HPLinks #52.

* The latest issue of the Brazilian open-access fantastic fiction journal Abusoes is a special on ‘histories and theories of fantasy in the 21st century’. A number of their back issues are also fantasy or science-fiction specials, and there’s also large special issue dedicated to Lovecraft. Mostly in Portuguese.

* The Science Fiction Foundation has a call for contributions to a forthcoming “100 Years of Wonder” special issue of its journal, with a submission deadline of 5th April 2026…

2026 marks the centenary of Hugo Gernsback’s [magazine] Amazing Stories. To commemorate and critically explore what many regard as the birth of genre science fiction, the Autumn 2026 issue of ‘Foundation’ (No. 153) will present a series of articles that investigate and re-evaluate the history of the science fiction pulps.

* The journal Messengers from the Stars plans a 2026 special issue on cityscapes in fantasy & science fiction. Deadline: 1st September 2025.

* A preprint paper on PsyArXiv, “The Lovecraft Protocol: A Clinical Guide for First Contact with Functionally Plural Systems”. Now withdrawn, but archived at Reddit. Appears to have been an HPL Birthday spoof of psychology ‘personality assessment’ papers, that made it into Google Scholar.

* In the new $155 academic-theory book Theorizing Stephen King (2025), I see there’s a chapter titled “A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King”.

* New in the open-access megajournal Humanities, “Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery”. Traces the influence of the fin-de-siecle Decadents through Machen to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series and beyond.

* Deep Cuts look at the Clara Hess letters held at Brown University, in “The Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess”, and transcribes letters she sent to August Derleth. As I understand it Derleth also interviewed her about her memories of Lovecraft, probably in late 1948.

* New articles at Grognardia on “Lovecraft the Blogger” and “Lovecraft the Fantasist”…

Like [R.E.] Howard, Lovecraft peopled the Dreamlands with decadent civilizations, perilous sorceries, and monstrous foes. Like Tolkien, he gives us a secondary world with its own geography, history, and laws. The difference is perhaps one of emphasis. Howard’s heroes carve their fates with the sword, Tolkien’s with the burden of virtue, and Lovecraft’s with the dreamer’s restless desire to glimpse what lies just beyond the horizon.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, DMR had the article “Lovecraft at 135: Yeah, He Won”. If one pinpoints 1925 as the beginning of Lovecraft’s strong influence on other creatives, then he’s now endured for a century…

By this time in August of 1925, HPL had turned the heads of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and many, many others. ‘Others’ like C.L. Moore and Manly Wade Wellman. ‘Others’ like Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury. [… and now 100 years later] The ‘lens’ of most horror fiction is filtered through the paradigm Lovecraft refined and perfected [and he also lives] rent-free even in the minds of even his most ardent haters.

* This week Wormwoodiana surveys “Those Thick Omnibuses from the Thirties”, and recommends some core 1930s books which collected the best ‘weird’ stories between hardcovers.

* A new audiobook The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, being a quality seven-hour reading of the classic Professor Challenger novel. From the same reader, there’s also “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith. Both free on YouTube. Avoid the YouTube ads by downloading with desktop freeware such as Mediahuman’s YouTube To MP3 software.

* I’m pleased to see that Fred Blosser has just published a new R.E. Howard reader’s guide, The Solomon Kane Companion: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Dark Avenger. Billed as the “first-ever comprehensive guide” and available now.

Includes a “Kane chronology and a glossary of people and places” in the tales.

* Perhaps useful for some involved in fantasy illustration and RPG-making, a proper ‘savage wolf’ LoRA for SDXL-based image generator models. The free A Better Wolf… “fixes a lot of the wolf related issues in SDXL”.

* Bandcamp Daily has a new long article and survey “Exploring the Mystical Realms of Fantasy Synth”, which is shorthand for ‘synthesizer-based electronic music’…

Think of a fantasy setting or a specific corner of mythology, and there’s almost certainly a one-person synth project out there taking its lore and turning it into music.

* Robert Bloch’s short Mythos novel Strange Eons (1978) was re-issued by Valancourt Books in early August 2025. Now shipping. Bloch makes frequent use of Lovecraft-the-man via letters etc, to prop up the rather dialogue-heavy tale. There’s no audiobook, it seems.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of Weird Tales for January 1946, including an indication that The Necronomicon had been dropped into the swirl of bookseller’s lists as early as 1945…

Also new on Archive.org, a Sprague de Camp snippet in Future Science Fiction, August 1954. His regular column lets drop a few details on his then-recent visit to Providence — giving the colours of Lovecraft’s homes and calling 10 Barnes a “monstrous” building.

* From Poland in Polish, the undergraduate dissertation “Shades of Cosmic Horror: An analysis of the cinematic expressions applied in adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space””. The author considered “all seven film adaptations” of “Colour”, and discussed the methods used to visually and scientifically convey the idea of a fictional colour. Not yet online.

* And finally, Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” adapted as a 1992 Japanese TV Movie (who knew?). Now subtitled in English and newly and freely available on Archive.org.

— End-quotes —

[In 1904, as a thirteen year-old] “… Latin now captivated my fancy, and I became a haughty Roman with scant use for the barbaric darkness of the modern world. The impress of this phase is still upon me, and I still thrill at the Roman name and the fasces and the figure of the Wolf of the Capitol.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“… nocturnal howling has an element of fearfulness for me. I always associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night’s small hours. Wolves and other animals are of course the ultimate basis of the hereditary folk-fear on which my impression is founded.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, January 1928.

“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very in-frequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.” — Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”.

“[I] fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk — a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney” — Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”.

HPLinks #49.

* Hippocampus Press has details of the forthcoming Lovecraft Annual 2025. Among others, the journal will have articles on…

    – Lovecraft’s Boyhood Cat.
    – “Iä, Iä!”: Its Origin and Significance.
    – Lovecraft and Wales.
    – Lovecraft in the Netherlands.
    – Lovecraft in Mexico.

Looks good. Set for release in August 2025. Not yet listed on Amazon UK.

* The French journal Epistemocritique also produces a line of free ebooks. One of their latest books is Ecrire avec les cartes (2024). Along with chapters on maps and the fiction of Kipling, Stevenson and H.G. Wells, this book includes “Cartographies d’outre-tombe: la posterite cartographique de la Nouvelle-Angleterre imaginaire de Lovecraft” (‘Cartographies from beyond the grave: the cartographic posterity of the New England imaginary of Lovecraft’), which is well illustrated with maps. Freely available online.

I propose to examine how these [popular, post-Lovecraft] maps relate to Lovecraft’s [original] fiction, with particular reference to “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. I suggest that these maps can be grouped into three categories, according to the function they perform and their graphic style. This abundant popular cartographic production affects both our reading of Lovecraft, and our perception of real spaces.

Available in PDF, and easily auto-translated. Historians of science-fiction may also want note Epistemocritique’s first such free ebook, on Jules Verne and the popularisation of science.

* From the Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century (2022), “Fantastic Letters: Writing in a Fictional World”. Letter-forms devised for fantastic worlds. Freely available online.

* In the French journal Belphegor, “Le bestiaire medievaliste comme produit derive” (2024, ‘The medievalist bestiary as a [modern] derivative product’), in French. Freely available online, but easily auto-translated. This examines modern gaming ‘monster manuals’ — most familiar to Lovecraftians via Sandy Petersen’s Field Guide to the Lovecraftian Horrors, Creatures of the Dreamlands etc — but does so with a medievalist’s eye to the mediaeval prehistory of the form.

* Also in gaming, the HPLHS Store has what appears to be a new series of “Audio Props”, each tuned to a specific variety of Lovecraftian game.

* Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” adapted as a 2024 puppetry film. With finely-crafted puppets, complex sets and FX. Free on YouTube.

* S.T. Joshi latest blog post mentions a film version of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, from Wales. He links to a trailer and a Kickstarter. Joshi seems to be right that many liberties have been taken with the tale. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the Kickstarter from nearly reaching its goal with a week to go.

* A review of a stage production of “The Call of Cthulhu”, in Hamburg, Germany. The show has just closed its run, but if you’re in the city then you can catch the same troupe’s “Dreams in the Witch House”, on stage “in mid-August”.

* A UK meetup for Mythos writers and also traders, the Innsmouth Literary Festival 25 is set for Saturday 27th September 2025, in the English town of Bedford. Located conveniently midway between Birmingham and London, and between Oxford and Cambridge, and with not one but two railway stations. Booking now.

* In the world of R.E. Howard, this week we have free on YouTube Editing Robert E. Howard’s Conan: A Conversation with Dr. Patrice Louinet. Also new and free on YouTube is a good reading of “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance” by Robert E. Howard. An excellent pirate adventure featuring an Irishman seeking his vengeance in the Caribbean. With a few tweaks, it could have been a ‘Conan the pirate’ tale.

* Tellers of Weird Tales feels the effects of Strange Rays & Weird Waves in Weird Tales of the mid 1920s.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the Deep Magic Ezine, 2002-2006. Includes short interviews with fantasy writers and artists.

* A pleasing and new-to-me view of a spot on the Brown University campus that Lovecraft likely visited, given his interest in Ancient Rome. An exact replica of an ancient statue of Caesar Augustus in Rome, installed on the Brown campus in 1906 and there until the early 1950s. Indeed, we can be fairly sure Lovecraft visited, in the company of his visiting geologist friend Morton. Since, after 1915 the adjacent Hall housed the Geology Department on the ground floor and in the basement. Morton would surely have prompted Lovecraft to visit the Dept. when visiting Providence.

* Talking of Brown University, the modern-day Providence campus and its library (home of most of the Lovecraft letters) are set to become a little safer to visit, after Brown reaches a $50m settlement over its campus antisemitism. Brown must now take… “significant, proactive, effective steps to combat antisemitism” including “proactive measures to protect Jewish students”, and it appears that progress is to be closely monitored.

* And finally, Lovecraft’s birthday is on the 20th of this month. ‘Presents’ have been a feature of past birthdays. As my present, I plan to release my recently-made “Lovecraft’s face/head” LoRA. This is intended as an add-on for use with SDXL models re: image-generating AI. Here’s a preview of ‘without and with’, when the generated figure is in the middle-distance and a facefix is automatically applied. Close-ups give a far better likeness (no facefix needed for close-ups), but this demo shows the LoRA can also work at a distance — which will be important for comic-books. It will also work with the head at an angle, and a prompt can change the expression (here seen in neutral)…

— End-quotes —

“My own nervous state in childhood once produced a tendency inclining toward chorea, although not quite attaining that level. My face was full of unconscious & involuntary motions now & then — & the more I was urged to stop them, the more frequent they became.” — Lovecraft to Richard F. Searight, March 1935.

“After 1904 [i.e. age 14] I had a long succession of 22-calibre rifles, and became a fair shot till my eyes played hell with my accuracy.” (Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, November 1933) / In Lovecraft’s “Polaris”… “my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts”.

“I used to have to wear them [spectacles] all the time, and they kept my nose and ears in a state of perpetual irritation. Now I wear them only for steady middle-distance vision — as at the theatre, or at illustrated lectures.” — Lovecraft to Bloch, June 1933.

“It’s all as plain as the nose on your face …. or even that on my face, which is something else again.” — Lovecraft on his large nose, to Talman, February 1931.

“I do not claim to be 100% Teuton. My dark hair and eyes forbid me that honour. […] I am content to survey my ample height and pallid complexion […] your old Grandpa is pretty well satisfied to be a Nordick, chalk white from the Hercynian wood and the Polar mists” — Lovecraft joshing with Frank Belknap Long, December 1923.

HPLinks #46.

* In the journal Transatlantica, a new and detailed 5,000-word summary and conference report from the recent major international conference on Lovecraft and the Sciences, held at the University of Poitiers from 4th-6th December 2024. In French, but here’s the Google Translate link.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other things, he has news of a one-day conference “The Smith Circle: A Clark Ashton Smith Conference”. To be held in Smith’s hometown of Auburn, California, at the Auburn Carnegie Library on 18th January 2026. Booking now.

* My thanks to Ken Faig for tipping me off to Sean Donnelly’s long article on the Vondy-Spink correspondence file…

I sat down with the file of Vondy-Helm letters and hoped to find some clues. After all, they both knew Lovecraft and they were writing to each other during the last 14 years of Lovecraft’s life. There must be some reference to him in all those letters.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog (on Lovecraft’s wife) has an update on 2025 Sonia Scholarship.

* New from the Italians, Potrebbe anche non esserci piu un mondo (2025)…

Lovecraft’s longest single letter, delivered to the Italian reader in the form of a book. Here is Lovecraft as a man who is sober and calm, full of healthy common-sense, an acute and resigned critic of the modern age and anticipator of the future.

Possibly the letter to Woodburn Harris, then? Although the blurb has it that the letter was addressed to an unknown recipient.

* A 700-page script? No problem, for the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. Purgatory Chasm is their new audio production with a difference, a choose-your-own-adventure in audio with multiple storylines and music. The setting is 1922, when a geologist discovers mysterious glyphs and artifacts in a New England cave.

* Another excellent new reading of R.E. Howard’s ‘El Borak’ tales, “The Lost Valley of Iskander”. Free on YouTube. Note that the reader’s Patreon patrons are able to suggest stories to be newly recorded in future.

* Gou Tanabe has reportedly started work on his manga adaptation of Dexter Ward. Given the length and complexity, I’d imagine it might be offered across two or more graphic-novel volumes? Although, given the glacial pace at which his work reaches an official English translation, I guess we may not see it in English for three or four years yet.

* Another more long-term project should be underway relatively soon. Richard Stanley’s movie version of The Dunwich Horror is still planning to start filming in Providence in early 2026. The movie aims to be the follow-up to his acclaimed Color Out of Space movie, set well after the events of Color and making Dunwich into “a futuristic version of Arkham”. It seems that Stanley hopes to film on the Brown campus and on College Hill, in his words… “to actually shoot the beast on College Hill and on the Brown campus”, fees and campus politics permitting. So presumably digital CG / AI / FX will give the present-day Providence a makeover, transforming it into a future-Arkham. Sounds good.

* HPL in the 18th century.

* Call of Cthulhu Ireland (Chaosium, 2025) is… “an update of the 2012 Miskatonic University Library Association (MULA) Monograph ‘Mysteries of Ireland'” for role-play gamers. 230+ pages, a 1920s setting, and also likely to be of interest to writers (as a spur to ideas and plotting within this setting). Currently nominated for the 2025 ENNIES Awards for new RPG books. Doesn’t appear to be on Amazon, and is possibly only on DriveThru RPG (which flung a ‘captcha’ road-block at me on trying to visit, and thus I didn’t visit and they don’t get a link here).

* And finally, order now to beat a 5% price-rise at print-on-demand publisher Lulu. All the store’s print book prices go up by 5% from 1st August 2025, due to inflationary back-end costs.

— End-quotes —

“… according to O’Hart’s Pedigrees [Irish Pedigrees (1892)] [in my family-tree] my Caseys are descended from Baudoin Ui Niall (O’Neill), 137th King of Ireland. Begorra …” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1933.

“My mother and aunts knew the daughters of Joseph Banigan from childhood, and found them really worthy in every respect. The grandchildren were my earliest playmates, though it made me shudder in my British soul to know ‘Dicky Banigan’, ‘Robert McElroy’, ‘Edmund Sullivan’, etc!! [… The Banigan mansion is now] one of the ‘show places’ of the neighbourhood, and excited Klei[ner]’s vast admiration when he was here. It is a Gothic manor-house of brick and stone, such as its peasant builder may have seen and admired at a distance in his boyhood in Ould Oireland. The grounds are extensive and beautifully kept, with hedges, trees, and stables of pleasing architecture. It lies almost exactly half way betwixt the house where I was born, and that which I inhabit. Altogether, I fancy the Irish have helped rather than harmed the locality!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, September 1919.

“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.” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“Most conservative anthropologists think it unlikely that — despite the vivid legends of diminutive Picts and elfin brownies in Scotland, tiny fairies and subterrene leprechauns in Ireland, sinister underground ‘little people’ in Wales, and Robin Goodfellow’s merry crew in England — any miniature race has ever actually inhabited the British Isles. We derive such tales entirely from the experience of our ancestors at a former stage of migration on the European continent.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.