Category Archives: Scholarly works

HPLinks #34 – Providence, Witch House, cosmic DC, Dexter Ward and more…

16 Wednesday Apr 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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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 He found, among other items, more unpublished letters (now destined for the “forthcoming edition of Smith’s Miscellaneous Letters”), and nine unpublished juvenile stories.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 #31 – letters for sale, astronomy talk, REH, “From Beyond” filmed, Great Old Ones return, and one last Houdini ‘miracle escape’ (perhaps)…

26 Wednesday Mar 2025

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HPLinks #31.

* For sale, “Three autograph letters from Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 1929”. Newly at Honest Abe’s pulp and paper impoundment, but they could be liberated for a mere third-of-a-bitcoin. In one of these Lovecraft observes that…

Today neither Poe nor Baudelaire could expect the slightest hearing in a standard magazine.

* New on YouTube, a reading of “The People of the Pit” (1918) by A. Merritt, Since the tale was a precursor to the famous Lovecraft-fave The Moon Pool of the same year, it seems highly likely that Lovecraft encountered this story at some point. It’s here read, across 46 minutes, by the very able Josh Greenwood.

* On YouTube, a recording of “When The Stars Are Right: H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy, a one-hour talk by Edward Guimont at the Seagrave Observatory, 5th October 2024. Starts at 2.00 minutes in, when the audio improves greatly.

* New and free in open-access, the academic book Fear of Aging: Old Age in Horror Fiction and Film (2025). Includes the chapter “‘With Strange Aeons Even Death May Die’: Aging in the World of Cthulhu”. Meaning in Lovecraft’s Mythos, not the wider mythos, games, movies etc.

* New from the University of North Texas Press, the chunky new hardcover book Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Released 15th March 2025, apparently. It’s on Amazon UK already but is oddly listed in the “Paranormal” category, and it seems only Amazon US is able to ship it to the UK.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press report that they are now shipping new “Ultimate Editions” of the letters.

* And there’s a further rich haul of R.E. Howard, in the latest LibriVox Ghost and Horror Collection #78. Public-domain readings of four REH tales including “The Skull in the Stars”. Also one by August Derleth.

* New on Archive.org, Mad Dreams And Monsters: The Art Of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studio.

* Some New York City readers may be interested in Syd Mead: Future Pastime, a large retrospective exhibition of the paintings by the science-fiction master. Being staged at a venue near Madison Square Gardens, New York City, and open from 27th March – 21st May 2025.

* An open-access / Creative Commons Attribution book review in Spanish, of El Gabinete Magico: Libro de las bibliotecas imaginarias (2023) (‘The Magic Cabinet: A Book of Imaginary Libraries’). The review is in HTML, and thus easy enough to auto-translate. The book is the…

product of almost thirty years of reading” and writing, distilled into “seventy-five entries”, a book in which “a tremendous amount of work is crystallized, tracing sources and organizing data”… “As an additional tool, the work’s name index, arranged in double columns and with a smaller font size, contains fifty-four tight pages that include the names of the writers and literary works, characters, films, articles, stories, and poems cited, not excluding the implicitly alluded references, identified in parentheses, and the authors or works where the aforementioned characters are located, preceded by an arrow. In this way, the interested reader can independently track down a specific writer or character in imaginary libraries, among other information.

Given this amount of effort, it seems curious Lovecraft is never mentioned in the book (I have access to a copy that can be searched). One would have thought that “The Shadow Out of Time”, at the least, would have merited a passing mention.

* I spotted another eBay scan of a postcard that may be of use to Lovecraftian RPG gamers, as a ‘vintage’ game prop…

U.S. Navy Hospital Corps training lab, Newport, Rhode Island.

* Here in the UK, “Filming set to begin on new horror film”. Billed as… “a respectful and faithful adaptation” of “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft and with some substantial acting names attached to the project. But also…

stretching the boundaries of the genre with modern, scientific concepts” and modernising the tale… “a physics researcher tracks down her disturbed mentor to stop an experiment that could rip open a portal to a dimension of unimaginable horrors.

* Veteran Lovecraftian band The Great Old Ones release their new Lovecraftian album Lands Of Azathoth on 27th March 2025.

* Did you think the Fanac Fan History project had come to an abrupt halt? Nope, it’s just that the Site Update History has moved to a new URL. Today’s additions, one sees, include the [ERB] Burroughs Bulletin #23 (New Series). Lots more scans of ye olde skool fanzines to discover, and all free. Dig in.

* The Cancer of Superstition has supposedly been “found” and was due to be published as a new book on 24th March 2025. Paper only, and I guess it should be arriving in the mail about now for the pre-order buyers. Probably best to wait to see what the reaction to the actual book is on the Houdini forums, before ordering, I’d suggest.

* And finally, an excellent new March 2025 reading of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” from The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. The very listenable voice of Josh Greenwood reminds me a little of the great Gordon Gould, but with more rumble and bounce. There’s an advert and intro, then the story. The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is definitely one worth following.

— End-quotes —

“Most of my nearly 43 years in New-England I have spent in semi-numbness & shivering from the rarely-interrupted cold […] as you can well appreciate from remembering [how] the poor old man shiver’d in Cleveland back in [19]’22, when the 5 o’clock lake breeze began to rattle the library windows!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, June 1933, delighting that he at last has reliable steam-heat in his rooms (he had moved to 66 College Street, and a house supplied with abundant heat by the adjacent boiler-room of the John Hay Library).

“At about 12:30 a.m. I was seated at my table writing when a curious & persistent popping or crackling outdoors arrested my attention. Lifting the dark curtain & peering out, I beheld a red world as light as day, with the falling snowflakes glittering weirdly. Seeking the source of the uncanny glare, I repaired to a north window. There, in full view, was the most impressive sight my eyes have ever beheld. Where that evening had stood the unoccupied Chapman house, recently sold & undergoing repairs, was now a titanic pillar of roaring, living flame amidst the deserted night — reaching into the illimitable heavens & lighting the country for miles around. The heat was intense — even here in the house — & the glare was stupendous. […] A high east wind was blowing, & the sparks flew freely, but ice-coated roofs saved the neighbourhood.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, February 1920.

“And it is recorded that in the Elder Times, Om Oris, mightiest of the wizards, laid crafty snare for the demon Avaloth, and pitted dark magic against him; for Avaloth plagued the earth with a strange growth of ice and snow that crept as if alive, ever southward, and swallowed up the forests and the mountains. And the outcome of the contest with the demon is not known; but wizards of that day maintained that Avaloth, who was not easily discernible, could not be destroyed save by a great heat, the means whereof was not then known, although certain of the wizards foresaw that one day it should be. Yet, at this time the ice fields began to shrink and dwindle and finally vanished; and the earth bloomed forth afresh.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, 1935.

“I literally don’t know what it is to be too hot. The hotter it gets, the more energy I seem to have — mental and physical alike. I perspire freely, but am comfortable for all that I can relish temperatures of 97° and 98°, and never want it cooler than 80°. Of course, I don’t know how I’d be in those inland regions [of the USA] where the summer temperature gets up around 120° — but judging from the available evidence I could stand it better than most.” — Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, October 1935.

HPLinks #30 – Dragon-Fly, insectile Lovecraft, weird spaces and landscapes, dead goths, AI Shadow trailer, Barry’s Library, and more…

19 Wednesday Mar 2025

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HPLinks #30.

* On eBay, “two issues of Barlow’s The Dragon-fly, 1935 and 1936. The listing offers some interior pictures.

* New in open-access, the Routledge book The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human (2023)… “tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still-life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film.” Includes the chapter “The Insectile Informe: H.P. Lovecraft and the Deliquescence of Form”…

What resonates not only throughout Lovecraft’s work, but also across the scholarship establishing and legitimising him as a writer stretching his ear towards the non/in/anti-human, is the discourse of the valorisation of form: ‘man’ — the ultimate apparition of form— emboldened against the murmur, the buzzzzzzzzz of a background without form.

* A new open-access book from Italy, in Italian. In translation the title is Geometries of Terror: architectural spaces and weird literature (February 2025). Includes, in Italian…

   — The Localization of the Supernatural Between Weird and Modernism

   — Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” and the Representation of Places of the Unknown

   — The Word and the Void: Ghostly Spaces in Western Literature

   — The Architecture of the Unconscious: Hauntings, Places and Non-Places in the Works of Robert Aickman

The book is under Creative Commons Non-commercial, thus translations for a non-profit ‘zine or blog are possible.

* The open-access Journal of the Short Story in English has a new special issue on ‘Creative and Critical Responses to Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction’ (2024). Includes “Fragmented Temporality, Digression and Experiments in Consciousness Representation: Arthur Machen’s “The White People””.

* Leslie Klinger, talks about his annotated books in a new podcast interview, including his two hefty volumes of annotated Lovecraft.

* I’ve newly found a postcard of the “Dunwich Woods”. Actually of the English Dunwich, perhaps circa the 1920s, but it could easily be from Lovecraft’s Dunwich. Possibly of use to RPG gamers, as part of a prop pack?

“Dunwich Woods”

* The editors of the Cardiff University open-access journal Studies in Gothic Fiction have issued a February 2025 official notice — they have suspended activities and are no longer accepting submissions. The seventh and final issue was themed ‘The Popular and the Weird: H.P. Lovecraft and Twenty-First-Century Adaptation’, and is still available online for now.

* More Lovecraft and modern philosophy. In the Italian PhD thesis Ontologies of the Future in Contemporary Philosophy: Stiegler and Meillassoux (2021), near the end one finds the long chapter “Overpassing Mediation: Meillassoux and Lovecraft”. Meillassoux being a French philosopher. Freely available online, in English and open-access.

* In Spain, the event CTHULHUton 2025 at the end of March 2025…

* Comic-book industry/history magazine publisher TwoMorrows has been left unpaid, following the financial collapse of the huge Diamond distributor. Diamond had long distributed comics and associated niche magazines to retail stores. TwoMorrows ask readers of their long-running ongoing magazines (Cryptology, RetroFan, Comic Book Creator, Jack Kirby Collector, etc), to “renew their magazine subscriptions” if possible, to help with cashflow. To those of us in the UK they’re offering “new lower international shipping rates” or bookshop distribution via Turnaround Distribution. Lovecraftians everywhere may be especially interested in the one-off monster books page.

* On YouTube, an impressive trailer/visual-pitch for a big-budget movie adaptation of “The Shadow Out of Time”.

* And finally, the sumptuous illustrated catalogue for the auction of The Library Of Barry Humphries, 26th March 2025. Freely available online, as a .PDF file. Slaver over the gothic and weird goodies you could have had, if only you’d sold a couple of bitcoins and the auctioneer’s hammer had fallen in your favour.

— End-quotes —

“[On the streets of College Hill] I acquired a fascinated reverence for the past — the age of periwigs and three-cornered hats and leather-bound books with long-fs. My taste for the latter was augmented by the fact that there were many in the family library — most of them in a black windowless attic room to which I was half-afraid to go alone, yet whose terror-breeding potentialities really increased for me the charm of the archaic volumes I found and read there. […] Living in an ancient town amidst ancient books, I followed Addison, Hope, and Dr. Johnson as my models in prose and verse; and literally lived in their peri-wigged world, ignoring the world of the present.” — Lovecraft, “Ec’h-Pi-El Speaks”.

“As a devotee of the past, I have naturally read more English than American books, and have felt profoundly the charm of those scenes and events amongst which my race-stock was moulded and developed; so that my conception of home and of natural beauty has come to centre in that soil around which so vast a majority of ancestral associations hover — “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” — Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”.

“I am not really literary in the purest sense of the word. Books & authors, as such, do not interest me; since I want only what they transmit. It is beauty — the beauty of wonder, of antiquity, of landscape, of architecture, of horror, of light & shadow, line & contour, of mystic memory & hallowed tradition — that I worship, & I never think of talking about books when I can talk of the stars or the hills or the abbey towers of dim, far lands or the steep roofs that cluster on the slopes of archaic towns. That is why I have read so relatively little, & why science with its breathless mysteries & inconceivable vistas has so often crowded mere letters from my sphere of paramount interest.” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“So many promising & deeply interested weird fans live in places where bizarre books are unobtainable — places like Milltown, Mont., Asotin, Wash., Auburn, Cal., West Shokan, N.Y., &c. &c. — that we feel we ought to give them the benefit of whatever volumes of the sort we may chance to possess. Hence a rather active programme of borrowing is carried out among ‘the gang’. And it is not only the small-towners who need to borrow — for even the largest city libraries are sometimes devoid of the most important weird items.” — Lovecraft, to Natalie H. Wooley, January 1935, on the ‘underground library’ he helped to run in the 1930s.

HPLinks #29 – Schultz, Pera, ‘We Are Providence’ stage play, Faunus in PDF, a pagan thesis, antique monsters, clouds and more…

13 Thursday Mar 2025

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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:

 Cumulus
 Cirrus
 Stratus
 Cirro-Stratus
 Cirro-Cumulus
 Cumulo-Stratus
 Cumulo-Nimbus, or Thunder-Cloud.

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 #28 – Whelan and Mountains, authenticity, REH Borak audiobooks, Sinking City 2, and more…

05 Wednesday Mar 2025

Posted by in 3D, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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HPLinks #28.

* Artist Micheal Whelan recalls his career breakthrough 1976: Year in Review (Part One)…

Staking everything on a letter from Donald Wollheim that promised a [book] cover assignment, bolstered by recent success selling his work at conventions, Michael packed his VW Beetle and with trailer in tow headed to New York City to pursue illustration…

At the foot of this portion from his pleasingly-illustrated memoirs, Whelan also notes that he will shortly be…

adding a small preliminary painting from [Lovecraft’s] “At The Mountains of Madness” to our shop. An exclusive preview of the original art will be available for our paid subscribers on Substack before the art is released to our shop on Wednesday, 5th March [2025] at 11am EST

* In the new £140 academic libraries book on Authenticity and Adaptation (Palgrave, Feb 2025), the chapter “”I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror”: The Authentic Lovecraftian Image in Film and Television”. Seeks to identify an authentic core of Lovecraft-inspired visual media, amid its exuberant abundance…

The ‘Lovecraftian’ can be seen everywhere in twenty-first-century visual culture.

* New in Italian and available via Amazon Italy, Yog-sothothery, Oltre La Soglia Dell’immaginario Di H.P. Lovecraft (‘Yog-Sothothery: H.P. Lovecraft Beyond the Threshold of Imagination’) (October 2024). Being a multi-author volume of what sounds to me like literary essays, in Italian. The essayists explore Lovecraft’s…

fantastic stories, considered among the most innovative and intense ever committed to paper, [in] seven essays […] which take the premise that ‘to appreciate Lovecraft you need to have suffered a lot’.

* At the University of Rennes, France, the three-day Le Festival Sirennes. Set for 20th-22nd March 2025…

* In Spanish, another journal review of the book A traves del abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024) (‘Through the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’). Freely available in open-access.

* The German Lovecraftians want a team leader for their Literature Team, which is…

currently working on a volume of essays from German-speaking countries, and a translation project of Lovecraft’s letters and essays

Also, some readers may wish to know that the Tolkien Society’s Amon Hen mag-a-journal is still seeking a volunteer graphic designer, and has been for over a year now.

* New on YouTube, Robert E. Howard’s “Blood of the Gods” (featuring his El Borak adventurer character) in audiobook, Part One and Part Two (120 minutes total). Plus another El Borak tale “The Daughter of Erlik Khan” (150 minutes). Both with a good professional reader. Since the 2012 El Borak audiobook is off-the-market (read from the Del Ray collection by another reader, Michael McConnohie) and totally unavailable, these seemingly-new El Borak recordings are very welcome. Several commenters complain about “ads” in these YouTube readings, but I assume they’re somehow clueless about ad-blockers and/or .MP3 YouTube downloader freeware such as that offered by MediaHuman.

* Want even more desert adventure from Robert E. Howard? Yup, there’s more, via a free audiobook from Horrorbabble reading “King of the Forgotten People” (53 minutes). 1930s adventurer Jim Brill goes seeking a missing scientist in the far reaches of the Gobi Desert.

* Also of note in free audiobooks. New and free on Librivox, the collection The Lost Valley and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood. Also The Magician by Somerset Maugham. The latter centres on a lightly disguised Aleister Crowley circa 1907/08, and… Lovecraft it is not. Though the final description of the creepy Victorian house interior in the Staffordshire Moorlands is well done.

* One of the best big-budget Lovecraftian videogames of recent years now has a Kickstarter page for its planned sequel, The Sinking City 2. The campaign launches on 6th March 2025.

* Possibly of use for Mythos writers for games, the free Llama-3.1-8B-BeyondReality, a relatively lightweight free and local AI specifically designed for suggesting “interactive fiction scenarios” for “text-based adventures”.

* And finally, E-Arkham makes a growing series of fab monsters for the free 3D software DAZ Studio. Load, pose, choose a suitable eerie lighting preset, and then render in 3D. And potentially also then use these renders as seeds for AI enhancements / stylisation in Stable Diffusion. All his items are rather expensive at present, but those experienced in DAZ and Poser know to Wishlist and then come back when the big 70%-80% discount sales are on. All royalty-free, so you can use your renders commercially if you wish.

— End-quotes —

“The advent of Spring — even technically — is surely pleasant to think of. — […] a warm day sent me splashing through the mud & melting snow of the fields & woods […] I never before saw the ponds & brooks so high — & when I crossed the broad gorge of the Blackstone I found the lower banks [of the river] completly over-flowed; with great trees & cottage roofs projecting above an aqueous expanse like reliques of sunken Atlantis.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, 29th March 1934.

“A sense of rushing through chartless corridors seized me, and I saw dates dancing in aether—1923—1924—1925—1926—1925—1924—1923—crash! Two years to the bad, but who the hell gives a damn? 1923 ends 1926 begins! Even the spring had delay’d so that I might see it break over Novanglia’s [New England’s] antient hills! I have lost 1924 and 1925 [to New York City], but the dawn of vernal 1926 is just as lovely as I view it from Rhodinsular [Rhode Island] windows! […] There is no other place for me. My world is Providence. […] The vista from my pseudo-ariel desk corner [at 10 Barnes St.] is delectable — bits of antique houses, stately trees, urn-topp’d white Georgian fence, and an ecstatic old-fashion’d garden which will be breathlessly transporting in a couple of months. Westward, from the brow of the hill, the view is awesome and prodigious — all the roofs, spires, and domes of the lower town, and beyond them the violet expanse of the far rolling rural meadows. [The State House and its] proud copper dome is the dominating feature of the Providence skyline. The view from this dome is said to be absolutely unparalleled — countless steepled towns, league on league of undulating countryside, and the beautiful blue bay to the south, gemmed with emerald islets. One can, the genial sexton says, see as far as Newport on good days; and he has promised to let me up there with a spy glass whenever I feel like making the climb.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, 1st May 1926, on Lovecraft’s return home from his long exile in New York City.

“… glimpses of a charming and mysterious gap in the far-off, vapour-wreath’d purple hills. There birds sang, and the sun filter’d down thro’ delicate vernal foliage and trac’d strange faery patterns on the grass and sand of the lane.” — Lovecraft describing his habitual place of outdoor writing, used daily while visiting Dwyer in “the West Shokan hinterland”. — Lovecraft, Travels in the Provinces of America, 1929.

“And so I emerg’d from under the Roman arch and beheld the city. The morning sun was high and brilliant, and the summerish air told me at once that I had at last set foot in that gentle Old South of which I have so often dream’d. Green and white were omnipresent — springtime leaves and grass, and delectable expanses of aethereal cherry-blossoms …” — Lovecraft in Washington, to Aunt Lillian, 21st April 1925.

Grok 3 Deep Search, currently free

20 Thursday Feb 2025

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Elon’s Grok.com is currently free to Google accounts, and is offering the new Grok 3 + its DeepSearch module for an unspecified limited time. It’s very very impressive, for those who give it a well-formed question/instruction-set, and it currently tops the world’s AI rankings. Impoverished scholars may want to use it now, as later Grok 3 + Deep Search will only be accessible via a top-tier X (Twitter) subscription at $40 a month.

May not be accessible in Europe, due to their AI regulations.

HPLinks #24 – Wayne June, audiobooks, Angouleme, The Haunted Forest, cats and more…

05 Wednesday Feb 2025

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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 #23 – REH letters, Loved Dead, geometries of terror, Arkham grows, pyramids, pixels and more…

29 Wednesday Jan 2025

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HPLinks #23.

* Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf has a long and detailed review of A Means to Freedom, the two-volume edition of the letters of Lovecraft and REH. With footnotes, even.

* The latest SFFaudio Podcast #823 is “The Loved Dead” by C.M. Eddy and H.P. Lovecraft. With discussion and a full reading by Jim Moon. The story is now public domain at last, due to the recent lapse of copyright.

* A November 2024 group interview in a literary magazine, with the Italian Lovecraftians, or at least those who congregate on the Lovecraft channel of the Telegram social-media service. Freely available, in Italian.

* In Italy in November 2024, a third conference / talk-series on “Geometries of Terror: The rhetorical space in the weird literature”. I see a 66-page publication from the event, freely available in Italian as a flipbook. Several Lovecraft items are seen on the contents page. This, however, turns out to be a free extract from the forthcoming 316-page printed book of the conference proceedings (all three of them?) which is set for February 2025.

* Also in Italy, what appears to be a Kindle edition of an Italian translation of the Rodionoff / Breccia graphic novel Lovecraft. Due February 2025.

* In French with an English abstract, “Esthetique de l’horreur et influence des motifs lovecraftiens dans le cinema de Stuart Gordon et Brian Yuzna: (2024). (‘The aesthetics of horror and the influence of Lovecraftian patterns in the cinema of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna’). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available for download.

* Here in the UK the London Lovecraft Festival website has now updated, and has the February 2025 details.

* Antihero magazine reviews the new “Monumental Journey Through Lovecraftian Horror and Black Metal Majesty”. This being the new album Kadath by the band The Great Old Ones. The review finds it…

an intricate and absorbing black metal masterpiece that honors Lovecraft’s vision while pushing their sound to new heights. This is not just an album; it’s an experience — a deep dive into a world of cosmic horror and surreal beauty.

* A new Lovecraftian picture series, “The Arkham Growths”. All are under Creative Commons Attribution, should you wish to re-use them.

a series of glass-plate pictures from the late 1920s. The weird plants were grown from seeds collected by an expedition from Miskatonic University into a blighted district located “west of Arkham” in the late 1920s. The plants were found to be bioluminescent, and these ten low-light images are now the only surviving relics of the Miskatonic investigation.

* Apparently set for publication in English in July 2025, the Tanabe manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. The English cover has been released…

* Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Comics Omnibus Vol. 6 is due to be published on 6th August 2025. It should weigh in at over 1,000 pages. Reprinting the Savage Sword of Conan magazine-format comic #73-87 from the early 1980s, plus a 1977 special.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Forrest J. Ackerman’s The Frankenscience Monster, a book length collections of essays on and tributes to the early horror-movie star Boris Karloff.

* Isaac Asimov’s Invention & Discovery Cards… “all 1,477 entries from Asimov’s encyclopedia are now represented as illustrated cards” and these are presented in an interactive adjustable web display/timeline.

* New, the pixellated 1990’s Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Adventure Shadow of the Comet – “Remastered”…

Shadow of the Comet is a great game, but it’s also quite a broken one. So in this special edit I’ve addressed its most glaring issues to make it a more entertaining experience. It required thousands of edits and an entirely new custom subtitle track. […] The video [a three-hour playthrough of the fixed game, on YouTube] also includes the bonus ‘Lovecraft Museum’ at the end. The Museum features lots of cool cosmic horror relics including the Necronomicon.

* From the Public Domain Film Contest 2025, the short film “Road Trip”, which (among others) samples from “The Dunwich Horror” and the Lovecraft-fave philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

* Found, another picture of the location of ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop on Weybosset in Providence. See my contribution to The Lovecraft Annual 2023 for details of the man and his shop, well known to Lovecraft and many of the Lovecraft Circle.

* And finally, a new survey of “Pyramids on the Cover of Weird Tales“.

— End-quotes —

“It was not like any city of earth, for above purple mists rose towers, spires, and pyramids which one may only dream of in opiate lands beyond the Oxus; towers, spires and pyramids that no man could fashion, but that bloomed flower-like and delicate …” — May 1922, Lovecraft to Moe. On his first sight of the evening lights of New York City coming up, seen from across the river.

“I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — Lovecraft’s revised vision of New York City, in the short tale “He”.

He would also encounter evocative pyramid-shapes in graveyards…

After briefly greeting such of the family — mother and sister — as were present, I departed with Edgar for the ancient shades of Amesbury […] “We alighted at the ancient graveyard” [where we] “marvell’d in the sombre pines and willows, slabs and monuments. Edgar reveal’d an imagination of high quality, and upon one occasion call’d my attention to the inimitably Babylonian effect of a certain granite memorial of pyramidal outline, as glimps’d thro’ distant trees against the iridescent sunset.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 1st May 1923. On visiting the schoolboy Edgar Jacobs Davis in Merrimac.

HPLinks #22 – the key 1919 Vagrant, the uninhabitable universe, a Lovecraft rock opera, and more…

22 Wednesday Jan 2025

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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 – hard and Long, Joshi’s Recognition reviewed, a Fanhistory Project webinar series, dreaming cats, and more…

02 Thursday Jan 2025

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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 #18 – Lovecraft and relativity, Lovecraft’s political evolution in Spanish, a Canton discovery, and more…

19 Thursday Dec 2024

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HPLinks #18.

* A new Wormwoodania post, “Remembering Scott Connors”, the Clark Ashton Smith and weird fiction scholar who has recently passed away. Related is last week’s news that S.T. Joshi intends to spend 2025 writing the long-awaited Clark Ashton Smith biography, a book Connors had apparently started but was unable to bring to publication.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog surveys 2024’s accomplishments in producing valuable new data and scholarship about Lovecraft’s wife.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine for Winter 1992, with the lead article being the memoir “H.P. Lovecraft Meets Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser” by Fritz Leiber.

* The Fossils website has a new “scan of the article “The Phenomenon of H.P.L., a ten-page biography of H.P. Lovecraft by Helen V. Wesson originally published in The Fossil for July 1957.”

* Now free on YouTube, S.T. Joshi’s presentation “Lovecraft and the Physicists: Coming to Terms with Relativity and Indeterminacy”, given at the recent ‘Lovecraft et les sciences’ conference in France. Two hours, but the length is partly due to the lack of an AI insta-translator. Thus there are many pauses needed for manual translation.

* A third Lovecraft book of translated letters for Spanish readers, El Terror de la Razon. Cartas III (2024), new from publisher Aristas Martinez. The blurb reveals that the first section flows around the idea of… “‘The Terror of Reason’, his ideas about humanity and the cosmos that he disseminated in his most famous stories [and fashioned into] visionary thought that would later inspire a new generation of posthumanist philosophers”. Then the second part of the book focuses on the evolution of the man’s political ideas and ideals, in his own words. I’d hope there are copious footnotes enabling younger readers with no personal experience of the 20th century to (for instance) distinguish national socialism from soviet socialism, and to know what a ‘blackshirt’ was, etc. e.g. when he signs off “Yrs for the blackshirt march on Washington” — Lovecraft to Galpin, July 1934.

* New from Brazil in open-access, a Spanish-language journal article with the translated title ‘Gods, Monsters, Aliens: Lovecraft and the Post-Human’.

* The free bundle of Lovecraft tales, specially set up for deep textual analysis with a computer, is now available as lovecraftr version 1.2 (December 2024).

* Further to my July 2024 post on “that Canton madhouse”, Tentaclii reader Luke has written to say that he’s spotted a possible state institution at Canton (this being the Canton to be seen from a tall railway viaduct, when on the rail route from Providence to Boston). This was the ‘Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children’, later the ‘Massachusetts Hospital School’. Opened in 1907 and continuing to the present day, located on an 160-acre slope going down to meet the large local lake then called ‘Reservoir Pond’. Lovecraft had written “I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse”. Yet this real place was not a “madhouse”, but rather an institutional residential hospital with vocational training (farm work, craft workshops etc) for ages 2 to 20. This possibility is certainly worth considering. But, so far as I can see, the location and relatively low-rise appearance (compared to the vast castle-like state madhouses of the time) suggests it may not have made much of an impression on passing rail travellers, even if it could have been seen from a train window…

Note that Luke plausibly observes that the use of “poor little cousin” indicates that the Innsmouth-tainted cousin may have been sent away when a child. He was “little” but then “I had not seen him in four years”, and then a few more years pass before the rescue plan. All of which suggests a boy of perhaps 12 or 13 at the time of the rescue. A boy who would not yet have been transferred to an adult institution. Thus, to find the key state institution for “deformed” children at the real Canton is certainly intriguing.

* A new Skull Session podcast interview with Will Murray… “Will Murray and I discuss his long and varied career writing for Marvel Comics and magazines” and the influence of Lovecraft.

* It’s official, there will be a “4k restoration” version of the Re-Animator movie, complete with bubbling vats of newly-brewed extras. Likely to appear in early April 2025, and to ship with a 150-page book. The much-loved 1985 comedy movie adapted Lovecraft’s Home Brew magazine shocker-serial “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

* In Denmark in August 2025, a three-day conference on ‘Otherworldly Entertainment’…

Today, videogames continue to be one of the biggest platforms for horror, magic, gothic, and occult entertainment, even outperforming cinema and television. Despite [this deep reach into] broad audiences, [the topic] remains severely understudied.

* A paying Lovecraft-related job for a “Dark and mysterious painterly illustrator” wanted for the early stages of a commercial project. Predictably it’s a ‘rush job’ and over Christmas and New Year too. But the offer looks quite serious and there should be just enough time. Sadly the application is by a “super detailed and borderline complicated form” (‘exit stage-left: half the creatives in the room, screaming…’, etc).

* Tartarus Press on the T. Lobsang Rampa books. I recall these being prominent on home bookshelves, as a young child. Not my own shelves, as I never read the Rampa books. But it’s fascinating to learn now that the supposed mystical Tibetan lama who peeped out at me from the book-cases as a child, was… “in fact the son of a plumber from Plympton in Devon [southern England] called Cyril Hoskin”. He became a sometime fitter of corsets, sometime photographer, in the dreary greyness of post-war London. After his first 1956/57 best-seller…

with each subsequent book, Rampa casually shared his knowledge of astral travel, civilisations on Venus, UFOs, etc. One of his books was even meant to have been dictated to him by his cat.

The newspaper expose didn’t matter. He just went into full character for the rest of his life, claimed ‘reincarnation’ and much else… and credulous readers still lapped it up. Tartarus is now seeking anyone who can help with the research for a new full biography of this strange and strangely popular Englishman.

* Islands magazine recommends a visit to an “Underrated Literary Gem Filled With Rare Finds In Rhode Island”. This being the John Hay Library in Providence. Along with the huge Lovecraft collection, evidently the visitor can find there what sounds like one of the world’s finest collections of miniature toy soldiers, and for the especially ghoulish… four books bound in human skin.

* And finally, at the Grolier in New York City, “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works”. Their exhibition runs until 15th February 2024. The Necronomicon is, regrettably, represented by a rather naff plastic ‘joke’ case (supposedly holding ye dreadfull tome).

— End-quotes —

“Hope ya kin get your Black Cat file [i.e. a complete ‘reference file’ run of a past magazine]. I used to buy that reg’lar-like, and recall the swell weird stuff it had.” — Lovecraft to Morton, 23rd February 1936.

“I have been re-reading [your new story] “Marsh-Mad” — & the more I analyse it the better I like it! I shall make every effort to get this in the official organ [but, if not then it] is far too good to waste on any but a first-rate paper! Try it on the Black Cat.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, 29th August 1918.

“Once again I’ve followed a Mortonian [Morton] tip, as I did when sending “Dagon” to the Black Cat and “The Tomb” to the Black Mask and have slipped Weird Tales five of my hell-beaters” — Lovecraft to Morton, May 1923.

We know Lovecraft began to “notice” the magazine Black Cat in 1904, but I know of no scholars able to pinpoint the exact date at which he ceased to buy or read the title.

HPLinks #17 – Masonic Lovecraft, Lovecraft as trainspotter, Lovecraft and Science conference, search the Providence Journal archives, and more…

11 Wednesday Dec 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #17.

* The journal Fraternal Review, from the Southern California Research Lodge, has a new ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Freemasonry’ special edition. Contents include…

* Harry Houdini and Masonry.
* Lovecraft’s Masonic grandfather.
* Masonic influences on Lovecraft, as well as Lovecraft’s subsequent influences on the occult world.
* Real-life location of the Masonic Lodge that inspired the one taken over in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

A $5 digital edition is available. It’s interesting to think what might have happened had Lovecraft taken a different path… able to break into local journalism, then a local magazine editor (he would have been a cert for something like the Hospital Trust magazine The Netopian, with all its local history) and… thus been enticed to join a local Masonic Lodge. Possibly there’s a “what if” Mythos story in that?

* Deep Cuts looks into Her Letters To August Derleth: Muriel E. Eddy, and there are also a few firmer biographical memories found in the article “Mrs. Hinckley’s Providence”. The latter having an item of data on Lovecraft’s youth that I don’t think I’d seen before…

Dorothy Walter, a member of our Short Story Club, said Mr. Lovecraft used to call on her when she was young. About 20 years ago [circa 1946-47] a stranger came from Baltimore and asked Miss Walter and me [Mrs Hinckley] many questions. I only remember that my father knew Mr. Lovecraft and always spoke to him. When we came from Wickford to go to school, Mr. Lovecraft was usually sitting in the Providence railway station, probably because it was nice and warm there.

Presumably the father was taking the girls to the train for school each day, or meeting them off the train, and thus he said ‘hello’ to the boy Lovecraft. This seems quite plausible, though due to Lovecraft’s avid early interest in trains and railroad-men rather than for the warmth (his adult aversion to cold was later known, which probably coloured memories). Deep Cuts puts this at a time when Lovecraft was perhaps 10-12 year old. So maybe 1901-02? I also note that the article also recalls that at that time, at the back of the railway station there was a “beautiful backwater cove”. Tidal and sweet-smelling as she recalled it, but which was later filled in. This huge water feature can be seen on panorama views of the early city. It’s interesting to hear that it may have been known to Lovecraft as a boy. I seem to recall he was to be found, late in life, doing a bit of ‘urban exploring’ in the same location.

* Deep Cuts also has Three Letters to the Editor, 1909, found via the digital archive of the Providence Journal. The topic of Lovecraft’s letters was Robert E. Lee and the South in the Civil War. Also letters from the young Lovecraft on the stage play The Clansman, something which was also debated among amateur journalists some years later — and as such his opinions on it are already well known.

* I see the (new?) Providence Journal Archives search is free, but then any items found are paywalled via individual pricing or a monthly subscription. I’m uncertain if they can take payments from outside the U.S., since payment is via credit card only. $29.95 gets you a one-month ‘unlimited downloads’ pass. Sadly passes cannot be gifted to researchers, since only the cardholder is allowed to use them.

The search-box supports phrases in quote marks e.g. “Ladd Observatory”. As with many old newspapers, however, the OCR of tiny print leaves much to be desired and there are many false-positives and oversights. For instance a search for “Winslow Upton” of the Ladd, will not find some articles that have his name and can be found with “Ladd Observatory”. Still, there are fascinating free snippets available, and even these may give mythos writers a historical hook on which to hang a story…

Found in a few minutes: Winslow Upton of the Ladd Observatory discussed “life on other worlds” in public in 1907. Whipple graves were opened ‘en masse’, 1910. Lovecraft’s beloved River Seekonk was being totally poisoned by sewage outflows, 1923.

* Newly announced, the dates for the Robert E. Howard Days in June 2025.

* The German Lovecraftians have released dates for their annual get-together, 17th to 20th July 2025. In scholarly activity, note that a Literature Team Leader is now required to take forward their ongoing work… “on a volume of essays from German-speaking countries and a translation project for Lovecraft’s letters and essays”.

* In France, a two-day conference at the University of Poitiers on ‘Lovecraft and the Sciences’. 5th-6th December 2024, so sadly it’s been and gone. But here’s the programme in PDF, and I guess there may be recordings on YouTube and/or a book in due course.

* Skulls in the Stars reviews The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch. Being a “quality edition” of 22 early Bloch stories, published by Valincourt. Has plot spoilers.

* New and free at FantasyBabble (spin-off from HorrorBabble), “A Stroll through the Dreamlands: 13 stories by H.P. Lovecraft”. The reading runs 2 hours 47 minutes, and it has all the Dreamlands stories in audio (except the Randolph Carter tales).

* In early 2025 France’s prestigious comics mega-fest Angouleme will feature a Masterclass with Gou Tanabe, the acclaimed manga adapter of Lovecraft. The event is one of several that will run alongside his large one-man exhibition ‘Gou Tanabe x H.P. Lovecraft’…

The great architect of a mythology which has infused all the world’s popular culture, H.P. Lovecraft has now built a bridge between 20th century New England and 21st century Japan, transcending borders and time, enabling pulp and manga to meet and join hands. This show is an opportunity to verify, once again, how great stories are universal.

* News of another Lovecraft all-night lakeside camp-out near Mexico City. Noctambulante 2025 is a Lovecraft-themed ‘camping and cinema’ event, and this time the organisers also promise that… “Cthulhu will emerge from the depths of Lake Xochimiclo”. Campers are expected to dress in a Lovecraftian manner. Starting on the evening of 29th March 2025, and booking now.

* The well-loved vintage videogame The Thing: Remastered, apparently forthcoming in a new release with… “updated character models, textures, and animations, with the implementation of advanced 3D rendering for updated lighting and atmospheric effects.”

* Also being mooted for a polish, a 40th anniversary Re-Animator edition of the celebrated 1985 comedy-adaptation movie of Lovecraft’s Home Brew shocker “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

* Visualizing Camelot was a 350-item university gallery exhibition surveying the uses of King Arthur in popular culture. The show was developed by subject-expert curators who were able to draw on specialist American and British collections of such material. It’s been and gone but a substantial website remains online.

* And finally, the new online H.P. Lovecraft Translator…

— End-quote —

“I was arrested mainly by the great temple of the Scottish Rite Masons, whose striking architecture lifts it out of the commonplace and mundane into the realm of the cosmick and mystical. Gazing upon it, I could well believe all the vague legends connected with the Masonick order; for here surely dwelt arcana whose sources are not of this earth. I saw it first at night, when only the twin cryptick braziers beside the great bronze door lit up the grim guardian sphinxes and the huge windowless facade. Mystery dwelt there — and I departed full of vague thoughts hinging upon the obscurest of dream-memories.” — Lovecraft on his visit to Washington in 1928.

“The hall retains its pristine impressiveness; its lofty rooms forming the present home of Ionick Lodge, the Masonick branch founded by my grandfather, and of which he was the first Grand Master. It did me good to see his picture there, enshrin’d in proper state.” — Lovecraft visits his grandfather’s Masonic Lodge in 1926.