HPLinks #35.

* The HPLHS Store now has the new Alcestis book version in stock…

… not only had the pair of them written a new prologue for the piece, but also presented after that a version of the play itself that was substantially different from other known translations, so we consulted with a classics scholar. In the end, instead of the lovely but simple pamphlet containing Sonia and Lovecraft’s version of Alcestis, we originally intended to produce, we are creating a casebound volume containing an explication of all of the new discoveries about this piece in the form of a paper by Helios Editor/Publisher N.R. Jenzen-Jones and classics scholar Carman Romano; Sonia and Lovecraft’s edition of Alcestis, complete with their prologue, and newly commissioned illustrations by several of our favorite artists.

* “Music for a blind idiot god: towards a weird ecology of noise” (2024). On “the horror of noise” in Lovecraft and others. Freely available for download.

* In the latest issue of the open-access journal Diaphonia, “Uma interlocucao entre estado hobbesiano com “O mito de Cthulhu” na literatura de H.P. Lovecraft”. It’s an awkward title to translate but, with reference to the abstract, this would about cover it: ‘A discussion between the absolutist Hobbesian state and the totalitarian sovereignty of Cthulhu as described in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Freely available online.

* A new contribution on ‘The Weird’ from Graham Harman, a leading philosopher in the field, “Weird Fallibilism: Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Justified True Belief” (2024). Freely available for download. Drawing on Lovecraft, he suggests the description of ‘weird fallibilism’ for a situation in which… “1) truth never corresponds to reality, and (2) objects never correspond to their own qualities”.

* A review in the new edition of Mythlore of the academic book Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery (2025). The review is freely available online.

* The new academic book Deviant Landscapes: A Journey to Exotic and Imaginary Places and Spaces (2025). Intriguing title, but the only somewhat relevant chapter appears to be “Atmospheric Narrative Landscape, Stimmung and Place-Making in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence — A Fable””. Stimmung is German and means broadly ‘mood/atmosphere’.

* The recent visit by S.T. Joshi made me aware of the wider Weird Fiction Collections at Brown University. It’s not just the Lovecraft letters.

* Brown University Master of Fine Arts student Roman Johnson is reported to have been given the latest S.T. Joshi Fellowship by Brown University. No details yet about his research topic or aim.

* A Masters dissertation for Texas State University, “Our Eyes are Yet to Open: H.P. Lovecraft and Modernist Horror” (2023). Freely available online. The abstract shows a clear focus and the author examined the essays and letters as well as three tales…

examines Lovecraft’s essays and correspondence to highlight his concerns and philosophical perspectives with his modernist contemporaries. [A study of three tales shows that] Lovecraft’s fiction exhibits various themes and techniques associated with literary modernism more prominently than one might initially assume. [Integrating aspects of early modernism] allowed him to express his fears and philosophical viewpoints about modernist concerns through terrifying and cosmic imagery.

* Robert Silverberg on HPL’s “gloriously overwrought” Shadow Out Of Time, an article extracted to HTML from Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (December 2005).

* Now on Google Books with a preview, the new biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* In the field of vintage comics appreciation, Deep Cuts has a new long post. Finding that there was an Italian edition of the Heavy Metal magazine ‘Lovecraft special’. The images shown reveal that the cover used an enlarged and coloured version of that issue’s fine b&w Moebius drawing. The long post has exhaustive details of the different editions, and many interior page and details. Here’s a good cover image I snagged from eBay, where collectors will still find several copies of the Italian edition for sale.

* Newly listed on eBay UK, Lovecraft’s Selected Letters: 1929-1931 from a UK seller and at a sensible £20 price. Though sadly there’s no ‘Click & Collect’ on offer, or I’d have had it. Still, some Tentaclii reader (with a big and accessible letter-box, able to take chunky books) may want it at that price.

* And finally, also on eBay and new to me, the Necronomicon Pop-up Book (2017) by ‘Skinner’ and Rosston Meyer…

— End-quotes —

“144. Hideous book glimpsed in ancient shop — never seen again.” — from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story germs and ideas.

“To Whomsoever May Open This Book: This is set down as a Warning to you, Sir or Madam, that you are not to open this Book beyond the Place mark’d by a red Riband. It wou’d be better for you to throw the whole Book unopen’d into the fire; but being unable to do so myself, I cannot hope that you will. I do nevertheless adjure you to look nowhere in it beyond the Riband, lest you lose yourself to this World, Body and Soul; for truly, it is a Tomb for the Living.” — Lovecraft pens an original ‘book warning’, in his best circa-1780 style, in a letter to Morton of March 1937.

HPLinks #34.

* In the new April 2025 issue of the academic journal Horror Studies ($ paywall), the lead article is “Dark Epiphany: The Lovecraftian in twentieth-century existential literature”.

* A call for papers from the British Fantasy Society. Their BFS Journal plans a special issue on ‘War in Fantasy’. I’m guessing that an article on “Dagon” and “The Temple” as wartime stories might have a chance? Or perhaps Derleth’s elaboration of the Mythos as a cosmic battleground?

* Newly published, issue 25 of the scholarly journal The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural, and Fantastic literature. A special issue on the author Le Fanu, it includes an overlooked poem by him and “a recently rediscovered monograph of Le Fanu written by his publisher”. Also a topographical article on his associations with places in Dublin.

* HorrorBabble has a new free audiobook of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”. This is a new 2025 recording and also includes subtitles (presumably for those who like to ‘read along’, or perhaps who need to see words spelled as they are spoken?).

* New on YouTube, Ray visits “H.P. Lovecraft Locations in Providence, RI”. He offers a swift 13 minute tour, made with a more-or-less steady camera and deftly edited.

* S.T. Joshi has also been in Providence, and his latest blog post is “A Trip to Providence”. Joshi dived into the immense Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown, which he catalogued forty-five years ago, but which he can now survey with a more experienced eye. He found, among other items, more unpublished letters (now destined for the “forthcoming edition of Smith’s Miscellaneous Letters”), and nine unpublished juvenile stories.

* Joshi’s new blog post also notes that the Best Adventures of Solar Pons is appearing in two paperback volumes, with the first having already appeared. These are the Sherlock-alike stories penned by August Derleth. Looks very affordable and the tales are something I have wanted to read for a while now, but… at present Amazon UK is iffy about shipping to the UK and there’s no eBay listing.

* New this week. “From Beyond: Five DC Titles that Scratch that Cosmic Horror Itch”. It’s a glossy listicle, but one from DC Comics itself. As such it’s a useful survey of Lovecraftian themes in their titles, made even more useful by good page illustrations from the comics discussed (DC being notoriously touchy about others showing their interior artwork).

* Talking of comics, some readers may be interested in the newly published book Drawn to the Stacks: Essays on Libraries, Librarians and Archives in Comics and Graphic Novels (March 2025). Apparently the first such book on the topic. The contents list suggests it is heavily and predictably leftist, but also that it has a number of essays addressing specific weird and supernatural titles. Also of note are the new books Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and the Divine (2024), and Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (2025).

* The new ‘post-apocalypse in the English countryside’ videogame, Atomfall, apparently has a touch of Lovecraft. The indie British-made game is described by DigitalSpy as a blend of…

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – whose name is given to Wyndham village in the game – and [the 1970s British TV series] Survivors, with some Wicker Man thrown in, and a bit of eldritch flair akin to something from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space.

* A new free reading of a long ‘El Borak’ desert adventure tale by R.E. Howard. “Hawk of the Hills” runs just over two hours, and has a good narrator.

* Robert E. Howard Days 2025: Events Schedule for June 2025. This year’s theme is ‘100 Years of Robert E. Howard’.

* Also R.E. Howard related, I note a minor update for the Stable Diffusion LORA plug-in Stygia, now at version 1.2. Designed for generating background images suitable for Conan tales set in Stygia or similar. These early (and arguably the most ‘creative’) SD releases are now very well supplied with LORAs and the tide is ebbing. Thus from now on I shall probably only mention Lovecraft / R.E. Howard / 1930s-noir SD LORAs in HPLinks — rather than in their own post.

* Talking of AI, AI 2027 is a dedicated and new ‘future scenario’ website, which actually goes out to 2030. Gripping, detailed, very lengthy and fairly plausible stuff which arises from serious think-tanking and war-gaming. Possibly of interested to Lovecraftians, in terms of the competing visions of future-AI as a blind tentacular all-devouring Lovecraftian monster, or a benign super-shoggoth that will “advance civilization by decades in a year or two”.

* And finally, I see from a current eBay listing there was a 1974 Signet mass-market U.S. paperback reprint of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, although this was “abridged”(?) and the book padded by Derleth with several other tales by other authors. New to me…

— End-quotes —

“One long-destroyed tale [I wrote as a boy] was of twin brothers — one murders the other, but conceals the body, & tries to live the life of both — appearing in one place as himself, & elsewhere as his victim. (Resemblance had been remarkable). He meets sudden death (lightning) when posing as the dead man — is identified by a scar, & the secret finally revealed by his diary.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1916.

“[Dexter Ward] may get to 75 pages or so before its natural and logical conclusion appears. It centres around old Providence…” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“… of the tale now drawing toward its close [in its writing], and which I shall call either The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or The Madness out of Time. Like Midas of old, curs’d by the turning to gold of everything he touch’d, I am this year curs’d by the turning into a young novel of every story I begin. [… Ward ended up as 51,500 words, but… ] the typing of manuscripts of this length is utterly beyond the powers of a feeble old gentleman who loses interest in a tale the moment he completes it.” — Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, February 1927.

HPLinks #29.

* Deep Cuts has a guest article examining “The Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz”. A man well known to Lovecraftians as one of the editors and annotators of the triumph-of-scholarship that is the Lovecraft’s Letters series of books.

* A Spanish news site has a new article on “Filme de Edgar Pera com Pessoa, Lovecraft”, which reveals the director is set to follow his acclaimed ‘Lovecraft meets Pessoa’ movie Telepathic Letters (2024) with… “an upcoming project inspired by Lovecraft tales”. No further details as yet.

* Popping up on Abebooks, a 1983 French ‘BD’ comic-book adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth”. New to me…

* Forthcoming on the New York stage, two plays about Lovecraft’s life. ‘Lovecraft in Brooklyn’ has been staged before, but is now being paired with ‘We are Providence’ which is billed as… “a new play set in Providence, Rhode Island”. The two plays are part of a spring and early-summer series that also features one with R.E. Howard…

On 24th April 2025, the series continues with ‘I have Known Many Grim and Loveless Gods’ [about] creator Robert E. Howard on the last day of his life reckoning with his creations and his mother’s illness.

* Robert E. Howard Days: The 2025 Howard Days Official Poster, revealed.

* Now in Kindle ebook, the first two volumes of Roy Thomas’s Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian. The third has yet to be an ebook, and note that Amazon misleads by selling a “Barbarian Life (3 book series)” that only has two ebooks. The three-book paperback set is significantly more expensive than the ebooks, at £45 UK.

* A new archive for Faunus, the Arthur Machen journal…

all [50] back issues of Faunus will shortly be available to members to download in PDF format for the first time

* All copies of the core An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia have suddenly become insanely expensive on both Amazon and eBay. Time for a budget ebook edition?

* New from Spain, “Revising paganism in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft” (2025), in English. It appears to be a Phd thesis, for the University of Granada. Judging by the contents pages it seems something of an encyclopedia on the topic. Freely available online.

* Set for June 2025, the new Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters.

* S.T. Joshi’s new The Wind in the Portico: Horrors from Classical Antiquity (2025). Available now, a collection of…

instances of horror fiction, poetry, drama, and other work from classical authors (some of them translated by myself—taken from my book Classical Papers), but writings by John Buchan, H.P. Lovecraft, Edward Lucas White, Rudyard Kipling, and many others utilising classical myth and history for their horror tales.

* Newly on Archive.org, the article “The Vortex of the Weird: Systemic Feedback and Environmental Individuation in the Media Ecology of Ito Junji’s Horror Comics”. This led me to track down its source, Stockholm’s Orientaliska Studier No. 156 (2019), a special journal issue on ‘Manga, Comics and Japan’. Now freely available online.

* A new £130 academic book from Springer, “The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games” (2025). Includes the chapter “Departing the Place Once Familiar: Lovecraft’s Eco-Weird Thought”.

* Back in 2019 I looked at Lovecraft’s spring 1931 musing on the possibility that rain clouds and drizzling mists might be partly influenced by fluxes in incoming cosmic-rays. 1931 was long before the idea was first proposed in 1959 by Ney in his Nature paper “Cosmic radiation and weather”. In 2025, an interesting bit of additional research evidence… “Cosmic-Ray Showers Play Pivotal Role in Triggering Lightning Flashes” on earth.

* Some of the indie titles among this week’s wave of Lovecraftian videogame news, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss (first-person thriller/investigation), The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu (four-player co-op adaptation of “The Mound”, by the makers of the worthy game Zeno Clash), and Cthulhu’s Reach: Devil Reef.

* Newly released and of possible interest to Mythos writers, the desktop writing assistance software NovelForge 3.x now has full LLM AI assistance. Still standalone and affordable, at $60. AI’s can be used free, and there’s a video showing how.

* And finally, some readers may be interested in seeing the documentary movie We Are As Gods (2021), on the life and legacy of the counterculture publisher and Long Now thinker Stewart Brand.

— End-quotes —

“Effective weird-fictional language, through rhythm & associative word-values, must always have a certain undercurrent of menacing tensily — shadows, gathering clouds, & all that. […] Very, very few things in Weird Tales ever achieve the desired degree of atmospheric menace” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“In Quebec one of the most striking things is the sky — the odd cloud formations peculiar to northern latitudes and unknown in R.I. [Rhode Island]. Mist and vapour assume fantastic and portentous forms, and at sunset on Labour Day I saw one of the most impressive phenomena imaginable from my vantage-point on the Citadel overlooking the river and the Levis cliffs beyond. The evening was predominantly clear; but some strange refractive quality gave the dying solar rays an abnormal redness, while from the zenith to the southeastern horizon stretched an almost black funnel of churning nimbus clouds — the small end meeting the earth at some inland point beyond Levis. From a place midway in this cloud-funnel, zigzag streaks of lightning would occasionally dart toward the ground, with faint rumbles of thunder following tardily after. […] With such bizarre skies, I do not wonder that the northern races excel those of the south in fantastic imagination.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, September 1933.

The young Lovecraft photographs cloud types, New Year 1907…

CLOUD PHOTOGRAPHY. This work was performed by a new 6.5 × 8.5 camera. The following types were taken:

Celestial views were also taken.

“It seems, in the light of recent discoveries, that all matter is in a state of balance betwixt formation and disintegration, evolution and devolution — and that the infinite cosmos is like a vast patch of summer sky, out of which little cirrus clouds gather here and there, presently to be dissolved into blankness again. The universes we know correspond to the little cirrus clouds of that summer sky, being merely transient aggregations of electrons condensed from that field of ungrouped electrons which we call space, and soon to be dissolved into that space again. This process of formation and destruc­tion is the fundamental attribute of all entity — it is infinite Nature, and it always has been, and always will be.” — Lovecraft, “The Materialist Today”, 1926.

HPLinks #24.

* Rest in peace, Wayne June (1954-2025), the man who read Lovecraft’s tales so expertly in the form of the Dark Worlds audiobook series and “The Shadow Out of Time”.

* New to me, an unabridged vintage recording of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Freely available on YouTube, as a six-hour reading. Read by David Palmer, though his voice is remarkably similar to the outstanding ‘Books for the Blind’ Lovecraft reader Gordon Gould. If a bit more wistful, perhaps. The Online Catalog of recordings for Books for the Blind etc reveals Ward was issued on tape way back in 1982.

* Just released, the LibriVox Short Horror Collection #77, this time containing a feast of R.E. Howard, Derleth, Lovecraft, Whitehead, and Wandrei. All recordings are issued as public-domain audio readings.

* Conan Chronology has a new and fascinating side-by-side look at exactly how the Comics Code censorship operated on the page in the U.S., followed by a long look at “How Conan Conquered the Comics Code”. Yes, Marvel’s Conan adaptations and adapters led the charge for the de-censorship of U.S. news-stand comic-books.

* “U.S. Govt: AI-assisted Works Can Get Copyright with Enough Human Creativity”. Good to know that such common sense is now official, at least in the eyes of the U.S. copyright office. So just because something used AI in some part, don’t assume it’s therefore freely redistributable.

* The new open-access journal, Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media hails from Denmark, and is published in English under Creative Commons Attribution. The journal has so far published three issues.

* In the latest edition of the Spanish journal Theory Now, an open-access review of the book A traves del abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024) (‘Into the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’).

* New from Iceland in English, the 2024 Masters dissertation “Adapt and Die: Ecocriticism and the Lovecraftian Sublime in Rainworld, Outer Wilds, Frostpunk, and Factorio”. Freely available online.

* A delayed Masters dissertation from Norway in English, on “Lovecraftian Horror and the Role of Truth”. It will be freely accessible from 20th November 2025.

* Just finished a few days ago, the giant Angouleme comics-arts event in France. This saw major exhibitions on…

   — The Lovecraft adaptations of Gou Tanabe, now standing at twelve book-length adaptations. [ Radio France one-hour special ] [ In-gallery video and video short (loop) ] [ Printed catalogue currently available, but very likely to sell out ]

   — The “cult Vikings series” of comics, Vinland Saga. [ In-gallery video, a bit wobbly but not sea-sickness inducing ]

   — ‘The City in Science-Fiction Comics’, with selected works from 150 artists including Moebius, Druillet, Bilal, Frederik Peeters and Francois Schuiten. The focus was on “BD” comics format, common in continental Europe. Rather than on the comics of the USA, Britain or Japan. [ There doesn’t seem to be a catalogue ]

   — A survey of BD comics adapting fairy tales for young children. [ Again, no catalogue ]

Incidentally, the UK’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival now has dates — 26th-28th September 2025. This is now the UK’s only potential challenger to France’s giant Angouleme event in the future, after the regrettable lockdown-demise of Shrewsbury’s ambitious comic arts festival.

* Issued in France in French, at the end of January 2025, Gou Tanabe’s adaptation of “The Cats of Ulthar”, as Les chats d’Ulthar. The book is as yet unknown to Amazon UK.

* In Spain in February 2025, the 2nd ‘Ferroviaria Fantastica’, and this year the event has a Lovecraft theme throughout. The title translates as ‘Fastastic Railways’, but sadly it does not appear to be a festival of Lovecraftian scale-model electric railway layouts (now there’s an idea for a railroad-builder videogame). Seems more of a general regional one-day festival of the fantastic, with talks and creative workshops?

* Also in Spain, a regional gallery show ‘The Cthulhu Mythos’, with a substantial set of online gallery pictures.

* I’m pleased to see that Murray Ewing is slowly reviewing the novels of British novelist John Gordon at his blog. Who knew that there were many more novels, after the children’s classic The Giant Under the Snow? Not me, until now. Ewing’s latest review is of The Edge of the World (1983). The thought strikes me that a full-cast / full-FX unabridged audio reading of The Giant Under the Snow would be quite something.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he brings news that the summer 2025 issue of the weird poetry journal Spectral Realms will contain the poem “The Haunted Forest”, liked by Lovecraft and compared by him to Poe. Thought lost, the poem has now been re-discovered in the January 1915 edition of Outward Bound.

* The German Lovecraftians now have dates for their major annual RPG convention anRUFung 2025, now set for 17th to 20th July 2025. They also report that the dedicated Lovecraftian Miskatonic Theatre, a real theatre in Hamburg’s Harburg district, has successfully crowdfunded $15,000 to replace all its stolen gear. It’s reported that this specialist ‘horror theatre’ has so far put on stage its adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

* Marzaat unearths a substantial Lovecraft Mythos tale by John Brunner. Who knew? Marzaat’s blog post is however one to read after reading the tale itself, since we get a complete plot synopsis and plot spoilers. The tale itself is found in Weird Tales v55 #31 1992, and in Robert M. Price’s themed anthology The Necronomicon (Chaosium, 1996). A review of the Price collection called the Brunner tale the… “gem of the collection”.

* Due in early 2025 from Chaosium, a new $50 hardback edition of the Keeper’s Guide for the RPG Cthulhu by Gaslight, intended for the game masters who run RPG game sessions. New cover art by Loic Muzy. The book may also be of use to writers using the setting of late Victorian Britain and the nation’s wider British Empire.

* Elsewhere, I’ve reached seven years of producing my regular 20/20 : Tracking Optimism links newsletter, which tracks causes for rational optimism about the future, and notes substantial debunkings of doom-mongers and alarmists. 20/20 is definitely not one for those inclined toward gloom and doom. I’ve also reached issue #275 of my regular Tolkien Gleanings links newsletter, which tracks interesting Tolkien scholarship and other Middle-earth and mediaeval-fantasy related items that catch my eye. Again, not one for those who are allergic to elves and hobbits and the like. But some readers of Tentaclii may be interested.

* And finally, news just in: the cats of Ulthar reported to have withdrawn from their emergency military alliance with the cats of Scotland! (aka: The Scottish government will not, as was widely mooted in the media, ban the keeping of pet cats in Scotland).

— End-quote —

Lovecraft on northern Scotland…

“One of the great puzzles of Northern ethnology is the origin of the peculiar facial & cranial type associated with the Gaelic Celt of western Ireland & northern Scotland — the type with upturned nose, long upper lip, heavy eyebrow-ridges, &c. This type has no known analogue anywhere else in the world, & the ethnologist is at a loss to determine how it arose. The races entering into the composition of the Gaels must have been largely Nordic, with a touch perhaps of Alpine (Slav) & Mediterranean. Whence, then, came this peculiar physiognomy?” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“The cult [of witchcraft] does not seem to have crossed into Britain till late in the 15th or early in the 16th century; and it there found its chief seat in Scotland.” — Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, October 1930.

“… how much I enjoyed The House of the Isles, which swept my imagination along with a kind of feudal pageantry all the more potent because it was real family history, & written by one of the characters of the pageant itself, as it were. […] It is certainly a vivid & dramatic chronicle [of the feudal clans of Scotland], & gripped my imagination strongly enough to send me more than once to histories & reference works for parallel background-material & scenic colour. […] The long pedigree [i.e. ancestral line, detailed in the book] is certainly a matter of the keenest interest — both the actually historic portion, which may be taken as extending back to the generations just preceding Somerled, & the earlier parts in which legendary & oral tradition blend gracefully into an increasing twilight of poetic narrative. […] I am very grateful for the loan of The House of the Isles, & would be glad to see the subsequent volume some time if it be of convenient mailing proportions. [… Of course] In actual detail, the period of romantic mediaevalism contained repellent amounts of crudeness. There is little doubt but that neither Somerled nor Bandoin Ui Niall could write his own name, & both probably ate half-cooked meat with unassisted hands, wiping their greasy fingers on their garments. But taken in its entirety, with all its proud, violent feelings & ruthlessly energetic deeds, it has the inestimable quality of typifying concretely & dramatically those basic thoughts, feelings, attitudes, & motive-patterns from which the whole fabric of Aryan life has flowered, & which have characterised the experience of the race during the longest part of its history. It is a symbol of the utmost potency, & has a natural hold on the deepest hidden psychological processes of the European personality. The ending of a stream of experience based upon the approximately similar conditions which have always surrounded us hitherto, & have thus become the indispensable background & reference-points of our habitual thoughts & feelings, is tremendously to be regretted. It is a tragedy because it deprives us of that reservoir of precedent which has so much to do with our sense of the value & significance of things — throwing us back to the beginning, as it were, & placing before us the task of founding a whole new tradition based on the newer conditions of living.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, February 1929.

HPLinks #22.

* The Drayton Arms theatre in London has officially announced the London Lovecraft Festival, for 16th-17th February 2025. The Drayton also has Web pages for the stage shows, which are booking now.

* Newly for sale, Lovecraft’s seminal “Dagon” as published in The Vagrant, November 1919. Said to be in near-fine condition.

* L’antique Sentier introduces Newburyport, a real-world model for Innsmouth, to French readers.

* From the University of North Carolina, the Masters dissertation “Popular Purity: Change Over Time in the Racial Views of H.P Lovecraft, and the Spectrum of Racial Ideas as Promoted by Popular Culture: 1917-1936” (2023). Freely available for download.

* At Stanford, the B.A. final dissertation “Lovecraft and the Question of an Uninhabitable Universe”. Winner of the university’s DLCL Award (2020). Now freely available for download.

* At McQuarie University, Australia, the PhD thesis Out of time/Out of control: speculative modernism and the limits of thought (2024), on Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs. Freely available for download.

* Forthcoming, an academic book collection on the topic of movie ‘creature features’. With a submission deadline of 10th March 2025, the editor is seeking…

… close readings of films led by creatures and monsters in the 21st century. Classic [older] films will be welcome if analyzed through new, contemporary theories to show how their purpose/meaning has changed over time.

* In Spanish, the YouTube recording of a 2023 Madrid conference on Geologia en la literatura fantastica y de terror (‘Geology in fantasy and horror literature’).

* Also in Spanish, MetalTrip reviews…

A new rock opera, ‘Legado De Una Tragedia: Lovecraft’, which brings together theatre and symphonic metal music. The result is a horror rock-opera full of the best heavy metal. Each song is based on one of Lovecraft’s most iconic stories.

* The Void reviews Kadath, the new Lovecraft-centred metal album by the Lovecraftian band The Great One Ones. Hardforce also has a review in French.

* On the south coast of the UK, Falmouth University will stage a three-day conference on Haunted Modernities, 16th-18th July 2025. Deadline for submissions: 17th March 2025. The conference seems to be casting the net wide, but will focus around…

… haunted modernities and spectral futures of all sorts. Looking back to the past as a haunted space and forward to the ‘spectres’ of the future, we want the ‘Haunted Modernities’ conference to be indicative of wide open spaces and fruitful intersections in scholarship and practice. Whether work is hyper-local, global, or interstellar we welcome imaginative, creative, ethical, and diverse discussions from all disciplines and subject areas. As well as traditional papers, creative practice work is also invited in whatever form — written, film, audio, performance, exhibitions etc.

* New on Librivox, a public-domain reading of the English translation of Hesse’s Steppenwolf. 1929, in first English translation, which I assume is the translation used here due to the 1929 U.S. copyright expiration date. So far as I know, Lovecraft never encountered the translation.

* A forthcoming book, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, will be a transcribed collection of interviews with science-fiction and fantasy authors, drawn from Richard Wolinsky’s Probabilities radio show. His half-hour interviewees included Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury and many more. The book is due from Tachyon in August 2025. No Amazon listing as yet.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the 1990s Sheffield horror-punkzine Gibbering Madness #6. This has a fannish look at punk rockers in horror movies, with the article naming about 18 such movies. Also of note is the punkzine Scrawl #3 from Belfast, though only for a 7″-single review which mentions in passing that…

Rudimentary Peni are quite rightly recognised as pioneering and influential in the realm of anarcho punk and are possibly one of the most deranged bands ever. […] The late eighties saw [their album] Cacophony, which was a musically inventive yet immensely bizarre tribute to the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

* Blinks notes a new broadcast TV travel documentary which (though otherwise tiresome) gives… “a number of interesting scenes showing both the inside and outside of Dunsany Castle”, plus some snatches of discussion with the current Lord Dunsany.

* And finally, new on eBay at a sensible price, ‘Stereo View of the Head of the Providence River’, which appears to show the ‘Old Brick Row’ which Lovecraft tried to save.

— End-quote —

“Good old Providence — there is no other town quite like it! [Until 1929 and the loss of the Old Brick Row, it still had the coherent] ancient waterfront with slant-roofed brick warehouses and lanes of gambrel-roofed shops and pillared taverns […] Then, too, from most points’ along the [College] hill crest there is a breath-taking view of the outspread roofs and spires and domes of the westward-stretching lower town — a view reaching even to the dim violet hills of the country beyond the country whence many of my ancestors came. At sunset this vista is past description — the marble dome of the State House, the Gothic tower of St. Patrick’s, and the distant spires of Federal Hill against the flaming, mysterious west — and then the cryptic twilight, with the violet of the far hills creeping eastward to engulf the whole drowsy valley, and little specks of light leaping out one by one till the expanded sea of roofs is one titanic constellation […] And even more magical now that we have tall buildings to light up and suggest enchanted cliff cities of Dunsanian mystery.” — Lovecraft to E. Hoffman Price, February 1933.

HPLinks #19.

* Newly listed for discounted pre-order, a 500-copy hardcover edition of A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. Due to ship in early spring 2025 (“March”), and it can’t ship outside the USA.

* In English in the latest edition of the Hungarian open-access journal Patchwork, “Subjectivity and Cosmic Ambiguity in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City””.

* The latest edition of the new open-access journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale has a review of Joshi’s The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown (2021).

* In the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Il richiamo degli abissi: una ripresa del Glauco ovidiano in H.P. Lovecraft” (‘The Call of the Deep: a revival of Ovidian Glaucus in H.P. Lovecraft’). Presents, in Italian, the idea that Ovid’s… “Metamorphoses, [specifically the] episode of Glaucus, was an important source of inspiration for the short story The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

* A special new Lovecraft issue of the French journal EaN… “Cthulhu waits no longer. Lovecraft is more relevant than ever: this is perhaps what explains the contemporary interest in his surprisingly modern work.” EaN appears to be open-access.

* In the latest issue of the French journal Otrante ($ paywall) “Relecture juridique de la nouvelle Le molosse d’H.P. Lovecraft” (‘A legal rereading of the short story The Hound by H.P. Lovecraft’).

* The current Weird Tales IP owners recently had a 100-page ‘Cosmic Horror’ special issue (#367), which I think I missed hearing about. But usefully, last week the Tellers of Weird Tales blog perused this issue, finding that… “the contributors to this issue are mostly movie, television, and comic book people” rather than writers. He also suspects that most of the unsigned pictures, of which there are apparently many, were generated by AI models. Which I’ve no objection to myself… provided AI images are done well, generated by someone who knows what they’re doing, and tickled a bit with Photoshop before release. Tellers of Weird Tales also has another post taking a deeper look at the Cosmic Horror issue.

* FanHistory Project Zoom Sessions. This is an online webinar series with the holders and curators of science-fiction fandom university collections. Set to run from January through April 2025.

* A few years back the Chinese communist authorities took a sudden and unexpected interest in science-fiction fans and communities. What seemed somewhat benign at the time now looks different, as a new paper reveals the “unexpected intensification” of censorship which followed, and how “government censorship caused once-thriving fanfiction communities to break apart”.

* Propnomicon posts the scenario setup for The Miskatonic University Sahara Expedition 2025. A real-world LARP in the deserts of North Africa.

* An early indication of the return of the London Lovecraft Festival in February 2025. A listing for “A Night Beneath The Elder Sign” at The Drayton Arms Theatre, London, on 16th February 2025. Lovecraft’s “Celephais, a tale from the Dreamlands, told in shadow puppet style” with “electronic soundtrack performed live”. Plus a “dramatic retelling of From Beyond”.

* Metal Temple interviews the band The Great Old Ones… “Lovecraft may be the sixth member of the band. It’s always music first, but Lovecraft is part of the band, you know?”

* And finally, the English edition of the leftist El Pais asks “How do cats dream?”.

— End-quote —

“My dream of the black cat city was very fragmentary. The place was built of stone & clung to the side of a cliff like some of the towns drawn by Sime for Dunsany’s stories. There are towns more or less like it in Spain. The place seemed to have been built by & for human beings aeons ago, but its present feline inhabitants had evidently lived there for ages. [I beheld] the cats moving about in a rational & orderly manner, evidently in the performance of definite duties.” — Lovecraft to Lumley, June 1936.