. Then save it to a PDF, and drop that into the Microsoft Edge browser. Edge currently offers sustained text-to-speech reading of a PDF, with Microsoft’s advanced AI TTS voices. These are free in Edge, and would otherwise be paid-for.

There is, as yet, no Phil Dragash-like unabridged ‘fully voice-worked’ reading, with music and environmental FX. Note that there are now AI sound FX makers to help things along. Another local one was released just the other day, Stable Audio Open.

Gordon Gould, 1930-2023 – narrator of Lovecraft’s tales

01 Monday Jul 2024

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I was sorry to hear that Gordon Gould, the excellent ‘Books for the Blind’ narrator of Lovecraft’s tales, has passed away at age 93, in February 2023. I discovered this via a short alt.obituaries newsgroup post…

Gordon Gould was also noted for recording an astonishing 600+ books over several decades for American Foundation for the Blind’s (AFB) Talking Book Studios under the auspices of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) division of the Library of Congress.

Possibly more than that, as I see a LoC search has 1,133 titles for him, as narrator, in the online AFB catalogue. It might be useful if someone could go through them all and winnow out a links-list of all the fantastic fiction readings. I also see other interesting items there, such as Lovecraft’s Selected Letters I as an Arkham House audiobook (though not read by Gould).

His ‘Books for the Blind’ reading of the Lovecraft collection Dagon and Other Macabre Tales can be found on Archive.org and despite the title it includes many Dreamlands tales. This appears to be the only Lovecraft he recorded, and he never read Dream Quest. What a treat that would have been.

On searching, I find The Putney Post had an obituary and small photo…

Gordon Gould Jr. passed away peacefully in his Manhattan apartment on February 26, 2023. He was 92 years old. He will be remembered not only as a talented professional, but also as a loving family man and friend.

Gordon joined the Chicago Tribune as a feature writer in June 1956. Gordon was awarded the 1961 Edward Scott Beck Award for Excellence in Foreign News Reporting for his story of an adventure-packed, four and one-half month trip in which he and 11 others were the first to drive passenger cars — three bright red Corvairs — from Chicago to the Panama Canal along the Inter-American Highway. At the time, the route included a then-unfinished link through the virtually unmapped Darién jungle.

Growing up before the advent of television, Gordon yearned to be a radio actor. But by the time he was old enough to be one, radio dramas had largely disappeared. When he moved to New York, he was overjoyed to discover the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and to be invited to join its pool of actors. Gordon eventually played in 60 episodes of Mystery Theater from 1974 to 1982, and was the last American actor to portray Sherlock Holmes on a nationally syndicated radio show. Gordon played villain General Veers in the radio adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, alongside Mark Hamill (as Luke Skywalker), Billy Dee Williams (as Lando Calrissian) and John Lithgow (as Yoda). The program first aired on NPR in the United States in 1983.

Gordon was the voice of countless radio and TV commercials. And, over 34 years, Gordon brought books to life for the visually impaired, recording more than 600 Talking Books for the Blind for the Library of Congress. Gordon was also a regular on-stage presence.

Gordon and his beloved wife of 51 years, Mary, were avid patrons of the arts, particularly opera. They regularly traveled across the United States and Europe to attend operas and music concerts. Their Manhattan apartment was a modern-day Parisian salon with friends gathering regularly to listen to music (including a recital of all of Chopin’s piano études) and exchange ideas. They frequently discussed the arts, travels, and global affairs. Gordon’s career and mind were impressive, but no more so than his gentle, loving nature. He was predeceased by his wife, Mary, and his dear son John Kinzie Gould. Gordon is survived by his beloved daughter and grandsons, Nell Gould, and Cooper and Griffin Gould.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater website has a listing of his programmes, and another small picture in uniform (perhaps made in the early 1950s).

Not to be confused with his namesake, who invented the laser.

Annals of the Jinns / Sorcery of Aphlar

26 Wednesday Jun 2024

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New on Librivox, The Weird Fiction of The Fantasy Fan. Including R.H. Barlow’s complete ‘Annals of the Jinns’ series. Also Lovecraft’s possible 1934 revision of a short tale by the emerging young Rimel, “The Sorcery of Aphlar”…

“Very glad to see the new tale [Sorcery of Aphlar] — which reminds me somewhat of Dunsany. I’m returning it with a few changes which I think would help somewhat. … [also] I’ve taken the liberty of changing the name of the hero …” (23rd July 1934)

Which could be Lovecraft-ese for ‘I’ve ripped it to shreds and re-written it’, or perhaps he did make only a few tweaks. We don’t know. The first two thirds often reads like a Lovecraft tale of the Dreamlands. However, we do know from the letters that Lovecraft finds Rimel’s next tale much better, and therefore he only gives it a light revision…

“The Jewels of Sharlotte” … marks a vast amount of progress … Good work! … as you may see I haven’t made a single major change. Just a few re-arrangements and substitutions, & it stands as originally written.” (23d August 1934, Lovecraft’s emphasis).

This might be taken to mean that the previous and lesser tale had had major changes and re-writing to make it fit for publication. The same letter reveals no quibbles from Rimel about the revision, but celebrates in passing that “Sorcery of Aphlar” had just “landed with Hornig” in The Fantasy Fan.

The tale adds a new and very minor Tolkien/Lovecraft comparison. Both managed to anthropomorphise a snail in fiction, though it was probably Rimel’s idea to do so here.