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.

HPLinks #14.

* A long new post on Lovecraft’s wife Sonia as a historical researcher. This was her paid role with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, undertaken in 1933, and which temporarily brought Lovecraft and Sonia together again. This scholarly post draws on as-yet unpublished archives.

I found an eBay picture of the Museum’s staff entrance seen in 1950, at the same Brower Park site that Sonia would have known.

* Librivox have released a new ghost and horror collection of public domain audio. Includes free and re-usable readings of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” and “Polaris”, and from the Lovecraft Circle Arthur Leeds’s “The Return of the Undead” and Frank Belknap Long’s “Men Who Walk Upon the Air”. The latter appeared in Weird Tales for May 1925, alongside Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann”. Also available on on Archive.org.

* Now available for purchase and download, the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre full-cast audio adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Temple”.

* Fumito Logica reviews the new Italian graphic novel of Lovecraft’s life and death…

HPL’s anti-humanism was a desperate faith in the absurd, in a silent and indifferent cosmos, while he lived through an era that clung to habit and the superfluous. […] Yet his desperation gave him the ability to transcend his era, while remaining sitting in a cold room in Providence. He used the power of the word to cross the threshold of eternity, entering dimensions that seek to erase every residue of humanity. [The book] is an imaginative and intimate biography, material and evanescent. Taddei insinuates himself into HPL’s flesh, while Lacavalla paints his darkest nightmares without sparing himself.

Also, Italian paper Il Manifesto has an interview with the writer and artist (spoiler alert). Freely available online.

* Heavy Metal magazine’s blog surveys the Lovecraft Art of John Holmes, the British artist who painted the covers for the early 1970s Ballantine paperbacks.

* New on YouTube, Christian Matzke Interview: Creating H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and also with some chat about his Alien Absolution fan-film.

* Newly listed on Amazon UK, the forthcoming book Les Chats d’Ulthar (‘The Cats of Ulthar’) by Gou Tanabe, set for release on 23rd January 2025 in French. Three Lovecraft tales of the Dreamlands are adapted by the Japanese graphic-novel master, “The Other Gods”, “Celephais” and “The Cats of Ulthar”.

* Metaladdicts brings news that the band “The Great Old Ones Release New Single ‘In The Mouth Of Madness'”, this being… “a haunting precursor to their forthcoming [Dreamlands themed] album, Kadath”. The album is due at the end of January 2025.

* Now published, Chaosium’s latest edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight Investigators’ Guide: Mysteries and Frights in the Victorian Age. This is the 2024 edition, presumably expanded and aligned with the latest core RPG game. I see the first edition was published way back in 1986, and that by 2012 there had been three editions. The book is possibly also useful for Mythos writers unfamiliar with the details of the British Isles in this period.

* From the HPLHS and new to me, The Providence Pack for Lovecraft’s Providence, including a wall-map sized reprint of the College Hill plat map. Again, potentially useful for writers as well as RPG players.

* Paywalled in the new gothic studies book Graveyard Gothic (2024), the chapter “Weirding the Gothic graveyard”. This discusses… “how Lovecraft uses the graveyard in “The Tomb” (1922), “Herbert West – ​Reanimator” (1922) and others”. At the end the author sees the later “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) as “reshaping [the graveyard] through the prism of a very modernist artistic and scientific sensibility”.

* A forthcoming 1,100+ page hardcover claiming to be The Complete Fiction, Poetry, and Essays of H.P. Lovecraft. Set for publication in early December 2024 at nearly £50. The publisher is Revive Classics, which shovels public-domain classics into slick hardback covers at high prices… and gets disappointed one or two-star reviews. I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t complete. The legit Collected Essays set from Hippocampus runs to five volumes and some 1,500 pages in small type. The legit collected poetry is around 600 pages in a wide oversized book. There’s no way you could cram all that, plus all the fiction, into just over 1,100 9″ x 6″ pages. Buyer beware.

* New on Archive.org for download, Arthur Machen’s late novel The Green Round (1933).

This was a book read by Lovecraft, early in 1934. He found it meandering but was positive…

Have just read Machen’s new book — The Green Round — his first weird production in 17 years. It is really extremely interesting — with something of that persistent sense of unreal worlds impinging on the real world which many imaginative persons possess. In the casualness & unexplainedness of the phenomena represented, it recalls some of Machen’s queer prefaces to his earlier books”. — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, March 1934.

* And finally, science seemed to become more weirdly Lovecraftian this week. More so than usual, these days. An Oxford University expert speculated that the octopus species will in time take over the world, should humans somehow die off or leave for the stars. Plus our fledgling quantum computers can, it seems, be reliably powered by weird imaginary cats. A scenario that springs to mind, then: a post-human quantum computer powered by an octopus named Cthulhu, who is dreaming about imaginary cats (possibly from Ulthar). This octo-cat-powered computer is keeping ‘alive’ the AI-reconstructed personality of one HPL, while located in a crypt deep under an Earth that is being burned into its final cinder by the last stages of an expanding sun. Add a few time-travelling humans who suddenly arrive in the crypt, and must extract HPL from the tentacular embrace of Cthulhu before the planet burns. This may perhaps be a Lovecraftian RPG scenario of use to some readers. Or possibly just another crap episode of Doctor Who.

— End-quote —

In March 1934 Lovecraft gave tongue-in-cheek advice to his friend Morton, on the possibilities of writing a weird mystery tale for Morton’s mineralogist colleagues…

“… you could have a great mineralogical curator from Paterson [Morton’s museum in New Jersey] murdered by some spy of the American Museum – the latter institution being jealous of having its pebble section surpass’d. Later it could be discover’d that the assassin had left his photograph imprinted on some obscurely sensitive stone (if none exists, invent one!) that yields up its secrets only under a blend of inframauve light from a special fur-lined vacuum tube. Then, when the murderer has explain’d this away by saying he left the image on some other visit, in stalks Old King Brady the Petrological Pinkerton with a radio-active kind of feldspar or sparkill or solidified argon which restores the life-vibrations of the murder’d man. Up sits the great curator on his bier, and points his finger at the dastard from 79th street. “He done it!” “He done it!” But since the victim ain’t dead no more, the murderer is let off on probation — tho’ the American Museum is forced to transfer most of its treasures to the enlarged marble palace at Summer Street and Broadway [at Paterson]. […] For gawd’s sake don’t have puppet [pseudo-comic names] like Sir Stoneham Pyrites, Capt. Magnetite de Magistris, Prof. Boulder B. Traprock, etc., etc. cluttering up your pages! [As for the follow-on serial…] You could vary your locale and incidents magnificently; having unknown minerals found in crypts under aeon-old deserted cities in the African jungle, and all that. Then there are hellish stony secrets filtering down from the forgotten elder world — think of the Eye of Tsathoggua, hinted at in the Livre d’Eibon, and of the carved primal monstrosity in lavender pyro-jadeite caught up in a Kanaka fisherman’s net off the coast of Ponape! God! Suppose the world knew why Curator Konbifhashi Taximeto of the Wiggiwaga Museum in Kyoto committed hara-kiri after examining the fluorescent emanations of this unholy blasphemy through the differential spectroheliograph!”

In an earlier post at Tentaclii I discovered good evidence that Morton’s collection at Paterson excelled in collecting and exhibiting fluorescent — i.e. glow-in-the-dark — minerals. Hence Lovecraft’s emphasis here on the technology of special light + minerals. So far as I can tell, Lovecraft invented the word “inframauve”. Nice name for a swishy fanzine.

Welcome to HPLinks #12.

“Little Bobby Barlow, for all his scant 16 years, can remember a world & a phase of civilisation — the feverish, thoughtless, reckless age of the 1920’s — which is today as dead as Tyre & Babylon!” — Lovecraft letter to Toldridge, March 1935.

* Now published, Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937–1973 (October 2024)…

The story of [the early Lovecraft publisher] Arkham House told in the ephemera is no less than the personal autobiography of the press. Year by year and sometimes month by month, see plans unfold — always to publish more books to keep readers and collectors coming back. In this ‘Pictorial History and Guide for Collectors’ each individually numbered item spotlights a shot of the cover or distinguishing interior feature. In full color. With additional selected information, so that any item can be recognized easily from any other.

* This week John Coulthart blogged on “Richard Taylor’s Lovecraftiana”, Taylor being the artist Derleth tapped for the dust-jackets of various Arkham House books.

* Talking of covers, I’d never until recently seen the cover of this 1983 Polish translation of Lovecraft. The unknown artist has made a pleasingly loose sans-Cthulhu combination of the broken ground of the risen R’lyeh, the mind-bending portal-door found there, and a cosmic sky-vista.

Unlike many cover artists, it appears he had actually read and considered the story he was illustrating…

… everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away…” (“The Call of Cthulhu”).

* New in The European Conservative, the article “Rebuilding R’lyeh: Houellebecq, Lovecraft, and the Meaning of Architecture”. Freely available online.

* A 2023 Brazilian post-graduate thesis, O horror cosmico de H.P. Lovecraft como expressao da barbarie do mundo administrado (‘H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror as an expression of the barbarity of the administered world’). Freely available in PDF here, with an English abstract. The work examines…

relations between the aspects of form and content used by [Lovecraft] and the forms of control and domination of nature marked by technological rationality, barbarism, and fear, characteristic of the living conditions found in the administered [i.e. bureaucratic] society. The main themes [found were] criticism of the occult; of the regression to barbarism in the context of war; the constitution of authoritarianism through patriotism; war neuroses; the disappearance of the intellectual type; the formation of sects and fanaticism; and the notion of imminent threat of the end. [Lovecraft] explores, through fear, the path of regression of society and the submission of its members to disastrous ideas and policies, as well as an attack on narcissism through the exploration of the sublime. In this way his work allows contact with fears that, if brought to consciousness and reflected upon, may reduce their harmful effects on the individual [reader’s psychological] formation process.

* From Spain, the new 2024 multi-author academic book A Traves Del Abysmos: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (‘Traversing the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’).

This chunky book costs a very reasonable 19 Euros from Amazon Spain. Had this been in English it might have been locked away at £120, by a big academic publisher aiming at a few hundred sales to academic libraries. It’s thus cheap enough to cut off the spine, scan to OCR and then auto-translate, if you needed to see it for your thesis etc. I have the contents pages auto-translated to English (the nice font and typesetting is lost), and here’s a translation from the blurb…

[Lovecraft resists] classification or explanation on a purely theoretical level. [He takes us] beyond the limits of what is human, making his literature a privileged threshold from which the most radical issues of philosophical reflection [can] emerge. The unknown relationships of time, space and matter; contact with extratemporal non-entities; the breakdown of existential certainty; the abyssal descents; the antediluvian languages; scientific revelations incompatible with what is human; the dream materialisations. Lovecraft [becomes] an extracosmic magma that flows though and illuminates the intricate network of the tensions running throughout modernity. Lovecraft’s manifestated ideas have permeated contemporary thought, prompting an important segment of thinkers to reflect on the unthinkable, talk about the unnameable and peer into the radical exteriority that surrounds the human world.

* The National Review magazine on “The Call of Lovecraft” ($ paywall). Possibly just another Halloween clickbait re-hash, of no interest to Lovecraftians? It’s difficult to know without seeing all of the article.

* Helios Press has announced a pre-order for a new expanded edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street. 140 pages in hardcover, compared to 70 pages in the previous paperback. I’m uncertain if it will contain the supposedly extant correspondence between HPL and the Eddys said to date “as early as 1918”, the existence of which was claimed many years ago by one of the Eddy descendants (see Joshi’s I Am Providence, page 465). But which was apparently not even shown to Joshi, and has never since been revealed. The blurb for the new edition does claim it will have new… “correspondence between and related to the Eddys and Lovecraft”. But that sounds to me like it could be letters sent ‘between the Eddys’, plus letters ‘related to Lovecraft’ — such as Clifford Eddy’s 1966 letter about Lovecraft (‘Knew Lovecraft’) which was published in The Providence Journal. That 1966 letter was not in the earlier edition. But all this is just my guess, based on the probability that, if we were to get actual new Lovecraft letters to the Eddys, then a lot more fuss would be being made about it in the blurb. I guess we wait and see. The book is due in 2025.

* Les Navigateurs, a new French ‘BD’ graphic novel by Caneva & Lehman. I see some good reviews, and apparently Lehman is a Lovecraftian who has made this book into a ‘Lovecraft in Paris’ tale. At least according to Marianne.net, which describes it as… “Lovecraft meets the waters of the Seine river”.

The preview pages make it look quite gritty-indie. And even less encouraging is the opening multi-page slog through some domestic teen-angst. Yet there is one page which hints the story may become more Lovecraftian later on…

* Veteran European comics publisher Humanoids plans to revive its venerable Metal Hurlant magazine title via a Kickstarter, as an English-language quarterly. The sci-fi comics magazine will aim to be… a “massive 272+page literary experience curated to theme, with all-new content from today’s best and brightest comics creators”, plus rare Moebius reprints. Given the recent big French ‘Lovecraft special’ comics-magazine, the re-launch would likely be Lovecraft-friendly. The crowdfunder is billed as “launching soon”, and currently has over 1,600 followers. Which bodes well.

* Cthulhu is wading over to the British Isles. Chaosium Con is to stage its first Call of Cthulhu RPG convention in the UK. Set for 2025.

* Cthulhu 2025, billed as a “massive” four-day camping and music festival at the start of May, and set to feature… “the best bass music artists in the country”. No nation specified, but I assume the USA and also that there may be a Lovecraft theme of some sort. But there are no further details as yet. Still, it may be of interest to some Lovecraftian creatives seeking an appreciative platform for their large-scale work.

* And finally, my new blog post on the short novel The Greatest Adventure (1929). With a bare-bones plot-summary, and some basic exploration of the unproven and probably-unprovable possibility that Lovecraft read this Antarctica novel before writing “At The Mountains of Madness”.

— End-quote —

“We are not nearly so well equipped for combating a varied environment [i.e. the natural variability of the earth as it moves through the ice-ages etc] as are the articulata; and some climatic revulsion will almost certainly wipe us out some day as the dinosaurs were wiped out — leaving the field free for the rise and dominance of some hardy and persistent insect species — which will in time, no doubt, develop a high specialisation of certain functions of instinct and perception, thus creating a kind of civilisation, albeit one of wholly different perceptions, (when other species view a given object, their ocular [i.e. seen by the eyes] image of it differs — sometimes widely — from ours) emphases, feelings, and goals.” — H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to his friend, the mineralogist and anarchist Morton, 30th October 1929.