HPLinks #69.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog for 31st December 2025 has a long free extract from the newly-published August Derleth Sac Prairie Journal for 1939. A diary in which we get vivid glimpses of… “Derleth’s preparation of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others” and an account of a visit to the Weird Tales offices under Farnsworth Wright.

* The Catholic subscription-only podcast Reconquest (Episode 498) this week considers “Lovecraft’s Lore and Catholicity: A Stark Contrast”.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has it that there’s a Truth Seeker “podcast on Lovecraft and religion” on Vimeo. Yes, Vimeo still exists it seems. Sadly I couldn’t get past Vimeo’s blocker-bot, but perhaps you can.

* From Mexico in Spanish, in the latest edition of the open-access journal Revista de Filosofia, “Los cuentos del gusano. Verdad, evolucion y antinatalismo en la ficcion de lo extrano de H.P. Lovecraft y Thomas Ligotti” (‘Truth, evolution and antinatalism in the strange fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti’). Freely available online, and these days easily auto-translated from the PDF.

* There’s a new £140(!) academic book in the Palgrave Gothic series, Uncanny Doubles: Doppelgangers, Twins, Clones and the Gothic (2026). One of the chapters is “Lovecraftian Dualities and Nonhuman Bodies: The Case of the Whateley Twins in “The Dunwich Horror”.

* Kalimac’s Corner blog reports from the recent U.S. conference on Clark Ashton Smith.

* New on Archive.org, an early work-in-progress PDF of Clark Ashton Smith In Early Fiction Magazines, with covers where possible.

* Deep Cuts considers “Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner and “A Glimpse of H.P.L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana. The latter post also digs up the drawings by…

“Betty Wells Halladay from [Lovecraft’s shelf collection of] objects [, as later] owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library. Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945”

* The same drawings are also new on Archive.org, found in good scans of the booklet of memoirs Rhode Island On Lovecraft (1945) (first and second edition).

* The new documentary film Lovecraft in Florida (no relation to the new book, it seems) is to have its world premiere at the Pensacon convention (Pensacola, Florida) in February 2026.

* New Pulp Tales has a new interview with author Ramsey Campbell. The short text-only interview is… “the first in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month”.

* SFcrowsnest reviews the magazine Cryptology #4 (July 2025) and notes that…

“Writer Will Murray’s second part of his look at Charlton horror comics is a demonstration of creators being given freedom to do what they liked because the company couldn’t care less – as long as their printing presses could be kept running continually. It also allowed new talent to learn their craft before moving onto the more profitable companies.”

* TDT podcast blog has a quick review in Spanish of the new Spanish book Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft: La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1 (‘We will always have Lovecraft: The influence of his cosmic horror on popular culture. Vol. 1.’). I also found what looks like a video from the book’s author at a university repository, talking about the new book in Spanish.

* The major new biography The Buried Man: A Life of H. Rider Haggard (2025).

* Les Heliocrates podcast examines the broad themes of Lovecraft & R.E. Howard: a correspondence beyond its time. In French, but YouTube autodubs it into English. Skip to three minutes in, to get to the start of talking about the letters.

* A new print magazine, RevERBerate: A Magazine of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The third issue moves to the print format, and apparently includes a survey of… “the early African explorers whose feats influenced Burroughs’ writing”.

* E. Hoffmann Price’s “Satan’s Garden” is a new free public-domain audiobook on LibriVox. 158 minutes.

* From Poland, the undergraduate final dissertation, Arabowie oczami Ameryki. Jak ukazywano swiat arabski w amerykaaskich magazynach pulpowych dwudziestego wieku (2025) (‘Arabs through the eyes of America: How the arab world was portrayed in American pulp magazines of the twentieth century’). Not online, but there is a cogent English abstract. Looks like the author takes a balanced view as a historian, and I’m guessing that (if an editor asked) it might become a trimmed English translation in a pulp history ‘zine?

* Everything you need to know about Selling at PulpFest 2026.

* And finally, Francois Baranger is lining up further editions of his richly illustrated large-format Lovecraft books. His “The Haunter of the Dark” will be hovering over the bookshops in the late autumn of 2026 in French, while his “Shadow over Innsmouth” is apparently due in English later in 2026.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft was fond of small sculpture and bas-relief tiles, and at the end of his life the shelves of his small bedroom area was adorned with gifts of small figurative sculptures made by Robert Barlow, C.A. Smith, ancient artefacts given to him by Loveman, and curious items picked up on his travels.

“My generous host [Loveman, in New York City] presented me with two fine museum objects (don’t get envious, O Fellow-Curator! [i.e. Morton]) — to wit, a prehistorick stone eikon from Mexico, and an African flint implement, with primitively graven ivory handle” — Lovecraft to Morton in January 1933, Selected Letters IV.

“I saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s […] Loveman quite overwhelmed me by giving me several objects for my collection of antiquities — a real Egyptian ushabti (small funerary statuette) 5000 years old, a Mayan stone idol of almost equal antiquity, & a carved wooden monkey from the East Indian island of Bali.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, January 1934.

“As for my newly-acquired Bird of Space … he looks something like this — standing about a foot tall. He is carved out of a piece of horn — I don’t know of what animal, though the colour is black — & highly polished & lacquered on the exterior. Wings & feathers — as well as eyes — are suggested through some very delicate engraving. The posture of the bird — as if looking into the sky preparatory to a hop-off for unknown trans-galactic reaches — combined with its generally weird aspect to suggest the title Bird of Space. […] Loveman was amazingly generous to give me this object. I had admired it for years in his home, but never thought of hinting for it. On the last night of my visit we fell to talking about it, & as I left he pressed it into my hands as a final thunderbolt surprise. That’s just like him! I’ve put the Bird on the top of a new low bookcase in company with a Japanese idol & a Kim Ling vase. Some time I mean to take a photograph of this & other objects in my ‘museum’ — and when I do I’ll send you prints. I have an Egyptian ushabti, Mayan images, & other odd & curious things …” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

HPLinks #62.

* New from Argentina, “El interiorismo del afuera en H.P. Lovecraft”. Freely available online, in Spanish.

In certain stories [by Lovecraft], it is possible to identify his careful attention to the specialized language associated with fine arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Its precision and abundance, as I propose in this article, is an attempt to bridge the gap between the artifacts and their perception that becomes a description by narrators and characters. The cultivation of this artistic knowledge, which is also expressed in his essayistic and epistolary corpus, allows us to consider Lovecraft as a well-versed interior decorator …

Offering some historical context here is the new exhibition review, “The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home”…

This engaging exhibition told the stories of four men — “bachelors” — who devoted themselves to designing their homes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New England. The exhibition beautifully displayed well-selected objects from the men’s homes and contextualized them with archival materials. An eloquent, witty accompanying book devotes chapters to each of their stories. […] they are situated in late nineteenth-century ‘bachelor culture’, which celebrated unmarried men and homosocial life within carefully crafted, comfortable, highly designed domiciles.”

* In the new edition of the journal Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, “Strange associates: Weird affect, weird fiction and the weird short story”. Freely available online.

… this paper investigates weird fiction’s relationship with the short story, and argues that the short story is perhaps the most ‘natural’ form for the weird.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog reports that he has finished his forthcoming Clark Ashton Smith biography. It weighs in at 164,000 words, so is presumably likely to appear in two volumes. “Will be published in the summer of 2026 by Hippocampus Press”.

* At Law and Liberty magazine, a Halloween article “Poe, Forevermore”. Freely available online.

* “Local librarian nominated for fantasy fiction award”… “The Dagon Collection is an anthology published as a fake 1929 auction catalog of items from a federal raid on the Esoteric Order of Dagon cult.”

* For Halloween, LibriVox offered its latest free audiobook collection Short Ghost and Horror Collection 080. The collection led with Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, closely followed by his “Cool Air”. Also includes tales by August Derleth and the Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.

* In videogames… Games Industry Ecosystem reports the “The producer of the first Diablo [game] has raised $500,000″ from an investment firm… “to develop Innsmouth Mysteries — a cooperative RPG [videogame] with elements of horror and extraction games, whose storyline is inspired by “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

* In comic-books, Pullbox reviews the one-off The Cats of Ulthar, a Tale Reimagined (for children). With interior page images.

* H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025 poster, now available. Plus the streaming dates in December 2025.

* From Australia, a new Lovecraft miniature to buy…

* Archive.org has a new set of screen-captures of Lot #54 – Necronomicon. Being auction images for a sophisticated movie-prop Necronomicon used in the movie Army of Darkness.

* And finally, Fungi music, in which British art-boffins wire up live fungi and have them play musical synths.

— End-quotes —

“I seldom notice what the cover-design of any cheap magazine is. Only once in an age does anything worth a second glance appear. If Wright [editor of Weird Tales] were to use a really effective weird design the bulk of his half-illiterate readers wouldn’t know what it was all about, and would write scornful and ungrammatical letters to the Eyrie.” — Lovecraft to Conover, September 1936.

“Not many of us, even in this age, have any marked leaning toward public pornography; so that we would generally welcome any agency calculated to banish offences against good taste. But when we come to reflect on the problem of enforcement, and perceive how absurdly any censorship places us in the hands of dogmatic and arbitrary officials with Puritan illusions and no true knowledge of life or literary values, we have to acknowledge that absolute liberty is the lesser evil. [Their recent actions show that] censors actually do seek to remove legitimate and essential matter [… And yet] ironically enough, this same censorship blandly tolerates, through legal technicalities, infinite sewers full of frankly and frivolously nasty drivel without the least pretence of aesthetic or intellectual significance.” — Lovecraft in The National Amateur, March 1924.

“I don’t know as it does much good to interfere with the vices & vulgarities of plebeians [through censorship]. The sooner they go to the devil, the sooner they’ll die off, gordam ’em.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1927. Lovecraft deftly anticipates the current state of pornography + birth-rate demography.

“I’ll endorse a censorship [of art and literature only after] the Watch and Ward Society have disposed of the blunders of Eddie Guest and of the designers of houses and public buildings of the 1860-1890 period. There is some ugliness that ought to be abolished by law in the interest of the good life! Down with French roofs and imitation Norman Gothic ….. keep the children from the degrading contamination of scroll-saw porch trimmings and octagonal cupolas and Richardsonian quasi-Romanesque ….. fie on the immortality of cast-iron lawn deer!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1931. The Watch and Ward Society were a notorious pro-censorship group based in Boston, New England. Eddie Guest was probably Edgar Albert Guest, the sentimental popular poet then known as “the People’s Poet”.

HPLinks #58.

* Les Navigateurs, a new French ‘BD’ graphic novel by Caneva & Lehman, has won the Rene Goscinny Best Writer Award in France. Apparently it’s a graphic novel in which… “Lovecraft meets the waters of the Seine river”.

* Also in France, the Angouleme 2026 comics arts megafest will feature “Francois Baranger meets Gou Tanabe”. Billed as an “exceptional encounter between two masters of H.P. Lovecraft’s masterpieces: Gou Tanabe on one side, and Francois Baranger on the other.” Set for 31st January 2026. Update: the entire festival is now cancelled.

* Gou Tanabe’s 370-page manga adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time has a date for the English edition from Dark Horse, 23rd December 2025.

* The new Routledge Anthology of Global Science Fiction Origins (2025) has “The Machine Man of Ardathia” (1927) by Francis Flagg of Tucson, Arizona, the pseudonym of Henry George Weiss. He was Canadian by birth and moved to America as a boy, but the anthologist pegs him as “Canada”. The introduction to the tale notes his Lovecraft connection…

Flagg engaged in a friendly correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s influence might be apparent in Flagg’s story, “The Blue Dimension” (1928) which tells of a scientist’s invention that allows the user to not only see into other dimensions but, eventually to travel to those other dimensions bodily. An even more direct borrowing from Lovecraft is Flagg’s story, “The Distortion out of Space” (1934), which uses a meteorite impact as its inciting event. The parallels to “The Color Out of Space” are clear and frequent. Flagg placed stories regularly into Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Science Wonder, and other prominent genre magazines.

Lovecraft started corresponding with Flagg in “early 1929” [Joshi, I Am Providence], so the 1928 influence must have come about simply by reading published Lovecraft tales. Lovecraft would not have contributed any outline or advice on re-writing the tale. “The Distortion out of Space” was published in Weird Tales in August 1934, and — given the above — one wonders what Lovecraft made of the close “parallels”.

* Barbadillo reviews the new book Lovecraft, poeta dell’abisso, in Italian. This reveals the book is actually a reprint of a 1979 book, but here with new…

… essays on, among other things, the relationship between the literature of the ‘recluse of Providence’ and esotericism, the Italian translations of his works, and the illustrators of his tales. [Readers also get the] two chapters which were removed from the first edition at the time, concerning the early myths surrounding Lovecraft and his literary legacy.

The review continues, here in translation…

[Lovecraft has a] “philosophical vision centered on a reevaluation of the tragic. This is clearly evident from some of his letters published at the beginning of the book. In them, among other things, one can read: “Since the entire plan of creation is pure chaos […] there is no need to draw a line between reality and illusion. Everything is a mere effect of perspective”. There are no facts, as Nietzsche knew, but interpretations of them. This conception is a-teleological and, on this subject, he notes: “I cannot imagine the scheme of life and cosmic forces in any other way than as a mass of irregular points gathered in directionless spirals”. Even more significantly: “I believe that the cosmos is a purposeless and meaningless set of endless cycles […] consisting only of blind forces operating according to fixed and eternal patterns”. The matter [he] gazes upon is Lucretian, animated; it is not “matter” in the modern sense. He is aware that transcendence exists only in immanence, in physis, and, in it, establishes the magical possibility of the impossible. Lovecraft’s cosmos is a Leopardian one, horrific and astonishing at the same time. His gaze is of a “detached observer” and his inquisitive curiosity is detached from any anthropocentrism […]. His existential and political conservatism must be understood, then, as a response to chaos, an attempt to order, to give “form,” even if momentary, to that which is not ordered.

* From Russia, “The ‘Gothic Plot’ as Outlined in Lovecraft’s Notes” (2024). A short journal article in Russian with English abstract. Freely available online. Examines Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and “Notes on Weird Fiction”, to determine exactly what Lovecraft considered ‘the Gothic Plot’…

the unnatural revival of an “antiquity” which was isolated from progressive society, forgotten and mummified, [was considered] to be the mainstay of the Victorian Gothic. The catalyst for the Gothic plot is usually an mechanistic attempt to assimilate alienated relics. Lovecraft identifies several plot ‘formulas’ for a revival of antiquity which threatens modern civilization: (1) activation of spiritless matter (corpse, “lower” realms of nature, bodily parts and organs, inanimate “facilities”), that ultimately inverts the hierarchy of psyche and physiology; (2) recurrent memories that literally resurrect the historical or biological past; (3) psycho-somatic degeneration and impersonation (which is presented as a local substitution of higher forms for lower, rudimentary ones).

* New details of an article for a forthcoming Edinburgh University Press journal article, “World War Weird: Blackwood and the First World War”.

* “Weird Weather Against the Pathetic Fallacy” of Ruskin (2025), an undergraduate final-year dissertation. Freely available online.

Ruskin’s work calls attention to the literary trope of assigning weather in literature emotion, yet Algernon Blackwood and Shirley Jackson intentionally deviate from the pathetic fallacy and make the weather in their stories weird and eerie by both breaking its connection with humanity and intentionally removing human emotion from the weather and natural settings.

* A new paper in the open-access Journal of Tolkien Research, “Cold Words, Heartless and Miserable: Tolkien’s Approach to Supernatural Horror”. Tolkien’s…

“Fog on the Barrow-downs” is basically a tale of supernatural horror [and] demonstrates that Tolkien, as a horror writer, could innovate and improve on his materials.

* In Current Research in Egyptology 2024: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Symposium, “The Call of Nighted Khem: Tracing Ancient Egypt through Weird Fiction”. The book is free online in open-access.

* A forthcoming Society of Illustrators exhibition, “Something Else Entirely: The Illustration Art of Edward Gorey”.

* New on YouTube, Michael K. Vaughan goes “Revisiting The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”.

* A stage play titled “Lovecraft Cult”, with a premiere on 29th October 2025 and then running on over Halloween. Apparently to be staged ‘in the round’ in an old surgical Dissection Room at the University of Goettingen, Germany…

A group of students interested in cryptomycology has gathered for a lecture, to learn more about the research of their eccentric Professor Dr. von Tannenberg regarding the mysterious fungus “Tenebris”, whose spores he found in an ancient burial chamber.

* And finally, new on Archive.org is a run of the UK’s The Flying Saucer Review (1955-1969). It looks like there are lots of ideas here for writers considering a crossover ‘UFO-logists unwittingly meet the Lovecraft Mythos’ tale or two. Or even a TV sitcom along the same lines (think ‘Detectorists but with UFO hunters, set in the mid 1970s’).

— End-quotes —

[… on seeking Lovecraft and arriving in] Angell Street [you will] see a tiny piazza [i.e. plaza… You will then] discover upon the corner post of the plazza some figures […] the three modest figures — 598! Your journey is indeed o’er, & your pull of the bell will in all probability bring before you the ungainly form & pasty face of the Demon Critick — the Boeotian Ogre — Ludovicus Theobaldus II” — Lovecraft gives instruction on how to reach his home at 598 Angell St, Providence, June 1918.

“Only last night I had another dream — of going back to 598 Angell Street after infinite years. The neighbourhood was deserted and grass-grown, and the houses were half-falling to pieces. The key on my ring fitted the mouldering door of 598, and I stepped in amidst the dust of centuries. Everything was as it was around 1910 — pictures, furniture, books, etc., all in a state of extreme decay. Even objects which have been with me constantly in all later homes were there in their old positions, sharing in the general dissolution and dust-burial. I felt an extreme terror — and when footsteps sounded draggingly from the direction of my room I turned and fled in panic. I would not admit to myself what it was I feared to confront but my fear also had the effect of making me shut my eyes as I raced past the mouldy, nitre-encrusted mirror in the hall. Out into the street I ran — and I noted that none of the ruins were of buildings newer than about 1910. I had covered about half a block — of continuous ruins, with nothing but ruins ahead — when I awaked shivering.” — Lovecraft recounts a dream of his old home, to C.A. Smith, November 1933.

“When, as a youth of twenty, I laid in these ochraceous pads [pads for writing, purchased in bulk in 1910] did I ever think a grey-headed old has-been of almost forty-five would be scrawling on ’em in the virtually fabulous future of year of 1935? 1935 ….. even today it has an unreal, far-ahead sound! Can I be living in a year whose numeral seems as fantastically remote as 2000 or 2500 or 5000? Where have all the intervening twelvemonths gone to? Even 1910 is fantastic enough to one whose sense of existence is somehow curiously oriented to 1903. And can it be that the world of 1910 will in turn give place to something as different as 1910 is from 1450?” — Lovecraft to Morton, on a sense of ‘living beyond one’s time’, April 1935.

HPLinks #55.

* An interesting new psychogeography Phd thesis, Atmospheric War and the Fantastic: Andre Breton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Richard S. Shaver (2025), from the University of California. Freely available online, and 165 pages. Examines how…

each writer conceives of the fantastic as an atmospheric phenomenon in culture. By characterizing the fantastic as an atmospheric phenomenon [the writers respond] to a broader process taking place in the twentieth century, whereby technological and scientific innovations increasingly made it possible to intervene into background conditions of life that were hitherto beyond the scope of human access or understanding [ By engaging with this ] process I call atmospheric war […] writers such as Lovecraft and Shaver carry forward Surrealism’s project to develop a collective myth that would make art the basis of a new, revolutionary life praxis.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of the new book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis (2025). A bibliographic scholar and book sleuth assiduously traces how Barlow’s fabulous collection of the weird (kept in a special closet) was built, and then later dispersed and travelled across time…

The book has important implications regarding the dispersal of the books in Lovecraft’s library. A must for all Lovecraft and Barlow scholars and collectors!” (Joshi)

Available now as a Kindle ebook. Also as a paperback and one that’s surprisingly affordable, in these days of expensive ever-price-ratcheted print-on-demand paperbacks.

* Joshi also notes in his blog that… “David E. Schultz and I are also working on a volume of Derleth’s essays on weird, fantasy, and science fiction”. This will be a selection from Derleth’s huge output.

* Here in the UK for the past three years, The University of Oxford has been running a successful series of public talks by scholars on aspects of Tolkien’s work and life. Now they’re branching out, with “H.P. Lovecraft: The Madness and the Horror”, set for 16th October 2025. “Booking required” for this one, though, since I guess it’s one more likely to be disrupted by leftist students.

* Now online, the schedule for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Portland). To also include panel discussions on “Psychedelics and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and “Dreams, Madness, and Monsters: Translating Lovecraft to the Screen”.

* From France, the forthcoming book Pixels Hallucines: Lovecraft et les jeux videos (‘Hallucinating Pixels: Lovecraft and videogames’). Set for release on 6th November 2025, according to Amazon UK. The book appears to be a multi-author chapter collection.

* Grognardia, in the midst of making a Dreamlands RPG, has a new long thoughtful post on Lovecraft’s “The White Ship”.

* A stage performance of Lovecraft in London, H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” (20th and 21st October), followed at the same venue by a “magic lantern + live theremin” preformance of “The Call of Cthulhu” (27th – 28th October 2025)…

Fresh from a series of sold out Lovecraftian shadow-puppet shows, T.L. Wiswell turns her hand to the magic lantern, bringing “Call of Cthulhu” to life in a new and original format with Sam Enthoven’s live theremin [music] building the dread.

* For R.E. Howard readers and scholars, new on YouTube is a recording of “REH in 1935” from Howard Days 2025.

* Chaosium Con in Poland. This is the big one for Call of Cthulhu RPG gamers in the UK, Europe, Eastern Europe, Greece etc. 30th October – 2nd November 2025.

* A 1962 postcard of old Providence that Lovecraft would have been pleased to receive, had he lived to old age. Here seen in its wall-poster version…

* And finally, behold the genesis of… The Meowthos…

— End-quotes —

“[it became] a youthful mystery of my own […] You doubtless recall the closing passage of Poe’s “Premature Burial” — where, after an allusion to Carathis which baffled me till I had read Vathek, there occurs the tenebrous final simile: “but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.” Now that image of Afrasiab sailing down the mysterious Oxus (a cryptic stream whose imaginative associations always fascinated me) on an accursed vessel full of sleeping daemons — ineffable nighted things — held for me a macabre terror of peculiar intensity; a terror all the acuter because I could not trace the allusion to any source. I wove all sorts of hideously fanciful images about that voyage, and made obscure references to it in many of my juvenile tales. At first, the name of Carathis was woven into the mystery, but that faded when I found it in Vathek. Afrasiab and his daemons remained the tough nut, and for a while I thought they must be derived from some version of the Arabian Night more ample than any I had seen. Only after years did I find out somehow that Afrasiab came from Firdousj’s great Persian epic […] But I have not yet succeeded in finding any translation of the Shah-Namah, hence am still ignorant of Afrasiab’s frightful adventure with the daemons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffman Price, March 1933.

Lovecraft read Vathek (1786) in July 1921, learning of “the demonic songs sung by Vathek’s necrophilic mother Carathis”.

“In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales — “the unreverberate blackness of the abyss”.” — Lovecraft, “The Nameless City” (1922)

Fabled Samarcand of Silk Route fame was “on the Polytimetus, a branch of the Oxus”.

“Arabia …. Haroun al Raschid …. the Golden Road to Samarcand …. Vathek …. Palace of Eblis …. Sinbad …. the Roc …. the ghouls ….” — Lovecraft demonstrates his associative chain-of-imagination thinking to Morton, over several pages, January 1931.

Each distant mountain glows with faery grace,
    The flame-lit lakelet laps the level strand;
Lur’d by dim vistas beck’ning out of space,
    We take the Golden Road to Samarcand!

— Lovecraft, some lines of his poetry sent to Morton, November 1929.

“… that elusive, ecstatically mystical impression of exotick giganticism and Dunsanian strangeness and seethingly monstrous vitality which I picked up in 1922, before I knew [the city] too well […] 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” — Lovecraft recalling his first impressions of New York City, seen at sunset/dusk in 1922.

” [I nightly heard] … whining monotones on a strange bagpipe which made me dream ghoulish and incredible things of crypts under Bagdad and limitless corridors of Eblis beneath the moon-cursed ruins of Istakhar. I never saw this man, and my privilege to imagine him in any shape I chose lent glamour to his weird pneumatic cacophonies. […] In truth, I never saw with actual sight the majority of my fellow-lodgers [while living in Red Hook]. I only heard them loathesomely­ and sometimes glimpsed faces of sinister decadence in the hall. […] And what scraps of old papers with Arabic lettering did one find about the house! Some­ times, going out at sunset, I would vow to myself that gold minarets glistened against the flaming skyline where the church-towers were!” — Lovecraft, recalling his squalid rooming-house on the edge of Red Hook, New York City.

Lovecraft here as if taking the part of Afrasiab on his voyage down the Oxus, with his unseen fellow lodgers taking the part of the demons… “they must sleep, or they will devour us — they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.”