HPLinks #100 – Will Murray, Lovecrafter No. 15, Cthulhu in China, Bibliomysteries, and more…

05 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

* It’s sad to learn that Will Murray has passed away, and at the too-young age of 70. There’s an obituary at the Keohane funeral service website, presumably online with the family’s blessing. Also memories and appreciations from Murania Press, Super Stuff in the Bronze Age, and Comics Beat magazine.

* The son of the pioneering 1970s Lovecraft researcher John L. McInnis III now has a new Web page detailing his father’s scholarship and on-the-ground research. There are also photographs and primary-source documentation where available.

* The German Lovecraftians have issued issue No. 15 of their paper annual magazine The Lovecrafter. This issue focuses on Clark Ashton Smith.

* Deep Cuts digs deep and reprints the Weird Tales tale “Medusa” (1928) by Royal W. Jimerson, noting it has some elements in common with “Medusa’s Coil” (1930). The latter being the tale ghost-written by H.P. Lovecraft (a re-writing and re-ordering of what was likely a lost original tale or outline by Zealia Bishop).

* In English in a Hungarian academic journal, “Cthulhu’s Resurgence As An Event: Mediation And Performativity In Chinese Online Novels” (2026). Freely available online.

* A Shiver in the Archives makes me aware of the bibliography Bibliomysteries: An Annotated Bibliography of First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World of Books, 1849-2000 (2014) (second revised edition, with the first apparently being a limited edition of 200 copies). I see the same author has also published the 440-page American Mystery Classics: Golden Age Bibliomysteries (July 2026) and… “This volume collects the finest of such stories” form American fiction, says the blurb. Currently it’s a 99-pence Kindle ebook on Amazon, but be warned that once purchased there’s no “Download available in additional formats” and Amazon has stopped sending ebooks to their older ereader devices. Also be warned that the first story in the collection is very skippable and curiously has nothing to do with books. Start with the second story.

* New to me, Sentinel Hill Press has “New England’s Creatures, Creepers, and Cryptids – A Bibliography” (2024) as an online post.

* Librivox has their new Coffee Break Collection 041 – Witchcraft online, including items from Lovecraft Circle members Wilfred Blanch Talman and Clark Ashton Smith. All Librivox audio readings are public domain.

* An academic paper, “AI-assisted literary-to-song adaptation: a practice-based study of literary interpretation in a text-to-audio workflow” (2026). Freely available online.

The corpus comprises 32 songs developed by a single creator, largely based on H.P. Lovecraft and produced in a post-punk/indie-rock idiom through close reading, researcher-written lyrics, ChatGPT-supported revision, Udio text-to-audio generation and human-directed assembly. Two cases are analysed: ‘The Viol Screams’ adapts “The Music of Erich Zann” and ‘Whispers from Yuggoth’ brings together selected sonnets from Lovecraft’s ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’ sequence.

* A concept album, Providence by SomeWhereOut (2026)…

Providence is the third album from Raul Lupianez under the name SomewhereOut, written over the course of two years and built as a collection of stories, each one drawing [musical inspiration] from the pages of Lovecraft and Poe.

* The production of the German open Lovecraft RPG is ceasing operations, according to the latest newsletter of the German Lovecraftians… “The entire FHTAGN editorial team is ceasing operations. We intend to complete all planned publications for this year.” The game and its offshoots remain open and freely re-usable. As I recall, it’s fairly well finished and also has a number of expansions. Open to take, adapt, translate.

* Spanish newspaper El Pais reviews what appears to be a new translated anthology which collects Lovecraft’s various Necronomicon tales.

* And finally, I see that Brown University Library News published an online “The Evolution of Cthulhu” article, ahead of NeconomiCon 2026 in Providence. On the same page is news that the Hay Library (which holds the Lovecraft collections and related) will re-open in September 2026, after being closed for the summer due to exterior renovation work. Looking at the Brown Repository page, I see the new F.B. Long letters are still not online as scans. But new there are high-res scans of two portraits of Lovecraft, one from 1931 by Wilfred Blanch Talman, and the other early from his The Conservative years. The .JP2 files are around 40Mb each. Here I’ve restored the 1931 portrait as much as possible, given the high constrast of the bright summer day…

— End-quote —

Lovecraft, photographer…

“Sunday morning Loveman and I explored Prospect Park, fed the squirrels, and talked literature. At noon I did some Kodak shooting during which process there dawned upon us the new infant celebrity who was to form our principal focus of interest [thereafter, Frank Belknap] Long, whose phantasies you have doubtless read (I believe you mistook one for Theobaldian stuff!) is an exquisite boy of twenty who hardly looks fifteen.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1922.

[Lovecraft photographs Sonia on her arrival in Providence]. “Arriving at the Crown about 3:15 p.m., I paused only to snap the fair [Sonia] with my V.P. [Vest Pocket] Kodak, (the [Kodak Box] Brownie is still at 20 Webster!) & proceeded at once to show the quiet sights of Providence with the assurance born of practice on you & Daas.” — Lovecraft letter from September 1921.

In 1933 Lovecraft was still using his Kodak camera… “#2 Brownie which I bought 26 years ago – in far-off 1907. A sturdy two dollars’ worth!”. It had broken or run out of film in 1930, but he dug it out and used it again in 1933 to photograph his new home at 66 College Street. He also owned a portable “vest-pocket Kodak”, though it only made what he called “microscopic views”.

Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book entry, of story idea-germs, No. 184. “Expedition lost in Antarctic or other weird place. Skeletons and effects found years later. Camera films used but undeveloped. Finders develop — and find strange horror.”

[Lovecraft sends Galpin some snaps, 1933] “The please-help-the-blind effect is caused by the sun in Grandpa’s eyes — which were closed when the camera was prematurely snapped. The blurring is due either to the perturbation of the ancient Brownie at its repulsive subject, or to a lack of steadiness in the grip of the photographer. These cheap Brownies have such slow shutter action that they have to be held very still even for allegedly instantaneous exposures.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.

HPLinks #98 – Night-gaunt puppetry, Avernus, NecronomiCon 2026, Providence litfest, thieves in the night, and more

22 Saturday Aug 2026

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

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #98.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, an audio reading of his “A Descent to Avernus” (1928).

* Released to YouTube especially for Lovecraft’s birthday, the handmade puppet film Night-gaunts (2023), and there’s also The Outsider (2024) from the same puppeteer.

* Edward Carmien reports from NeconomiCon 2026, in a series of posts. I Am a Man of Providence, 404: Lovecraft Not Found, A Day in Pictures, and a Post-NecronomiCon goodies round-up.

* The House of Shadows & Ink podcast interviews the Vendor Room Organizer at NeconomiCon 2026.

* A YouTube recording from this year’s Armitage Symposium at NecronomiCon, a paper on “Gothic Echoes: Lovecraft’s ‘Rats in the Walls’ and Walpole”.

* The latest 30+ Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft podcast considers Lovecraft’s letters, in the new episode “Letters from the Editor”.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, philosopher Nick Nielsen considers “Lovecraft and the Epistemology of Cosmic Horror”.

* Grognardia has the birthday post “Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft”.

* The Journal of Southern History reviews the 2025 Robert E. Howard biography from the University of North Texas Press. Mostly free.

* SpragueDeCampFan reviews the book Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age.

* A forthcoming book, The Strange World of H.P. Lovecraft: A Guide to the Characters and Creations of the Cthulhu Mythos which is …”due out in the UK on September the 1st” according to the author.

* New and free at Archive.org, the Peter Harrington well-illustrated auction catalogue for Quo Vadis? Visions of the Future.

* To Live and Let Die gives details about a forthcoming novel which will recount the full events behind Lovecraft’s Dexter Ward. All the events and meetings and trips that are only alluded to or mentioned in passing, apparently.

* A current Humble Bundle (i.e. digital goodies sold for charity) for Lovecraft videogames. 20 days left.

* Will Vigar considers pop culture and Lovecraft at length, in “Lovecraft Out of Context”, with his coda “Lovecraft Out of Mind”.

By turning Cthulhu into a plush toy, an encyclopaedic wiki database, or a videogame boss with a quantifiable health bar, contemporary culture is merely repeating the exact failure of Lovecraft’s academic protagonists.

* The Providence city council reportedly has plans to host Providence’s first official literary festival… “in late January 2027. Planning is still underway and details will be revealed soon”. Possibly an opportunity to talk about the siting of the Lovecraft statue? A plinth on the Twin Islands would be my suggestion, which would somewhat protect it from leftist vandalism.

* And finally, Locus magazine reports a break-in at L.W. Currey, during which a book thief stole first-editions of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Shunned House”, along with much else. The thief was apparently… “6’4″ tall, dressed in black and wearing pointed-toe dress shoes”. No night-black cape, which seems rather an oversight.

— End-quotes —

“… if any thief touches this outfit; why, by _____, I’ll smash his ______ for him with one fist whilst I pulverise his _____ _____ with the other, meanwhile kicking him posteriorly with both feet in their most pointed shoes and manner!” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1926. [While living in Red Hook, Lovecraft has three suits, his overcoat, and Loveman’s radio set stolen one night by juvenile delinquents. Here he tells Morton that he has a new replacement outfit. In another letter, he comically remarked on his loss by drawing a cartoon of himself trudging the streets in a yeti-like costume composed only of his own hair.]

“… those night-daemons or personifications of darkness which appear in all Aryan mythologies as thieves or mischief-working entities more or less inimical to man. The element of thievery or mischief-making symbolises the theft of daylight by darkness.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.

[Lovecraft ligs his way into a party at the most fabulous private New Orleans mansion]. “I spend all my time in the Vieux Carre, & am constantly uncovering new street vistas, perspectives of massed chimneys, gables, & balconies, & garden-garnished inner courtyards. [… One very famous mansion is…] zealously guarded from vulgar sight by the proprietor. I hung around this place like a thief planning a large-scale cleanup, but was finally rewarded when a large party — evidently friends of the inhabitants — called & strolled about the patio & arcade with the gate open! [Lovecraft slips in on the tail, as if one of the party] — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1932.

“I saw that Wollheim article dealing with Hugo the Rat [i.e. Gernsback] — through the kindness of a bright young member of the Science fiction League, Kenneth Sterling, who has recently moved to Providence. It was nothing new to me — for more than one friend of mine has been robbed by that thieving son-of-a-beachcomber.” — Lovecraft to William Frederick Anger, April 1935. Gernsback was notorious for not paying his pulp magazine writers. Wollheim had published an expose of his methods.

HPLinks #97 – Bloch biography, Otto’s daemons, Worm ebook, Robert E. Price interview, sea-breezes and more…

13 Thursday Aug 2026

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

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #97.

A less-full-than usual HPLinks this week, what with these being ‘the dog days’ of August and what with many goodies released last week ahead of NecronomiCon 2026.

* A new full biography of a member of the Lovecraft Circle, Psycho Century – Robert Bloch, American Horror Master (2026). Being… “the first full literary biography of this immensely influential author.”

* From the Concordia University Research Repository, the Masters dissertation “Daemons From the Stars: Discerning the Mysterium Horrendum in Otto and Lovecraft” (2026). Freely available online.

* In a timely post, amid the whirring of air-conditioning, Lonely Power Poles appreciates Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”.

* The Dreamands collection of tales by Gary Myers, The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2022), now seemingly has a $10 ebook version. The last time I looked the ebook was of the 2013 version.

* The latest July 2026 edition of the podcast 30+ Minutes with H.P. Lovecraft is “The Price of Fiction”, a 90 minute interview with Robert E. Price.

* Possibly an interesting curiosity, Dunhams Destroys Lovecraft! ‘zine. Crowdfunding on Indiegogo, and also soliciting contributions. The ‘zine…

is an upcoming quarterly journal published by Dunhams Manor Press. It will feature parodies, satires, farces, art, and all around irreverent Lovecraftian fun. Note: This is NOT an anti-Lovecraft publication.

* IGN reviews Chaosium’s new Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth Board Game.

* Avatar of Chaos examines Kadath (1979)… “which appears to be the first Lovecraftian video game, [and] is loosely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* The acclaimed major AAA videogame The Sinking City 2 is set for an 18th August 2026 release, with an Innsmouth-alike setting and an open world.

* My quick and vaguely Lovecraftian demo video, from the amazing new Minimax H3 video generator. Generated locally and quickly on my entry-level RTX 3060 12Gb graphics-card. Surprisingly, all but the tech-press have ignored this major game-changing open and free model.

* London’s esoteric bookshops are starting to list their autumn talks. These include An Evening with Lovecraft at Watkins Books in London, set for 20th August 2026.

Another London bookshop talk of possible interest to some is “The Golden Dawn and the Arts”, set for 29th September 2026.

* And finally, those now arriving at NecronomiCon 2026 in Providence may want to note that the Extended Programming page was updated yesterday. The page also has flyers/posters for the theatrical events.

— End-quotes —

It seems suitable for high summer and for the advent of the beside-the-ocean Necronomicon 2026, to offer a little trawl of Lovecraft appreciating the cooling sea-breezes…

On the sea-breezes of Charleston… ” At twilight — a very brief subtropical twilight — the birds sang in the gardens, and an insidious perfume of many blossoms floated cryptically over the whole city. Cool breezes sprang up, and those who disliked warmth would walk along the Battery, or White Point Gardens, at the very tip of the peninsula, which fronts the spacious harbour and receives a sweep of air from across the low islands dividing the harbour from the open Atlantick.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

“The atmosphere makes me feel twenty years younger and one hundred percent better — and I really seem to have a surplus fund of energy for the first time since last August. The sea breeze is always blowing, and I have become as tanned as an Indian in less than a week.” — Lovecraft in Charleston, to Moe, May 1930.

“And the screen Dracula in 1931 — I saw the beginning of that in Miami, Fla. [Florida] — but couldn’t bear to watch it drag to its full term of dreariness, hence walked out into the fragrant tropic moonlight!” — Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, February 1933.

“Darkness – sunset – dreams – mists – fever – madness – the tomb – the hills – the sea – the sky – the wind – all these, & many other things have seemed to me to retain a certain imaginative potency despite our actual scientific analyses of them.” — Lovecraft to Harold Farnese, September 1932.

“… his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village.” [to dream of the city of Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai] — Lovecraft, “Celephais”.

“But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits a thing untold by his grandfather. [That …] when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous, brooding silence [of the Strange High House, a silence that was] ever before the bane of Kingsport’s maritime cotters. And old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth’s joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly.” — Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

HPLinks #96 – Proceedings #6, Annual 2026 contents, Cat Book republished, Rats on stage, Providence mega-map and more…

07 Friday Aug 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Maps, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #96.

* Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 6 is now listing on Amazon UK, with a shipping date of 20th August 2026. The paperback contains the 2024 proceedings of the Armitage Symposium at the NecronomiCon. The website hplovecraft.com has the full contents-list. There are three biographical articles: on the early poem “Providence in 2000 A.D.” (1912) in the context of 1912; on Lovecraft’s fateful trip to Cleveland in 1922; and an account of the history of Butler Hospital in Providence.

* The website hplovecraft.com now has the full contents-list for the Lovecraft Annual 2026. Too much goodness for me to select just a few items here, so take a look at the full contents-list.

* The latest Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (Vol. 37, No. 1) has a review of the book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida (2025). In print only, it seems. The book is also reviewed in the new Lovecraft Annual 2026.

* Ars Necronomica, the NecronomiCon 2026 art-show, now has a poster and artist-list.

* Eventbrite still has NecronomiCon Providence 2026 Tickets, at the time of writing.

* S.T. Joshi has usefully re-published the long out-of-print H.P. Lovecraft Cat Book (2019), under the new title Little Sam Perkins: Writings about Cats (2026). The book can now be had as a budget Kindle ebook… “This book contains Lovecraft’s complete writings on cats, including generous extracts from his letters in which he attests to his devotion to felines.” hplovecraft.com has the book’s original cover and table-of-contents. It’s not a complete survey of cats in the letters, but rather a “generous sampling” with a focus on cats in New York City. I’ll add a Kleiner memory of Lovecraft in New York City…

[Lovecraft] and I were sitting in George Kirk’s Chelsea Book Shop one night, after hours, and we were discussing the word parallelopipedon. Lovecraft, as usual, was primed with information, [and] it suddenly occurred to me that parallelopipedon would be quite a name for a cat, a pleasing supposition which I mentioned to him. Then, beholding the usual kitten playing around his chair, I stooped, and soothingly murmuring, “Here, my little parallelopipedon,” began to pet it. Looking up at Lovecraft, I beheld him in a state of helpless mirth. His face was contorted and he shook all over. He was so completely convulsed that it took him some time to return to normal” — Rheinhart Kleiner, “Some Lovecraft Memories”.

* A new long text interview with S.T. Joshi, “A Recognised Tradition of Weird Writing”, for the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction.

* In Caen, France, Symposium Lovecraft, set for 14th November 2026. The event appears to be broadly about Lovecraft as an outsider who struggled to find a place in ‘reality’, and will seek…

to understand what his work reveals about our own relationship with ‘the real world’. Through readings, short dramatic sketches, lectures, and audiovisual presentations, this symposium seeks to experiment with a form of “disappropriation” — accepting that reality is not intended for us, that it transcends our conceptual frameworks, and that not everything with a face is necessarily human.

* As the AI wars rage among writers, Cambridge University Press and Villanova University have usefully published the results of a ‘bot or not’ test for AI vs human fiction. It was an online self-reporting test of “adults in the United States between the ages of 18 and 81”, who were each paid $4 to do the test. And it offered participants only “realistic fiction”. Not ideal then, but the results still seem interesting. Even given the current fledgling state of creative writing LLMs, they are found to be currently… “capable of generating short stories that cannot be distinguished from human-written stories and that tend to be perceived as higher quality and more absorbing.” “Participants were no better than chance at differentiating between the human-written and AI-generated stories.” And that’s without human plot devising, or later human polishing and trimming. The paper and data are open-access.

* A new short film, “The Call of C’thulu”, on YouTube.

* SpragueDeCampFan considers “Robert E. Howard in Modern American Poetry”.

* From 1974-1980 “Gregg Press Turned Paperback-only Science Fiction Into Quality Hardcovers, Then Vanished”.

* John Coulthart recalls one of the classic comic-art portfolio sets of the 1970s, in “BWS & REH”.

* A new book from prolific British publisher Bloomsbury, The Devil’s Garden: The World’s Most Sinister Plants and Fungi (May 2026).

* In the UK, Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Wall” has been adapted for the stage. It will be performed in Yorkshire in October 2026. Booking now.

* I’ve found a stupendous business map of Lovecraft’s city in 1946. Showing in microscopic detail the names and positions of the shops, cafes, offices and streets of Providence. A useful aid to researchers, even though it was published 20 years later than one might prefer.

* And finally, it’s nice to see that a new ‘grandpa’ bench is now sited at the entrance to the wooded bluff above York Pond, Providence, one of Lovecraft’s favourite summer writing spots. Looking shiny and new in summer 2025, the bench can be seen on Google Earth.

— End-quotes —

Some bench-pressing with Lovecraft…

“Visitors at the Slater Avenue Primary and Grammar School in Providence, examining the desks and walls of the building, or the fence and the long bench in the boys’ yard, may today discern among the multitude of names unlawfully carved by generations of youthful irrepressibles frequent repetitions of the initials ‘C.P.M. & H.P.L.’, which the vicissitudes of sixteen years have failed completely to efface.” — Lovecraft recalls schoolboy days, in The Conservative for April 1915.

“Getting too dark to write now. This [Roger Williams] park is one of the finest in the country, though formal as compared with my old river-bank. I’ve been using it lately because the hospital (which I visit daily) lies in its direction. The squirrels here are extremely friendly — one little rascal is now on the other end of the bench on which I’m sitting.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, June 1933.

“As I write these lines I am in very congenial K.A.T. company myself — for small tiger Alfred A. Knopf is ensconced in the curve of my left arm as I sit on a bench in the landscape garden …. occasionally chewing the edge of your letter, and occasionally reaching forth a sportive paw to pat the moving Parker [pen] which indites this document.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, August 1935.

“You may smilingly doubt the genuineness of Old Theobald’s retirement from the world — but look sharp! [… amid the hustle of Brooklyn, New York City, a certain] old gentleman … arose [in the early morning] to tuck his books under his arm and start for a solitary open-air day in nearby Fort Greene Park. There, on a bench against a secluded verdant slope, I read continuously all day; stopping only at twilight, when I wended my homeward way, pausing at John’s Spaghetti place for my usual Sunday dinner of meat balls and spaghetti, vanilla ice cream, and coffee.” — Lovecraft to Aunt Lillian, May 1925.

“I first became conscious of him [R.E. Howard] as a coming leader just a decade ago — when (on a bench in Prospect Park, Brooklyn) I read Wolfshead.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, July 1936.

“Finally I assented & seated myself upon a marble bench close by the open grave [and its newly-revealed “black passageway with a flight of stone steps”], telephone in hand. He produced an electric lantern, prepared the telephone wire for unreeling, & disappeared down the damp stone steps, the insulated wire rustling as it uncoiled. […] I sat on a marble bench in that very ancient unknown cemetery with the crumbling stones and tombs and long grass and dampness and the owl and the waning crescent moon.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, December 1919. Telling the dream of Loveman that later became the story “The Statement of Randolph Carter”.

HPLinks #95 – NecronomiCon 2026, Oceanic Horror conference, Pulpster 35, fungi by the Seekonk, and more…

30 Thursday Jul 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

HPLinks #95.

* NecronomiCon Providence is now less than a month away, and The Armitage Symposium 2026 wing of NecronomiCon has released details of the scholarly papers. There’s a PDF with abstracts. Titles include, among many others…

— “Correlating the Mind’s Contents: Lovecraft’s Challenge to Philosophers”.
— “From Quebec to Kadath: Echoes of Canada in Lovecraft’s Late Fiction”.
— “Cold, Circulation, and Cosmic Affect: Bodily Experience and Sensory Language in Lovecraft’s Fiction”.
— “Galahad in the Rubble: Frank Belknap Long’s Letters to Donald Wandrei, 1927–1975”.
— “A Shared Bond through Greece and Rome: Classical References in the Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”.
— “Lovecraft’s Influence on UFO/UAP Ontologies”.
— “Lovecraft and the UFO”.
— “Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches’ Sabbath”.
— “Lovecraft and Eugenics: for HPL, It was Personal”.
— “The Antipodean Weird in Lovecraft and Others”.

In the main programming for NecronomiCon, I spotted Fred Lubnow on “The Science of the Dreamlands”, and panels on “The Collectable Lovecraft” and “Librarians & Archivists in Weird Fiction”, among many more. A very rich year, by the look of it, but sadly I can’t be there. Still, hopefully recordings will surface on YouTube in due course.

* Lovecraft’s own Newport, Rhode Island, is to host an academic conference on “Oceanic Horror” in March 2027. Curiously, given the setting and theme, the call for papers neglects to mention Lovecraft. Given the current state of academia, perhaps they’re simply unaware of a Lovecraft connection? But some academics may be interested in the call. Deadline for proposals: 30th September 2026.

* New from Spain’s University of Salamanca, the open-access book Echoes of Fantasy and Reality (2026). In English. Contains, among others…

— “Alphabets For The Shadows: The Design Of Three Alphabets To Talk To The Dead”.
— “Impossible Mazes: Transmedia Representations Of The Fantastic Rhizome”.
— “Unspeakable, The Art Of Talking About Forbidden Topics Through Fantasy & Horror”.
— “A Visual Reflection On The Fantastic And Magical Realism: Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781) and Bocklin’s Triton And Nereid (1873)”.
— “The Poetics Of The Immense: Scale And Visual Metaphor In The Cinema Of Denis Villeneuve”.
— “The Long and Cinematic Shadow of the Vampire Nosferatu”.

* The new edition of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy has “Stay Strange: A Computational Stylistic Analysis of Altered Consciousness in American Science Fiction 1960–1979”. Freely available in open-access, in English. Related is the forthcoming NeconomiCon 2026 panel on “White Rabbits and Purple Haze: The Influence of the Psychedelic Era on Weird Fiction”.

* PulpFest details the contents of this year’s convention annual, in “Highlights from The Pulpster #35″.

* The scholarly annual journal Lovecraft Annual No. 20 (2026) is now listing on Amazon UK, and is set for an August 2026 release. As well as the articles and reviews, it includes… “a comprehensive index to issues 11-20.” No table-of-contents on the Hippocampus Press site as yet, but the Amazon blurb gives a flavour of the contents.

* The SpraguedeCampFan blog considers “Robert E. Howard and the American Fiction Guild”.

* A rare bit of CAS scholarship in the scholarly journal Odisea, “The Reversion of the Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of the Enchanter’ (1933)”. Freely available online, in open-access.

* I see NecronomiCon 2026’s core programming has “The Pale Song of the Butterfly Collector: Nabokov as Weird Fiction” with a focus on the fabulous novel Ada, or Ardor (1969).

* Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys “The Fantasy Novels of Clifford D. Simak – Part 1”. The is ‘the late Simak’ of the mid 1970s paperback boom, his name firmly established and newly able to have fun in the space where fantasy and science-fiction meet. Which at the time didn’t endear him to the ‘genre police’ on either side, but the mood of the times was with him.

* The University of Chicago magazine has the new long article “Wonderland”, on their magnificent Stephen D. Korshak art collection and its collectors. Freely available online. The collection is online here, and also in an affordable hardcover artbook as Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection (2025).

* Launching on Kickstarter on 4th August, Deep Space Lovecraft Collected Edition. A 184-page book collecting various one-man Lovecraft comics adaptations…

reimagined as tales of a retro-futuristic spacefarer encountering and enduring the very monstrosities conjured by Lovecraft’s own tortured mind, but in the environs and technologies of deep space and adapted to the artform of comics.

The book version adds two new adaptations, of “The Outsider” and “Dagon”.

* Coming soon on the Steam gaming platform, The Steeple, a one-man indie videogame which apparently aims to be a faithful version of Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”…

Explore a stylized recreation of 1935 Providence in this story-focused adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s final work.

* Keen Gamer has a long and pithy review of the new $30 videogame The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu (2026).

* From Chaosium, a new Call of Cthulhu: Innsmouth Sourcebook (2026) for table-top RPG players. Also potentially useful as reference for Mythos writers.

* Here in the UK, on stage at the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer is “Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Innsmouth Crown”.

* In Austin, USA, this summer, the promenade theatre performance “Speak No More: Lovecraft”…

Physical theatre experimenters La Fenice [offer a] silent, site-specific, and immersive drama [which unleashes] Lovecraftian secrets, through an improvised narrative that audience members will walk through.

* This year’s NecronomiCon 2026 is also very strong on theatre presentations, with far too many to list here. Note also the performance of T.L. Wiswell’s Magic Lantern show of “The Call of Cthulhu”…

The magic lantern is an early version of the slide show, with hand-painted glass plates, phosphorus lighting (replaced for safety’s sake with an incandescent bulb), and a touch of the quirky.

* In Scotland, British Horror Studio have started filming for their indie “Lovecraft-inspired, feature-length horror anthology”, For We Are Many: Lovecraft. They plan a Kickstarter release in due course.

* Talking of film, the open source and local Marlin-2B (GGUF here) is a new small lightweight video-describing AI. It may be of use to some who wish to index (rather than transcribe the audio of) large video archives or film footage. The small 5Gb size means it can run even on entry-level Nvidia 3060 12Gb graphics-cards.

* On YouTube, this summer Strange Magick is making a series of YouTube Shorts visiting Lovecraft-related places. So far he has visited the Newport round-tower, the Dark Swamp, and Neutaconkanut Hill.

* And finally, I see NecronomiCon also has “Foraging Horrors: A NecronomiCon Mushroom Walk – OFF-SITE, at Blackstone Park” by the side of the Seekonk. Sunday 16th August 2026. Which suggests the humid and warm air of Providence in mid August yields early fungi? If so, then that changes how one imagines Lovecraft in his outdoor summer letter-writing grove on the bluff above York Pond, since there would also have been early-emerging fungi around? Note also the related Armitage Symposium talk “In the Absence of Light… An Assessment of Lovecraftian Non-Photosynthetic Ecosystems”, in the early morning of the same day.

— End-quotes —

The following seems somehow approprate for the advent of NecronomiCon 2026…

N’ggah-kthn-y’hhu! Cthua flh gup r’lhob-g’th’gg Igh thok! G’llh-ya, Tsathoggua! Y’kn’nh, Tsathoggua!

It hath come!
Homage, Lord Tsathoggua, Father of Night!
Glory, Elder One, First-Born of Outer Entity!
Hail, Thou Who wast Ancient beyond Memory
Ere the Stars Spawned Great Cthulhu!
Power, Hoary Crawler over Mu’s fungoid places!
Iä! Iä! G’noth-ykagga-ha!
Iä, Iä, Tsathoggua!!!

— Lovecraft, from Selected Letters III, 7th October 1930. Not included in The Ancient Track.

HPLinks #92 – Clara and Lovecraft, bestiality, fandom research, the OED, film, theatre, and more…

09 Thursday Jul 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #92.

* Deep Cuts asks “Who is Clara in Lovecraft’s Letters?” and ably uncovers a new Lovecraft acquaintance in Providence. I’d add that the Westport Historical Society has a Clara Buffum page, with additional details of her summer home in Westport and her cataloguing work at the Providence Athenaeum. The Providence Athenaeum Bulletin reveals she also worked on the Delivery Desk in 1897, around the same time as the cataloguing work. Later the Providence Handicraft Club has her giving a talk on bookbinding to the Club in 1923, and her correspondence and mail-order sales address in 1926 was “42 College St., Providence, R.I.” which is that of the Club. Later the American Art Annual 1932 lists her as a member of the Club. Both the cataloguing work and the Club would tie Clara to Lovecraft’s aunts.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Profiles In History: Autograph Catalog 41 Winter 2006. Offers a 1930 Lovecraft letter to C.A. Smith, with transcript…

Carlsbad = the famous Carlsbad caverns. 20 years ago one could have had this letter for what today would be deemed a bargain price.

* From Indiana University, the Phd thesis The Edge of Cognition: Enchantment in Weird Fiction (2026). Freely available online.

* New in the 2026 of the French open-access annual journal Res Futurae, “Lovecraft sans Cthulhu. Epistemologie et esthetique de la bestialite dans l’oeuvre lovecraftienne” (‘Lovecraft without Cthulhu: Epistemology and the aesthetics of bestiality in Lovecraftian work’).

This article reconstructs the author’s intellectual landscape to better understand the interfaces between the pattern of bestiality and racialist zoo-anthropology. The study of the stories ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and ‘The Dunwich Horror’ allows us to articulate bestiality with an aestheticized evolutionary imagination.

* From the University of Marburg in Germany, a new open-access journal titled Fandom | Cultures | Research. Dedicated to fandom and fan-cultures research and research methodology. So far, four issues have been produced. Mostly English items.

* On YouTube, Archiving Horror! The S.T. Joshi Interview. A new Joshi interview.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the Arkham House Catalog and Stock List With Addendum, 1986-1987.

* A new book Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination (2025), which may interest some.

* Murray Ewing has a new blog post on “Lovecraftian Labatut”, musing on the curious similarities between the “strange and disturbing new insights” of the physicists and mathematicians, and the entities and cosmic vistas their workings can appear to glimpse.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog announces…

the Friends of August Derleth is a going concern, and we are actively soliciting members. As can be seen from our website at friendsofaugustderleth.org, which is still in a somewhat rudimentary stage, a membership is remarkably inexpensive, and at a later time members will be allowed special privileges (such as access to books published by the Friends) not available to non-members.

* Among other items, Joshi also notes his participation in a…

conference on Lovecraft’s philosophy put on by Steven K. Stakland and others and taking place in Japan on [29th June – 1st July. Other speakers] included papers by such veterans as Robert M. Price and Steven J. Mariconda. [The papers] will not be available online, but it appears that a book of all the papers is likely to be published by Routledge.

* DMR considers “R.E. Howard’s “The Garden of Fear”: Flowers of Evil and a Tower of Dread” and “”The Valley of the Worm”: Forging the Myth Behind the Myths”.

* On YouTube, “…when I last see him” The de Camp Interviews on Robert E. Howard…

Michael K. Vaughan discusses a rare, limited-edition book containing unedited interviews by L. Sprague de Camp regarding Robert E. Howard. These primary source transcripts offer fans and scholars a transparent look at the original accounts from those who knew the author

* Adventures Fantastic has A Brief Report from Robert E. Howard Days 2026.

* From veteran audiobook reader Horror Babble, what appears to be a new full reading of “The Shadow out of Time” (July 2026). I’ve not listened to it yet, but I assume it’s a more polished re-read of the earlier version HB released to YouTube some years ago. There’s also another fine unabridged reading free on Archive.org.

* The Obelisk has “Atom Age Lovecraft: A Review of Frank Belknap Long’s Journey Into Darkness”.

* New to me, an early item in Lovecraft scholarship Out for Blood (1984). A chunky A5 booklet, apparently aimed to “…prove that Lovecraftian analysis is not ‘worked out’ as many believe. [Gives] evidence to support my conviction that Lovecraft’s fictional concepts were developed with consistent logic and form a unified body of work”. However, the contents-list on the back suggests an essay selection with some intriguing topics.

* Comics publisher Dark Horse has announced a cover and a firm 2027 release date for the Gou Tanabe graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark in English translation. To be paired with “Dagon”.

* “Crowdfunded $10K film ‘It Calls'”…

a psychological cosmic horror film inspired by the mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft […] Filming began in mid-May and is taking place throughout Roseburg, Bandon and other locations across Southern Oregon, with production expected to wrap on the 1st of August [2026]. Produced on a $10,000 budget raised entirely through crowdfunding, the studio said It Calls represents its most ambitious production to date.

* Germany’s Miskatonic Horror Theatre will be staging their biggest show yet, “The Call of Cthulhu” in Hamburg from 21st-23rd August 2026. Taking to the stage at the big open-air stage in Hamburg’s city park. Booking now.

* RobbieTheRobot has a current page of the choice selections he’s making from the itch.io mini-games and interactive fiction which have Lovecraft as the theme.

* A long English abstract for the Polish undergraduate final dissertation “Horror in Pixels: How Ugly Games Generate Fear” (2025).

When coupled with a cosmic or Lovecraftian narrative, even modest graphics can transform a game into a masterpiece.

* A slick new Cthulhu Mythos – H.P. Lovecraft Concordance for 14 stories, as a new website.

* And finally, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has added the word “Lovecraftian” in their latest update, tracing the first use of the word to 1936 and Robert Bloch in a letter to Weird Tales.

— End-quotes —

“… drifting down a stagnant river betwixt high basalt cliffs, & wondering why I drifted; since the water had no motion, & there was no breath of wind in the awful SILENCE.” (Lovecraft to Kleiner, May 1920). “… conscious of drifting down some hideous stagnant river in a rotting boat, between terrible overhanging cliffs of basalt. There was no wind, and I wondered why I moved down so still a stream. The insects were of strange form, and made me shudder as their numbers increased and they began to light all over me” (Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920). — Lovecraft recalls a dream, to two correspondents, in 1920.

“About the most daemoniac place I ever saw was a valley in New Jersey — in the foothills of the Ramapos — where the sides were covered with the outcroppings of a black crystalline basaltic formation, & the floor was strewn with curiously angular fragments. I only saw it once, but its image has lingered with me.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“Primal Basalt Bridge over the black & oily River Gnar. Time of the Bulbous Shape’s passage up-stream” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1933.

“Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it — and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me. Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses.” — Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”, just one example of various uses of basalt at key moments in Lovecraft’s tales and poetry.

HPLinks #87 – playful monsters, Moore esoterica, new journals, Colour from Germany, Martian loungers and more…

01 Monday Jun 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #87.

* The Morris Everett Collection Part Two, free on Archive.org as a 391-page PDF catalogue.

* A call-for-papers for The Playful Monster. Set for September 2026 on the south coast of England. Deadline: 31st July 2026.

The Playful Monster is a conference hosted by Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. It looks at how monsters are made playful, and how the monstrous appears in playful ways across games, media, and everyday culture.

* A call-for-papers for Esotericism in the Comics of Alan Moore. Deadline: 1st July 2026…

This proposed collection of essays will seek to deepen the awareness and importance of esotericism in the work of Alan Moore. It is time for a volume on the topic

* A journal from the University of Oviedo, Spain, plans a special issue themed around ‘Lands of Fear: Gothic and Horror in Literature, Art, and Culture’. The Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research now has a call for papers, and proposals for interviews, artworks and book reviews are also welcomed. Deadline: 31st October 2026.

* Wormwoodiana announces a new print journal in English, A Weird Occasional.

* A new Spanish journal invites papers for the forthcoming Legendaria: Revista de estudios sobre el mito y lo fantastico (‘Legendaria: the journal of studies on myth and the fantastic’). The publisher Legendaria Ediciones is a notable publisher of Tolkien scholarship in Spanish, but their new double-blind peer-reviewed journal will evidently range beyond Tolkien. The first issue is planned for later in 2026.

* In 2024 I see that the Mexican journal Historias had a profile of Robert Barlow… “Perhaps this is one of the first profiles of the literary executor of H.P. Lovecraft and editor of Tlalocan magazine.”

* SFcrowsnest reviews The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson.

* Dread Central reappraises a Lovecraft screen adaptation, 25 Years Later: Revisiting the Lovecraftian The Resurrected…

The Resurrected is a completely mistreated and underseen gem. The film is an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft novella “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, and is an electric combination of slow-burn noir and supernatural horror. The film is also incredibly silly, and paired with the enthralling mystery, goopy gore, and southern gothic imagery, it truly feels like a singular creative piece.

* Up and Down These Mean Streets has Rediscovered: Ex Libris Virgil Finlay, with an image of a finely penned Finlay signature.

* An unusual item in Italian, the book Il Mistero di Lovecraft & Lovering (2026)….

In the early 1930s stories appeared in Amazing Stories magazine signed as P.H. Lovering, and with the note that it was the same author as The Color Out of Space. Journal error or deliberate choice? And if it were true, is P.H. Lovering actually one of H.P. Lovecraft’s pseudonyms? This essay, part of the Arkham Myths series, explores in depth this mystery […] through rigorous and exciting research, providing essential reading keys for scholars and enthusiasts of the “Providence Dreamer”. With the texts of the two stories for the first time in Italian in a single book.

Lovering was dialogue-heavy 1930s pulp with a love interest, so it seems unlikely. Also Lovecraft appears to have denied it to Hoffman Price in 1933…

Belknap slipped up un one thing — for he was absolutely and unqualifiedly wrong in believing that I have published non-weird fiction under a pseudonym. I not only have never done so, but have certainly never said anything from which such a mistaken inference could legitimately be made. That’s the kid’s one trouble — his imagination flies off on a tangent, and now and then goes beyond the plain facts.

* Now crowdfunded, a French…

edition of the official complete Cycle of Swords — all the short stories, all the novels by Fritz Leiber, in chronological order of the adventures, enriched with Adept’s Gambit with the notes of H. P. Lovecraft presented by S.T. Joshi — in a prestige edition.

* The latest History Today magazine has the article “H.P. Lovecraft: Haunted by History”…

Portrait of the Author as a Historian. H.P. Lovecraft asked us to imagine a much deeper past than modern comforts and science allow us to perceive — and the monsters that might dwell there.

* New on eBay, a pleasing sketch of the John Hay Reading Room at Brown University, in 1923…

* Advance notice that 16th July 2027 will be the 100th anniversary of the ‘escape from Innsmouth’…

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode.

* Germany’s theatrical/audio-visual show Die Farbe aus dem All now has an online version…

* And finally, ArchiScene profiles Summer on Mars, a long profile/interview featuring the professional designers who recently created a ‘Martian interior’ for a big Milan expo…

The exhibition was presented during Milan Design Week. […] Especially for the exhibition, I designed the Lovecraft chaise lounge – an organic form that looked almost as if it was walking across the surface of the red planet. For me, it was also a playful experiment with form and convention. It is technically a piece of furniture, but at the same time it feels slightly alive, as if it wanted to escape or came from another dimension. [… it] came from my fascination with the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and the atmosphere of cosmic horror. There was also a sense of humor behind it, this idea that on Mars, even objects designed for rest might look as if they want to escape from us. I wanted the piece to feel slightly inaccessible, almost like an alien organism or a futuristic algae form. You can still recognize soft surfaces and shapes that invite the body to sit or recline, but at the same time there is something unfamiliar and unsettling about it. That contrast was intentional. I was interested in creating a kind of grotesque tension between comfort and discomfort, familiarity and otherness.

— End-quotes —

[pulp SF readers…] “want their conventional best-seller values and motives kept paramount throughout the abysses of apocalyptic vision and extra-Einsteinian chaos, and would not deem an “interplanetary” tale in the least interesting if it did not have its Martian (or Jovian or Venerian or Saturnian) heroine fall in love with the young voyager from Earth, and thereby incur the jealousy of the inevitable Prince Kongros (or Zeelar or Hoshgosh or Norkog) who at once proceeds to usurp the throne etc.; [and add] something disagreeable and Semitic for the villain. Now I couldn’t grind out that sort of junk if my life depended on it. If I were writing an ‘interplanetary’ tale it would deal with beings organised very differently from mundane mammalia, and obeying motives wholly alien to anything we know upon Earth — the exact degree of alienage depending, of course, on the scene of the tale; whether laid in the solar system, the visible galactic universe outside the solar system, or the utterly un plumbed gulfs still farther out — the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting” — Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, July 1927.

[When depicting] “events on the alien planet [one’s fiction] must be in strict accord with the known or assumed nature of the orb in question — surface gravity, axial inclination, length of day and year, aspect of sky, etc. — and the atmosphere must be built up with significant details conducing to verisimilitude and realism. Hoary stock devices connected with the reception of the voyagers by the planet’s inhabitants ought to be ruled rigidly out. Thus we should have no overfacile language-learning; no telepathic communication; no worship of the travellers as deities; no participation in the affairs of pseudo-human kingdoms, or in conventional wars between factions of inhabitants; no weddings with beautiful anthropomorphic princesses; no stereotyped Armageddons with ray-guns and space-ships; no court intrigues and jealous magicians; no peril from hairy ape-men of the polar caps; and so on, and so on. […] What must always be present in superlative degree is a deep, pervasive sense of strangeness — the utter, incomprehensible strangeness of a world holding nothing in common with ours.” — Lovecraft, “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction”.

“If a story’s weirdness be due to scientific imagination voyages to other planets by mechanical means, creation of metal men, &c. instead of downright supernaturalism, it has at least a half-chance with the “scientifiction” magazines — Amazing, Astounding, & Wonder Stories. Clark Ashton Smith is now ‘going over big’ with Wonder Stories, & has been asked to write a whole series of tales (interplanetary voyaging in an atomic-energy spaceship) for it. If anyone has a knack at this kind of thing, there is really an excellent & increasing market open to him. I fear I’m not much in this line myself, but nevertheless believe I’ll try a few specimens & see how they are regarded by editors.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, October 1930.

HPLinks #83 – Names in Lovecraft, Lovecraft and antiquity, Russian Lovecraft, Lovecraft on the Moon, and more…

02 Saturday May 2026

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

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #83.

* New to me and now open-access, “Teratonymy: the weird and monstrous names of H.P. Lovecraft”, from the academic journal Names (September 2010). Freely available online.

* A long abstract for an advanced undergraduate presentation at Oberlin, “Letters from the Abyss: Epistolary Form and the Unknowable in Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror” (2025). A rare focus on the influence of letter-writing on the structuring of Lovecraft’s fiction…

“Nineteenth-century Gothic texts such as Dracula and Frankenstein use written correspondence to create realism, build trust, and establish clear lines of communication between narrator and reader. This study argues that Lovecraft reworks these same forms to produce the opposite effect: confusion, fragmentation, and uncertainty.”

* A recent virtual conference on Mediterranean Antiquity in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft (April 2026). This included papers, not yet available online, such as…

    — H.P. Lovecraft and the Dark Side of Antiquity.
    — Cthulhu and Polyphemus.
    — Civilization, Decline, and Hybridizations: Trajectories of ‘Decadence’ in Greco-Roman Cultures and Lovecraft’s Fiction.
    — Roman History Through the Lens of Lovecraft?

* A reminder to readers that the deadline for the Armitage Symposium is fast approaching. Submit by 24th May 2026.

* The Journal of Dracula Studies once again rises from the dead, and has a new Call for Papers.

* Deep Cuts considers the 1970s booklet Winifred Virginia Jackson — Lovecraft’s Lost Romance (1976) by R. Alain Everts & George T. Wetzel. And also Lovecraft’s Daughter (1983) by R. Alain Everts. The latter being Sonia’s teenage ‘flapper’ daughter.

* The boy Lovecraft’s attention was turned towards Greek/Roman myth by reading Hawthorne’s Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales. Now there’s a sumptuous new $100 illustrated Wonder Book Illuminated Edition, complete with essays by Guillermo del Toro and others.

* Dark Worlds Quarterly has a new post surveying The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulp magazine Strange Tales.

* From France, the audio ‘Lovecraft Integrale’ series of podcasts, which appear to be straightforward free high-quality human readings of Lovecraft in French, with music. My guess is that they’re meant to showcase the abilities of the maker’s Audio360 studio in Paris? Freely available online, no region-blocking.

* From Moscow, a Russian book whose English title might be The mythology of Lovecraft: From Cthulhu and cosmic horror to the Necronomicon and forbidden cults (2026). Appears to be a mix of biography, criticism and mythos-systematizing, with dashes of philosophy? The reviewer states… “it seems that this is the first time his mythology has been analysed in such detail in Russian”

* SpraguedeCampFan reviews Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird, 1923-2023 (2023).

I see that this table-trembling 500-page hardback can now be had as a rather more lightweight Kindle ebook. Speaking of which, I read that Amazon is ceasing all re-install support and book-sales to its previous Kindle ereader devices… so watch out for that.

* A horrid front-cover that doesn’t inspire confidence, but I see there’s a new short book on Amazon titled Lovecraft on Civilization: Selected Writings.

It might be something quickly copy-pasted from the Selected Letters and banged together with some online essays? Or perhaps it’s something more considered and curated, and only marred by that cover? Who knows, as there’s no Kindle ebook free sample. Buyer beware.

* Seemingly from Germany (it’s in German, anyway) on the ARTE channel and online, the short 14 minute on-location documentary Providence, die dunkle Stadt von H.P. Lovecraft. The ARTE video plays for me, with no region-blocking, captchas or sign-in.

* An unusual new book, Lovecraft in India. A little digging reveals it to be a graphic novel, rather than a scholarly look at the publication history, reception and local adaptations. Available now from Gosh comics in London.

* Regard Critique reviews the new Metal Hurlant (the French edition of ‘Heavy Metal’) Lovecraft special-issue. The reviewer finds that Druillet has his…

extracts from his delirious illustrated Necronomicon [reprinted from the old Lovecraft special, but this time] accompanied by a complete analytical text on the links between the graphic designer and the author of Providence by Alex Nikolavitch.” And there is also… “a fascinating interview with the mangaka Gou Tanabe”.

* In Japan, the famous horror-manga creator Gou Tanabe has launched his long-form graphic novel adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The first instalment has now appeared in Japanese.

* Talking of comics, in case you hadn’t noticed, a vast and seemingly completist collection of vintage ‘fanzines and magazines about comics’ are flooding onto Archive.org as good scans.

* On DeviantArt, Peru’s GeniusXX is having fun depicting the Great Race and other Lovecraft monsters. He appears to be taking requests.

* A small fact about Lovecraft’s environs that I had not previously fully appreciated. It was male Brown University students who would have thronged up and down College Street (confined to the south sidewalk, the northerly one being traditionally reserved for residents) during term-time. Brown was then segregated by gender, it appears. Here is Lovecraft on the point…

I fear your colleague’s Providentian geography is all wet. Cushing St. is a full quarter-mile north of here; & instead of going up the great hill, slopes gradually downward from near its summit over the eastward plateau on top. (Like Barnes St. — which is not far away). It is around this street that Pembroke College, the female department of Brown University, clusters — whereas College St. (commonly called ‘College Hill’) tops the main & exclusively masculine part of the institution.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.

* And finally, talking of hearty young lads, new at the HPLHS Store is the RPG book Campfire Tales: Scouts Against Cthulhu.

— End-quotes —

Slightly late (the astronauts are back and being received at the White House), but this week here are some quotes from Lovecraft on travel to the Moon. Lovecraft was aware, as early as 1920, of a plan to send a rocket-ship to the Moon…

“Speaking of astronomical things — is either of youse guys interested in (a) the supposed new trans-Neptunian planet [Pluto], (b) the talk of telegraphic communication with Venus or Mars, and (c) the Goddard plan for sending a rocket to the moon? If so, just speak up! Grandpa has heaps to say about all these things!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920.

He refers to space pioneer Robert Goddard’s paper A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitude (March 1920), which saw Goddard mercilessly mocked by the usual suspects.

“‘Space ships’ of the traditional scientifictional sort are perhaps a little beyond probability (the obstacles to their operation being really much greater than popular science indicates), but I certainly think that some rocket voyage to the moon (whose extreme nearness puts it in a separate category) will be attempted — first with an untenanted projectile, & later perhaps with a human cargo. Whether any living being could survive such a voyage & return is another matter.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, November 1933.

[In sending an editor] “an account of my vivid and active career I did not think it necessary to mention […] my voyage up the Oxus, nor my visit to Samarcand, […] but I did hint of certain travels through the aether in the dark of the moon, and give broad suggestions regarding certain queerly-dimensioned cities of windowless onyx towers on a planet circling about Antares …” — Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927.

HPLinks #81 – Lovecraft and the posthuman, Lovecraft and geology, a century of Cthulhu, letter from Red Hook, and more…

17 Friday Apr 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #81.

* A new £150 academic book from Brill / Walter de Gruyter, H.P. Lovecraft and Posthumanism (2026). No sign of it yet on Amazon UK, but the ebook version is apparently published. Here are the contents…

* This week a geodynamics scientist looks closely at the geology in “At The Mountains of Madness”. Lovecraft’s…

geology is not decoration — it is the engine of the plot. The story advances through stratigraphy, fossils, field observations, and the slow realization that rocks are not simply background scenery, but records of worlds vastly older than humanity. In that sense, the horror is profoundly geological: it emerges from time, burial, preservation, and the idea that the Earth has existed far longer than we would like. From a geological perspective, one of Lovecraft’s sharpest intuitions was to present Antarctica as (geo)dynamic rather than static […] Lovecraft understood, instinctively, that the rock record is unsettling. A cliff is never just a cliff; it is a stack of vanished environments. A fossil is never just a shape in stone; it is evidence that the world used to be structured differently.

* HorrorBabble has a free six-hour audio reading of The Complete Hyperborean Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith: Audiovisual Edition on YouTube.

* The REH Foundation Press has issued a special fundraiser book for the Howard house repairs, First Passage: Early Drafts of Beloved Yarns (2026).

* Now officially free and online, the four-volume Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes (2017).

* Forthcoming from the University of Wales Press, Coasts and the Gothic (2027), including a chapter on “Weird Tales of the China Coast”…

The weird tales of the treaty ports and coastal waters of China, written in the early years of the twentieth century, provide an evocative and understudied examination of life in the harbours and coasting vessels of […] urban port cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yangtai.

* S.T. Joshi has issued a new edited collection of lesser-known vintage horror tales, One of Cleopatra’s Nights: Tales and Poems of Egyptian Horror (2026). Available as a budget ebook, and it also includes some modern horror poems on the topic of Ancient Egypt.

* New from Italy, an Italian-language book Il secolo di Cthulhu: Omaggio misterioso a Lovecraft (‘The Century of Cthulhu: Writings in Honor of the Centennial’).

Apparently it opens with essays on the history of the famous tale, followed by stories. The lead essay… “reconstructs the birth of The Call of Cthulhu as a web of influences — from Margaret Murray to Lord Dunsany to Arthur Machen”. The fiction authors appear to have been asked to take as their departure point the real-life mysterious disappearance of an iconic early Italian fan-painting… “Karel Thole’s original painting for the cover of Monsters on the Street Corner“.

* Up for auction, The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy. A two-part auction, in May and then December 2026. Including an August 1925 Lovecraft letter sent from Red Hook to Clark Ashton Smith…

* In a new interview, the manga creator Junji Ito talks Lovecraft, Osamu Dazai, and his latest vinyl-exclusive audio drama. The latter being his audio tale of…

an old melody on an unmarked vinyl record becomes an inexplicable source of terror, [and which] is now a vinyl-exclusive audio drama named In Old Records.

* An interesting Python-based attempt to make local software that automatically generates an OldTimeRadio show, which may interest some. Feed it real weird-science news, and from this it auto-writes a script, adds narration and voice-acting, then adds music and SFX. Sadly the narrator’s voice is generated via the Kokoro AI model, so… good luck getting it working on Windows. I must have tried to install/run a dozen different packages that claimed to offer Kokoro, and all failed or were stymied (each in a different way). The only working Kokoro TTS I have is included in the NovelForge 4.0 novel-writing software, which is straightforward Windows software with a no-hassle install.

* Talking of audio production tools which may interest Lovecraftian creatives, there’s now a 6Gb ‘fine-tune’ of the worthy Stable Audio sound-effects generator, called Stable Audio X and it works in ComfyUI. Stable Audio was trained on the vast Freesound.org archive of free sound-effect recordings. Apparently the X fine-tune of Stable Audio can not only do prompt-to-SFX-audio, but can also auto-create an accompanying foley soundtrack for a video (if you feed it a video).

* Talking of AI tools, yes… we can now re-style images so they more-or-less evoke Providence at night in Lovecraft’s time. Here’s ‘Lovecraft returns home up College Street at night, in the late 1920s’. Made with two Nano Banana day-to-night re-styles of a vintage public-domain image, plus my Photoshop-addition of HPL and the black bag he often carried.

Three short extracts from “Aletheia Phrikodes” (1916) by H.P. Lovecraft, seem to fit the picture…

Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes
From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air
That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees
[…]
I was afraid when through the vaulted space
Of the old tow’r, the clock-ticks died away
Into a silence so profound and chill
That my teeth chatter’d — giving yet no sound.
[…]
Methought a fire-mist drap’d with lucent fold
The well-remember’d features of the grove,
Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams
The hot, unfinish’d stuff of nascent worlds

— End-quotes —

“By 1901 or thereabouts I had a fair knowledge of the principles of chemistry […] Then my fickle fancy turned away to the intensive study of geography, geology” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

[As a boy] “Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived & studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments & stratifications get crystallised & upheaved into granite peaks? […] I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn’t know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere.” — Lovecraft to Vernon Shea, February 1934.

“an old-fashioned but not seriously misleading introduction to geology still unsurpassed for beginners is Geikie’s old Geology Primer. Another peculiarly congenial veteran is Winchell’s Walks and Talks in the Geological Field” — Lovecraft’s ghost-written Suggestions for a Reading Guide, probably indicating the key geology books he knew as a boy.

“I am not insensible of the importance of mineralogy in science; being well aware that the history of the planet and the details of many of its most vivid catastrophes lye hid in the chemical constitution and physical environment of its various sorts of rock. The science of geology, that primary branch of learning of which mineralogy is a division, is indeed something in which I might with ease become interested under the proper set of chance conditions; insomuch as it is directly concern’d with that main stream of cosmick pageantry which begins in blank aether and free electrons and ends in the perfection of Nordick man and Georgian architecture. Where mineralogy fails to get a grip on me is in the fact that it is a secondary science; an affair mainly of classification, with relatively slight direct linkage to the dramatick stream of pageantry of elemental conflict and mutation which appeals to the cosmic curiosity or interest-sense of the incurable layman.” — Lovecraft to his mineralogist friend Morton, October 1930.

“There is material for ineffable phantasy in the rocks & inner abysses of Mother Earth.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, March 1933, in a letter headed as written at the “Hour of the Opening of the Under Burrows”.

HPLinks #80 – Golems, REH news, book reviews, comic adaptations, new Burleson book, librarians and more…

09 Thursday Apr 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #80.

* An English abstract for a new conference paper from the city in Brno in the Czech Republic, “The Discipline of the Eye: Lovecraft’s Visual Epistemology, Atmospheric Proof, and the Horror of Display” (2026). Through “refusal and display”, Lovecraft…

disciplines the eye to treat atmosphere as evidence […] outline, surface, hue, and scene operate as atmospheric proof—signals of an alien order […] Indeterminacy, shared by narrator and reader, forces imaginative substitution, making the reader complicit in producing what cannot be stably seen.

* The latest (37.1) members-only Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts has a review of David Goudsward’s book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Not online.

* From Russia in Russian and open-access, an essay that translates as ‘The Fantastic Chronotope and the Image of the City in the works of G. Meyrink and H.P. Lovecraft’…

Meyrink’s Prague (The Golem and The Angel of the Western Window) and H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”) each offer a fantastic space with distinctive features [… I also suggest] that certain details of the descriptions of the fictional city of Innsmouth were most likely borrowed by H.P. Lovecraft from The Golem.

However, one can note that “Innsmouth” was written at the end of 1931 and yet Lovecraft didn’t finally read The Golem until several years later when Barlow was able to send him a copy… “I had seen the cinema version, and thought it was faithful to the original — but when I came to read the book only a year ago [i.e. April 1935]” …. Holy Yuggoth! The film had nothing of the novel save the mere title and the Prague ghetto setting — indeed, in the book the Golem-monster never appeared at all, but merely lurked in the background as a shadowy symbol.” (Lovecraft, in Selected Letters V, p.138). If there was any inspiration, it would have been from the movie. But Lovecraft was personally well acquainted with decrepit seafronts of all sorts.

* Also from Russia and in open-access, a new journal article which translates as “‘Lovecraftian Magic’ as a Form of Fictional Religion” (2026). In Russian, but easily auto-translated.

* A new philosophy article on the Medium platform on “H.P. Lovecraft’s Takedown of Islam” (a short free sample, then $ paywall).

* DMR notes the passing of “Lee Breakiron: A Gentleman and a (Howardian) Scholar”…

While Lee was all-around a gifted scholar of [R.E.] Howardiana, he was the undisputed king — by his own hand — when it came to scholarship regarding the history of Howardian fandom and literary criticism. He’d read and collected all of it during the decades before he strode into the REH scholarship arena.

* A review of Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* The REH Foundation podcast has a new chat surveying and discussing Robert E. Howard’s Pirate Stories.

* A new review of the Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith.

* On Kickstarter… Deep Space Lovecraft: 2 Cthulhu Mythos Horror Adaptations. Being… two “Mythos tales reimagined & visualized as hard science fiction” and done as comics. It’s heavily over-funded already. “The Haunter of the Dark” is imagined as a visit to a giant cathedral-like space station, and “The Hound” seemingly as a visit to another space station / museum? Despite the obviously AI-generated images, which by the looks of them were probably generated some years ago with now-primitive AI and then partly overpainted, the images have been carefully cohered into appealing pages. The pages are offered on the Kickstarter page as free samples. Looks to me like the Inverse Press / Flatline Comics could be a way to publish your AI generated comic in paper, without having to encounter the anti-AI hysteria currently being whipped up elsewhere.

* AI has moved on since then, and if you want a taster of that then have a look at this curious weird experiment. Simply feed the entire text of the seminal science-fiction novel The Time Machine into an AI, and have it make an apparently un-aided script and then generate a 17 minute movie version by itself… “this is the raw unrefined result with a single take, no cherry picking” says the experimenter.

* The new French Metal Hurlant 18 (Lovecraft special, 2026) magazine is now available.

* Amazon UK is listing Donald R. Burleson’s new book Seed of the Gods: Lovecraft-Inspired Tales and Others as published in April 2026… “his first collection of short stories in more than a decade, [in which] Burleson gathers tales written over the past fifteen years”.

* A new free ebook, “Overworked, Undernourished, and Weak in the Eyes”: The Portrayal of Librarians in Comics. An assiduous annotated and seemingly completist survey in 365 pages, offered by the author. Freely available to download as a PDF. It’s under Creative Commons Non-Commercial, so one could have an AI extract all the references which refer in some way to supernatural/horror librarians and thus make a more compact themed survey.

* Taskerland has a short essay “On “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft”. He finds this collaboration is…

not a great story, but it is an instructive one. In its mixture of cosmic suggestion and theatrical excess, it shows how readily Lovecraft’s ideas can be broken apart and made to function elsewhere. What emerges is not simply a change in tone, but a loosening of ownership, the same anxieties set loose from their original form and already beginning to move beyond the control of their author. This process is usually dated to Lovecraft’s afterlife, to obscurity, Derlethian appropriation, copyright murkiness, and the long slide into cultural ubiquity, but its beginnings may be earlier.

* Dark Worlds surveys “The Arkham Sampler Fiction”. Scans of Derleth’s Sampler issues can now be found at the Internet Archive.

* Up for auction at Heritage Auctions, a complete run of Arkham House books.

* Browsing eBay for scans, I’d not seen this one before. A pleasing and unwatermarked map of the highway system in Rhode Island, 1925. Could be upscaled to become a good RPG game prop?

* And finally, a rare street-level view of the Market Square, Providence, as Lovecraft would have encountered it. Many other postcard views are elevated or bridge-views. The view here is north towards the State House dome. The city’s market was held around the railings on the left of the picture. One can almost imagine the fellow alighting from the tram car, holding a black bag, to be the young Lovecraft.

— End-quotes —

“My aunt is well acquainted with Mr. Champlin Burrage, an Oxford man, who is librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown. (I hope to meet him very soon.)” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917. Brown University in Providence.

“Like you I am absolutely devoid of actual friends outside of correspondence. Those whom I knew in youth are all active and successful now, […] one a librarian of the R.I. Historical Society” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, circa 1918.

“My other guest [in Providence], Carl Ferdinand Strauch — poet and Asst. Librarian of Muhlenberg University (a friend of Brobst’s) — was also highly interesting, and very appreciative of the local antiquities and and-wheres.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1932.

“Only the other day a correspondent of mine — a librarian who sees all the magazines — was remarking what a fixture of the small & select publications you [i.e. Derleth] are getting to be!” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1933.

“… some timid reader has torn out the pages [from the Necronomicon] where the Episode of the Vault under the Mosque comes to a climax — the deletion being curiously uniform in the copies at Harvard & at Miskatonic University. When I wrote to the University of Paris for information about the missing text, a polite sub-librarian, M. Lean de Vercheres, wrote me that be would make me a photostatic copy as soon as he could comply with the formalities attendant upon access to the dreaded volume. Unfortunately it was not long afterward that I learned of M. de Vercheres’ sudden insanity & incarceration, & of his attempt to burn the hideous book which he had just secured & consulted. Thereafter my requests met with scant notice.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

HPLinks #79 – Lovecraft’s father, Lovecraft and urbanism, Herbert West BD, Claude Mythos, Lovecraft and machines, and more…

31 Tuesday Mar 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ 3 Comments

HPLinks #79.

* A new book, The Father’s Silence: H.P. Lovecraft and the Shadow of the Father (2026). Being a 100-page collection of “John L. McInnis III’s long unpublished scholarly work on Lovecraft”, newly published by his son. The book examines the long shadow that can be seen to have been cast by Lovecraft’s father, in relation to Lovecraft’s… “themes of inheritance, decay, forbidden knowledge, and unseen influence”.

* Deep Cuts considers “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974) by R.A. Everts.

* New on Archive.org, to borrow, a scan of Barton Levi St. Armand’s The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (1977).

* Also new on Archive.org, a scan of Zealia Bishop’s “H.P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s Review” (1953).

* On Reddit, a long article on “Italian Cinema and Lovecraft”. In English.

* New in Italian, “Il mito di Lovecraft. H.P.L. come personaggio nel fumetto”, a journal article on Lovecraft as a character in two graphic novels (Alan Moore, Breccia). Freely available online.

* New in the latest edition of the journal Studies in the Fantastic, “Biophilia, New Urbanism, and “He”: H.P. Lovecraft’s Contribution to Environmental Thought” ($ paywall)…

Lovecraft presents readers with a compelling and original critique of twentieth-century American urbanism, one that bears little resemblance to either E.O. Wilson’s influential theory of biophilia or the environmental movement in general.

* New on YouTube, the R.E. Howard Foundation in a podcast conversation with the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

* Heroic Fantasy Quarterly has news of the forthcoming Howard Days S&S Workshop for writers.

* Talking of writers, the $50 Windows desktop PC software NovelForge is now at version 4.0. At the end of last summer I made and released a free Lovecraft style module for it. In the new v4.0 this worthy script and novel-writing software adds “over 50 local neural voices” for text-to-speech, plus Word export and more. The voices are the excellent real-time Kokoro voices, in a ONNX wrapper (thus, no Python wrestling or $800 graphics-card is required). The installer size has increased accordingly, but is a reasonable 260Mb. The free-trial version doesn’t expire, has nearly all features working, and is only very lightly crippled. The third-party $20 WindowTop Pro would be required to give the software’s UI a full Dark Mode (tested and working), though NovelForge’s native ‘Distraction Free’ simple page now has a new dark option.

* ThePulp.Net has a handy new directory-page with fresh links to Doc Savage websites and more.

* Rue Morgue positively reviews the new Welsh anthology of Lovecraftian Mythos tales.

* On Archive.org, a good scan of the underground Skull Comics #4: Special Issue Lovecraft (1972), which was so popular they immediately followed it with Skull Comics #5 (1972) which was also a Lovecraft issue. #5 includes Corben and also an adaptation of the Lovecraft poem “To a Dreamer”.

* New to me, a French BD comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Herbert West”. 136 pages, published in April 2025. The characters become cartoon animals.

* Hokusai’s famous “Mount Fuji” series of prints gets a Lovecraftian monster-makeover, in a new 126-page artbook from Japan. Could be a quick AI makeover, I’ve not sure. Buyer beware.

* A McFarland book I missed noticing around Christmas time last year, Fantastic Adventures in the Comics: Rockets, Genies, and Bug-Eyed Monsters, 1940s-1980s (December 2025). Only covers American comics, and in just 120 pages. So it sounds like it’s aimed at newbie readers/collectors looking for an authoritative survey?

* Ghost Clinic reports that Mike Lyddon’s new screen documentary Lovecraft In Florida: DeLand and the Barlow House won ‘Best Short Documentary’ at A Night of Horror Film Festival and will be released on Blu-ray later in 2026, along with…

his 2022 documantary Haunted Thrills which had tremendous success on the film festival circuit. The film explores the pre-code science fiction and horror comic book era of the late 1940’s to mid 1950’s. It features commentary by three living pre-code comic book artists – Joe Sinnott, Everett Raymond Kinstler, and Victor Carrabotta, all of whom have sadly passed away. The Blu-ray will be a special signed and numbered limited edition release, so please bookmark this website as we near the release date, probably in October of 2026.

* And finally, the leading mega-AI Claude has its latest hottest version. It’s named ‘Claude Mythos’. Nope, the name is not an April Fool, apparently. Said by official leaked documents to be the secret next-gen Claude that is already built, and which in the words of the developers is… “by far the most powerful AI model we’ve ever developed”. The name was apparently given because it’s so scary.

— End-quotes —

“I am, I hope, now a complete machine without a disturbing and biassing volition; a machine for the reception and classification of ideas and the construction of theories.” — Lovecraft to Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 1921.

“About Brown [University students] rioting — yes, I did take a genuine pride in the virile energy and healthy antinomianism displayed [by the boys] on Memorial Day. […] It makes me sad to reflect that I’ve grown too old and grey to mix into inspiring rough-and-tumbles like this. I’d love to crack skulls in the name of free individualism, and smash office-appliance-shop windows as a symbolic nose-thumbing at the age of commerce, machines, time-tables…” — Lovecraft to Morton, July 1929.

“Anybody who thinks that men […] are able consciously to mould the effect and influences of the devices they create, is behind the times psychologically. Men can use machines for a while, but after a while the psychology of machine-habituation and machine-dependence becomes such that the machines will be using the men — modelling them to their essentially efficient and absolutely valueless precision of action and thought …… perfect functioning, without any reason or reward for functioning at all. [We will] no longer measure men as human beings, but as effective fractions of a vast mathematical machine which has no goal or purpose save to increase the precision and economy of its own useless and rewardless motions.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

“Just read the new Astounding [pulp magazine]. Essentially mediocre & conventional — machine-made stories with no distinction in style or atmosphere.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1933.

HPLinks #78 – F.B. Long letters published, new early discoveries, Providence swamps and ponds, and more…

23 Monday Mar 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, HPLinks, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #78.

* The long-awaited limited-edition hardcover of the Lovecraft-Long letters has been released. As the $85 A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. Shipping now.

This volume brings to a conclusion the massive effort to publish the totality of Lovecraft’s extant correspondence. In each of these twenty volumes, editors David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi have consulted original manuscripts and have exhaustively annotated the letters to provide readers with a full understanding of the biographical and literary background of every document.

Congratulations to all involved with this triumph of research, scholarship and endurance. Now all we need is the cumulative index volume. And, to save Tentaclii readers from looking, I should add that there’s no sign yet of a release of the scans of these new letters at the Brown University repository. At least, not when sorting by date. Possibly these are there, but the system dated them a few years back, when they were ingested-but-embargoed? Just a guess, for now.

* S.T. Joshi reports on a newly-found ‘first mention of Lovecraft in print’. Donovan K. Loucks has unearthed a Providence Evening News item from early April 1903, which reported that the boy Lovecraft had his $4 “small express waggon” stolen from in front of the Hope Reservoir Pumping Station. An express waggon was a basic multi-purpose toy cart with a long handle for pulling and no brakes. The one seen below is made of wood, but they were also made of sheet metal by the early 1900s.

Yes, that sloping path looks perfect for boys and waggon-rides.

* An abstract for a paper presented at the Design Research Society Conference 2026, “User centred dread: a Lovecraftian critique of design”… “The concept of ‘user-centered dread’ emerges as a central provocation, highlighting how users are led into states of incomprehension and even terror through supposedly benign design work”. The authors are from Glasgow in Scotland, a city notorious for its urban design horrors.

* A new open-access article in the journal Modern American History, “Where the Dumps that Used to Be Ponds Used to Be: Urbanization and Waste in Providence, Rhode Island” provides detailed deep historical background on the changing aqueous landscapes of Providence.

from the 1880s until the 1950s, officials encouraged the conversion of inner-city ponds and lakes into landfills, with each filling more quickly than the last. This trend continued until virtually all low, wet places had been filled, along with significant stretches of the urban coastline.

For Lovecraft, such places were Cat Swamp; along the banks of the Seekonk; York Pond and the ravines back of it. From places such as York Pond and the Seekonk arose his earliest literary combinations of landscape and nightmare.

* The Fossil: Official Publication of The Fossils has its January 2026 issue freely available. Including an item from Lovecraft’s wife… “Monica Wasserman writes about a recently discovered early piece by Sonia Green, published in 1921” and the snappily-written piece is also printed. Though it takes some decoding, as its written in the amateur convention-report style of the time.

* Back in July I noted the Argentinian philosophy book H.P. Lovecraft. La Anti-vida y el destino cosmico (2025), and now I see an “English Edition” is newly available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon. Get the 10% free sample to determine if the translation is up to the job.

* At the University of Verona, Italy, there was a campus-wide… “day of studies to explore the role of materials and resources in science-fiction worlds, between theoretical reflections and the analysis of Lovecraft”.

* In open-access, what appears to be a February 2026 special edition of Lingua Italiana magazine (?) on the topic of The New Italian Weird. In Italian. Freely available online.

* DMR considers Lovecraft’s Shout-Outs to Robert E. Howard, rather than the other way around…

Lovecraft told REH that he would name-check some of Howard’s creations in his future tales and he fulfilled that promise. The earliest mentions can be found in “The Whisperer in Darkness”, which was finished in September of 1930.

* Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys “Shoggothian Terror in Sword & Sorcery Comics”.

* The Save the Robert E. Howard Museum campaign is now more than half-way there.

* American Hero Press have a very sumptuous-looking Frazetta TERROR large-format artbook at 15″, with pull-out prints on heavy paper stock.

* Finnish publisher Jalava has long done good work in translating Lovecraft, R.E. Howard and others into Finnish. I see that in 2025 they produced a handsome edited volume of the best stories by Lovecraft in Finnish.

* Now released, the new book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995. 140 pages of essays on the otherworldly in the British landscape, as seen on British broadcast television in its prime.

* Talking of British spooks, the final ‘farewell’ issue of the scholarly M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars has been published.

* From Germany, a YouTube gallery of various Mythos Creatures, visualised as five-second ‘animated pictures’.

* On Kickstarter and already funded, a Dreamlands playing-card pack.

* The Gates of Imagination reads Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”, free on YouTube.

* On Librivox and public domain, Short Science Fiction Collection 106. Includes free audio readings of Frank Belknap Long’s “Young Man With a Trumpet” and Hannes Bok’s “Return from Death”.

* And finally, on Reddit one Grandpa Theobaldus (u/GrandpaTheobaldus) is newly fascinated by Lovecraft and film-going, and is regularly digging up Lovecraft quotes in which the master talks about movies he has seen.

— End-quotes —

“My home was not far from what was then the edge of the settled residence district, so that I was just as used to the rolling fields, stone walls, giant elms, squat farmhouses, and deep woods of rural New England as to the ancient urban scene. This brooding, primitive landscape seemed to me to hold some vast but unknown significance, and certain dark wooded hollows near the Seekonk River took on an aura of strangeness not unmixed with vague horror. They figured in my dreams — especially those nightmares containing the black, winged rubbery entities which I called “night-gaunts” — Lovecraft, from “Some Notes on a Nonentity”.

“Remembering that I had no map & knew nothing of the country, [I went] trusting with chance with a very agreeable sense of adventure into the unknown; just as I used to enjoy getting “lost” on walks around Cat Swamp [as a boy]” — Letters to Family, page 421. The northern part of Cat Swamp became the Brown University Baseball Field of the 1920s/30s.

“[the old wild and farmland area of Providence is now] built up with residential streets; although a small strip of it — the high wooded bluff along the Seekonk River & an adjacent series of ravines — has been preserved in its primitive state as a park reservation.”, Selected Letters IV, p.348. The high wooded bluff is the southern one at York Pond, likely relatively pristine throughout Lovecraft’s life (although the northern bluff was ground down and graded for a road). Note however that in Lovecraft’s boyhood this strip along the Seekonk had evidently been a wild and unregulated place, as… “By 1908, Blackstone Park had fallen into almost complete disuse” (Providence Journal) and was being used as a dumping ground. One suspects the city authorities were deliberately neglecting it, in the hope of waterfront development. The city however eventually preserved the tidal Seekonk waterfront for the long term, with…

“the preservation of a splendidly rural series of river-bluffs, wooded ravines, and meadows for a space of at least two miles along the shore, and extending considerably inland. Its ownership and conditions are [legally] fixed, hence it has been the same throughout my life and is always likely to stay so. I can shed the years uncannily by getting into some of my favourite childhood haunts here. In spots where nothing has changed, there is little to remind me that the date is not still 1900 or 1901, and that I am not still a boy of 10 or 11.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, October 1930, written outdoors from “Open fields near the River”.

Tentaclii

~ News & scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft

Category Archives: Scholarly works

HPLinks #100 – Will Murray, Lovecrafter No. 15, Cthulhu in China, Bibliomysteries, and more…

HPLinks #98 – Night-gaunt puppetry, Avernus, NecronomiCon 2026, Providence litfest, thieves in the night, and more

HPLinks #97 – Bloch biography, Otto’s daemons, Worm ebook, Robert E. Price interview, sea-breezes and more…

HPLinks #96 – Proceedings #6, Annual 2026 contents, Cat Book republished, Rats on stage, Providence mega-map and more…

HPLinks #95 – NecronomiCon 2026, Oceanic Horror conference, Pulpster 35, fungi by the Seekonk, and more…

HPLinks #92 – Clara and Lovecraft, bestiality, fandom research, the OED, film, theatre, and more…

HPLinks #87 – playful monsters, Moore esoterica, new journals, Colour from Germany, Martian loungers and more…

HPLinks #83 – Names in Lovecraft, Lovecraft and antiquity, Russian Lovecraft, Lovecraft on the Moon, and more…

HPLinks #81 – Lovecraft and the posthuman, Lovecraft and geology, a century of Cthulhu, letter from Red Hook, and more…

HPLinks #80 – Golems, REH news, book reviews, comic adaptations, new Burleson book, librarians and more…

HPLinks #79 – Lovecraft’s father, Lovecraft and urbanism, Herbert West BD, Claude Mythos, Lovecraft and machines, and more…

HPLinks #78 – F.B. Long letters published, new early discoveries, Providence swamps and ponds, and more…