HPLinks #10.

     “… it would be damned improbable if there were any real phenomena existing unknown in space and happening to correspond to these error-born myths” [which assume] “such things as gods, immortality, etc.” — Lovecraft on ‘space gods’, to Robert E. Howard on 16th August 1932.

* The Lovecraft Historical Society have another Dark Adventure Radio Theatre recording due, currently available for pre-order. It’s an adaptation of Lovecraft’s wartime submarine-supernatural “The Temple” (1920). Due to surface from the depths on 24th November 2024.

* A new long post from JonBlackWrites on “Yellow Signs: The Decadent Movement and its Influence on Weird Fiction”…

“If one considers the poetry of two of the most celebrated practitioners from each movement, Charles Baudelaire and H.P. Lovecraft, there are lines of their poetry which, ripped out of context, would be almost impossible to identify as the work of one creator or the other.”

* Jordan M. Poss has “Further notes on aliens and the gothic and makes a short but convincing case that UFO lore and the literary gothic have a lot of strands in common. One can see at a glance how much of Lovecraft’s mythos corresponds in much the same way. I don’t recall of any book or article showing a heavy overlap between the post-1950s UFOs-are-aliens crowd and Lovecraft, but perhaps it’s an area worthy of a little historical study. I guess the ‘ancient astronauts’ angle would come closest to overlap (ably dealt with in the book: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, 2005). And, ah yes… there was also that definite early influence of Lovecraft on Terence McKenna, who later became a big name among the mystical-trippy UFO crowd.

* Talking of “ancient astronauts”, Deep Cuts this week takes a deep-dive…

“into the history of one of the most contentious affairs in pulp science fiction in the 1940s, the Shaver Mystery, and its interactions with H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos”.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis has been blogging extensively over the summer, and now on into the autumn with a long new post on Lovecraft’s daughter by marriage. Especially note the long research-heavy posts “Dear Mrs. Greene” Part I and Part II, on Galpin’s letters to Sonia.

* A 2023 Philology degree dissertation “Images of the Living Dead in Lovecraft’s Oeuvre in the Light of the Aesthetic of Ugliness”. Just a firm abstract, in English. One wonders if the author was able to also draw on Lovecraft’s various remarks about his own ugliness and sense of facial disfigurement. But there’s no PDF available.

* Corbeyran’s Classic Fantastic book of comics adaptations of fantasy classics, now 89% funded on French crowdfunding platform Ulule.

* The TransAtlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) now has the Work For Hire book for free download, being a book of essays by Dave Langford… “written for sf, fantasy and horror reference works published long ago from 1996 to 2007. These do not include the Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, both freely available online.” Authors discussed include Rudyard Kipling, Brian Stableford and Colin Wilson, among many others. The Fan Fund helps send British science fiction fans to conventions in the USA, and will welcome a donation if you enjoy the book.

* Last week John Coulthart surveyed the covers for “Lovecraft at Ballantine” in the mid 1970s. The covers are shown and there’s an eyebrow-raising amount of dragons and similar.

It then occurred to me that in 1976 dragons were ‘hot’ (remember Anne McCaffrey and all that best-selling dragon-riders stuff?). Perhaps that’s why a cynical publisher wanted to suggest that Lovecraft wrote about dragons and dragon-like sea-serpents? But if so, Ballantine also made some unfortunate choices in the cheap-looking artwork and questionable graphic-design for the framing. Compare these editions with the vastly better work on the Panther paperback covers, appearing around the same time here in the UK.

* Via Chaosium, watch the panels from this year’s Miskatonic Repository Con, online. Including one on writing Mythos scenarios, and another on how to intertwingle real-world history into your Mythos setting.

* Reviews from R’lyeh has a long new review of the 1920s Gumshoe-based game The Terror Beneath: An Investigative Roleplaying Game of Weird Folk Horror…

There are elements of folk horror here, but also eldritch horror, such that Machen’s work is seen as a precursor to and influence upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The latter is important in The Terror Beneath in several ways. [The setting is not rural Wales, but rather among the] communities of London’s docks and veterans of the Great War [i.e. the First World War]”.

Nice to see a British working-class 1920s setting. The game is currently pre-ordering and is due for publication on 24th October 2024.

* In the Portland Press Herald local newspaper (accessible from the UK, no ‘EU cookies’ nonsense), a new exhibition review titled “Discover a quirky Vermont college that you’ll wish had really existed”. The show offered relics from “St. Amelia’s College of Speculative Timbre”, where among other things…

“Professor Samuel Drexler built odd musical contraptions taken from literary works, such as ‘the Detestable Electrical Machine’ H.P. Lovecraft wrote about”

The “electrical machine” (un-capitalised) is found in Lovecraft’s tale “From Beyond” (1920).

* At DeviantArt, a set of eight finely painted section-illustrations for The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Also, by the same artist, Zoogs.

* Also at DeviantArt, a new Halloween photo-set, as-if from 1970s experiments in Providence which sought to enter the Dreamlands of HPL via ‘cosmic radios’.

* And finally, the National Library of Ireland reports “Hidden Bram Stoker Story Unearthed in Irish Archives”. An amateur researcher has found the lost “Gibbet Hill”…

“in an 1890 Christmas supplement of the Daily Express Dublin Edition. The story was unknown even to Stoker biographers and literary scholars for over 130 years.”

The tale’s setting, Gibbet Hill. A gibbet being where criminals were hanged and then left for display.

Which just shows that there may even still be an unknown Lovecraft item lurking somewhere, perhaps in some amateur journal or old newspaper.

— End-quote —

“Around the All-Hallows period I unearthed a highly picturesque district on the city’s very rim — Fruit Hill, from one point of which I caught a view of almost incredible loveliness which included a twilight-clad descent of walled meadows (with a wood and glimpses of a sunset-litten river at the bottom), dim violet hills against an orange-gold west, a steepled village in a northward valley, and over the rocky eastward ridge a great round Hunter’s Moon preparing to flood the scene with spectral light.” — H.P. Lovecraft, to Richard Ely Morse, 14th November 1933.

Welcome to HPLinks #6.

* A short Q&A interview with the Innsmouth Literary Festival organisers. The event happens here in the UK on 28th September 2024, and will bring together Mythos writers, publishers, editors and collectors of weird fiction.

* Leftist Spanish newspaper El Pais this week has a new feature article on “Dias felices e impios en el club de lectura Lovecraft” (‘Happy, Ungodly Days at the Lovecraft Book Club’) ($ paywall, in Spanish). The Club being a group of fans who apparently strike the journalist as unusually cheerful for Lovecraftians.

* According to Amazon UK, Francois Baranger’s oversized L’Ombre sur Innsmouth illustre releases in French in mid October 2024, not 2025 as was mooted earlier in the year.

The French Druillet – Lovecraft artbook and the English edition of Tanabe’s Cthulhu manga are expected about the same time.

* A recent long podcast on “Modern Religion and H.P. Lovecraft”, with Christopher Ruocchio and Austin Freeman. Freeman is the editor of the excellent recent book on Lovecraft and aspects of theology and the Bible.

* From Brazil in open-access, the new article “Lovecraft e a logica dos transitos culturais” (‘Lovecraft and the logic of cultural transits’). Examines his transits into and consequent… “massive penetration [into the culture, and how this disturbs] “classic dichotomies and dominant philosophical and aesthetic perspectives”.

* A new bibliography of Lovecraft in Hebrew translation, via S.T. Joshi. Who, in the same post, reveals he has finished his massive survey history of atheism.

* From Indonesia in English, an open-access journal article on Lovecraftian Elements in the Writing of Three Icons of the Dongbei Renaissance…

Literary works based on Dongbei (China’s Northeast) or composed by Dongbei-born writers have been playing a preponderant role in modern Chinese literature” […] “the three leading neo-Dongbei writers portray preternatural creatures, and their narratives convey fear of the unknown and nameless approximations of form” and thus their work “bears resemblance to the Cthulhu Mythos”.

* Partial online proceedings of the recent Mythcon 53 (August 2024), with videos and transcripts, plus some PDF papers. About 75% Tolkien, but with other papers. Such as: “Clifford Simak’s Big Front Yard”; “Fantasist of Middle America: L. Frank Baum and his Works”; “Middle West and the Pastoral Ideal in the American Artistic Landscape”; “The Tragic Life and Misconstrued Work of Jules Verne”; and “Wisdom and Life Lessons in the Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and David R. Slayton”. Freely available online, though they still await some PDFs.

* Talking of Simak, it’s good to learn that the long-awaited final two volumes of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak were released in 2023. Though (of the set) these two still appear to lack Kindle editions on Amazon UK. 14 volumes in total. #13 was Buckets of Diamonds (tales of strange events in otherwise ordinary American towns) and the final #14 was Epilog (Simak’s robot stories).

* A pleasing new quick-sketch of Klarkash Ton by MrZarono, at DeviantArt.

* A John Carter of Mars audio series, now fully funded on Kickstarter. The $84k+ raised will enable… “the first dramatic audio adaptation”, multi-cast and with lush soundscapes. Though note it’s an ‘adaptation’, rather than an ‘unabridged reading’ + cast and FX.

* A slick new directory of 920 illustrators understood by Midjourney, the popular paid-for online AI image-generator. Illustrated, and with a search-box, so you can quickly look for the names of long-ago pulp artists.

* Compare the above with Arcanorium at DeviantArt, a huge and magnificent selection of old-school painted fantasy art. No AI involved.

“Wizard’s Revenge” by Don Maitz.

* And finally, rather less prettily, my cleaning of Lovecraft’s map of “Foxfield”. This being his unused setting for a weird tale. Found on the back of one of the letters whose paper was used to write “The Dreams in the Witch House” in early 1932. The letter he used for this map is dated 25th October 1930, therefore this map must have been drawn between then and early 1932. Here I’ve carefully removed the typed letter in Photoshop, to leave you with only the pencil map…

His “1932 | 1692” note suggests the likely years that could have been involved with a Foxfield tale: an investigation in 1932 of events in that place in 1692 — the year in which the Salem Witch Trials began. Thus one might think of it as a fold-out visual addition to his Commonplace Book of story-ideas. (With thanks to ‘Eastman’ for the Web link to the Brown repository page containing the scan). (Update: Cthulhu & Co. has a transcription online).

HPLinks #5.

* Applications for The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship in H.P. Lovecraft, at Brown University in Providence, are due by 17th January 2025.

* I note that Brown University has a list of theses and dissertations that were done at Brown and relate to Brown and the parts of Providence adjacent to the university campus. Of possible interest to Lovecraft researchers are: Fox Point: the disintegration of a neighborhood and the related Community building: The Azorean, Cape Verdean, and Continental Portuguese in Fox Point, 1900-1940; Arsenic contamination in Providence’s East Side (relevant to “Colour”?); The problem of academic reputation at Brown University in the 1930’s which might perhaps marginally illuminate Lovecraft’s presence on the edge of the campus at that time; and Choosing Genes: the eugenics of Herbert Eugene Walter [1867-1945]. The latter was a full Biology professor at Brown from 1923, a leading heredity expert, and he later also taught at the Marine Biological Institute of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. As such he sounds like a rather interesting figure to include as a character, or to at least reference, in a 1930s New England Mythos adventure.

* H.P. Lovecraft Film Fest Kickstarter, live and… already funded in a flash! The event is now set for 3rd-6th October, and note that the online “Streaming Program is 18th-22nd October” 2024.

* Nighttide Mag has a report on Dreams of Light and Shadow: TL Wiswell’s Shadow Puppet performances… “At this year’s NecronomiCon, Tonnvane ‘TL’ Wiswell performed shadow play adaptations of two of H.P. Lovecraft’s weirder short stories.”

* The Rise of Cthulhu blog has the post “NecronomiCon Providence 2024 part 1” which has notes on the panels he attended. Part two remembers the spectacular Lovecraftian WaterFire parade of 2013 in Providence.

* In France, Actualitte takes a closer peep at the handsome new Druillet et Lovecraft artbook.

* An Italian Lovecraftian points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for publication in the Californian for summer 1935).

* A call to contribute to The Pulpster #34, which for 2025 will have the theme of ‘Masters of Blood and Thunder’. The theme centering being the writers Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars, Tarzan etc), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood), and Edgar Wallace (Sanders of the River, crime novels, original King Kong movie script). The editors also seek articles on your favourite villain from the pulps.

* The new paper “The Law is Weirder than AI” (2024)… “Primarily through the lens of author H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales, I argue that the law is very weird [and this then leads me] to an assessment of the weird claims surrounding ‘artificial intelligence’.” Freely available online.

* From the Ukraine, a new short discussion paper on “The horrors of Lovecraft: disgust and repulsion”. In English and freely available online.

* Egregoric Times has a blog post that briefly considers “H.P. Lovecraft, Horror Writing and ‘Transliminality’. The author wonders if there may be neurological basis for openness to what appears on the surface to be “paranormal or extrasensory experiences”, especially in certain conducive places and atmospheres. I recall I read a weak one-page guest-article on a very similar topic, in New Scientist magazine, a few weeks ago.

* DMR reviews The Best of Jules De Grandin by Seabury Quinn, one of the most popular Weird Tales writers… “I kept thinking, ‘How on earth was this guy more popular than Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft?'”.

* Coming in October from Hippocampus, the book Where the Silent Ones Watch, a chunky anthology in which… “twenty-seven authors and poets visit William Hope Hodgson’s worlds and concepts, to dig deep into his mythologies and delve into fresh mysteries in unexpected times, locations, and interpretations.”

* The following paperback covers are completely new to me. I had thought (though not as a collector) that I was broadly familiar by now with the 1970s paperbacks of the British publisher Panther. But who knew they put out two volumes of Machen? Not me. Vol. 2 being dated 1975. Neither appeared later in the used bookshops I frequented, in all the time I was assiduously browsing and purchasing. Ah, for the long-lost days of the 50-pence second-hand paperback, or ‘three for £1’…

* Also new to me, I see The Meeplesmith has a nice line in Lovecraftian miniatures for tabletop gaming. Lots of them, relatively affordable and nothing ‘sold out’ as yet. There’s a tiny figure of Lovecraft himself. But there’s no stylised Lovecraft Circle (imagine: a bespectacled young Barlow, the old anarchist Morton, the New York dandy Belknap Long, straight-man Leeds leading his freak-show friends, etc) as yet, and no Erich Zann-like figure that I could see. Which seems a missed opportunity.

* A real-life “Sahara Expedition – In Search of the Unknown 2024”, happening 23rd – 27th Oct 2024 in Tunisia. A 1930s Lovecraftian LARP adventure in a real desert.

* And finally, the sometime-Lovecraftian creative Alan Moore on language…

Q: Could you disclose to our readers some of your favourite and most interesting occult artifacts?

A: My most powerful, without a doubt, is the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged. That is the best book anyone will ever read. To understand language is to understand what is hidden, which is to say, the occult.

Moore also has his own book coming soon, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

Welcome to HPLinks #3.

* New as a limited-edition hardcover book from Hippocampus, Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations): A Variorum Edition…

“this final collection includes all known revisions and collaborations undertaken by Lovecraft on behalf of his friends and clients. As with previous volumes in this series, the texts preserved herein scrupulously follow archival manuscripts, typescripts, or original publications, and constitute the definitive edition of these stories. For the first time, students and scholars of Lovecraft can see at a glance all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story—manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications. The result is an illuminating record of the textual history of the tales, in an edition that supersedes all those that preceded it.”

The Eddy collaboration tales, which I seem to recall are now out-of-copyright, are able to be included.

* The latest Lovecraft Annual scholarly journal also appears to be shipping from Hippocampus Press. Or at least, Amazon UK says it can whizz me a next-day copy if needed, and Joshi reports that he has had his editor’s copies in the mail.

I see that the 2024 contents list includes an essay by Joshi on “The Lovecraft Letters Project”, as well as an advance review of the forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

Note: If you can’t get to the Hippocampus Press website, change your DNS provider in your Web browser. Cloudflare in particular doesn’t seem to be able to access the site.

* A new book-chapter by philosopher Graham Harman “The Weird and the Absurd” ($ paywall, but with a free abstract). He contrasts the weird (H.P. Lovecraft) with the absurd (Dali), with a view to characterising the contours of knowledge itself.

* EuroSiberia has a new long essay on “Lovecraft and Multipolarity”.

* From Switzerland, a long article in French on “Le naturaliste danois qui avait ete ressuscite par Lovecraft” (‘The Danish naturalist who was resurrected by Lovecraft’). Which means Olaus Wormius (1588-1654), ‘Old Worm’.

* From the Ukraine’s Forum for Linguistic Studies, a new multi-author paper on “Proper Names as Presupposition Triggers in the Horror Story — Semantic and Functional Aspects”. Being a linguistic study of the names in Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear”. Freely available online, in English.

* The new short book, Ripples from Carcosa: H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Landscapes, and True Detective (July 2024) is now available as a 142-page paperback. The Amazon blurb is not especially illuminating. However, the back-cover blurb is much clearer and more enticing. This suggests a close and fan-friendly scholarly study of the sources for the first season of the U.S. True Detective TV series (2014, eight episodes). Of which… “first and foremost, there is H.P. Lovecraft…”. No reviews that I can find as yet, though I see that in 2023 S.T. Joshi perused an advance copy. He described it as… “a searching examination of the first season of True Detective and the influence of Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Chambers upon it.” (Note: buyers should not confuse it with the Chaosium RPG book of the same name).

* I don’t normally note the ongoing wealth of Lovecraftian anthologies, but since I enjoy Sherlock Holmes tales I’ll make an exception for the new Sherlock & Friends: Eldritch Investigations (June 2024). The book arises from a successful $3,000 crowd-funder, and offers “nine adventures” across some 80,000 words. Publisher Tule Fog Press has the contents list, and this also notes the protagonist(s) in each story, e.g. “The Adventure of the Cats of Ulthar” is a tale of “Miss Lois Cayley, a spirited young bicycling adventuress”. No reviews as yet, but one of the editors usefully added on his blog that the aim was for a collection of… “tales [which] ‘channel the spirits’ of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who graced the dime novels and pulp magazines”. Sounds fun. A free-sample and a £5 Kindle ebook makes it less of a gamble, should you be tempted.

* Also of note, but also an unknown quantity, the anthology Bound in Blood: Stories of Cursed Books, Damned Libraries and Unearthly Authors (Sept 2024).

* Also coming in September 2024, a Kindle ebook in Italian, Atlante delle terre del sogno di Lovecraft (‘Atlas of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands’). The blurb has it as… “compiled by Carlo Baja Guarienti, aided by the pencil of Alberto Ponticelli, with an afterword by S.T. Joshi and the map drawn by Francesca Baerald.” It’s to be an ebook equivalent to 155 pages, according to Amazon. Sounds to me like a gazetteer of places, with a single map, rather than an atlas with lots of map-plates.

* Hamburg, Germany, again. The city seems to have a thing for Lovecraft theatre. Indeed, they now actually have a Lovecraft theatre. In Hamburg… “the new Miskatonic Theater opens on September 6th with the play “The Call of Cthulhu” based on the tale by H.P. Lovecraft.”

The new theatre building, the only dedicated horror theatre in the world, here looking very suitable as a home for a ‘Miskatonic Theater’.

Sadly, after a great deal of hard work to open this new venue, the nearly fitted-out theatre was then gutted by burglars. Who appear to have stolen everything not nailed down. Apparently the police had no cameras in the area, since “unknown persons” is the only description of the crime that I can find. Anyway… no-one has recovered the stolen property and thus the Theatre now has a crowd-funder campaign to replace what was stolen. This campaign is currently only half-way to raising 15,000 euros and still needs support.

* A new movie from the acclaimed director Edgar Pera, billed as Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), imagines that letters flowed between the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft. But via the dreamlands, and… “with a dreamer’s logic [in which] Pessoa’s multiple personalities meet the nightmare creations of Lovecraft”. The film is currently appearing on the German film-festival circuit, with a mid September date in Oldenburg. I’ll try to link reviews in next week’s HPLinks #4.

* The Ephemeral New York blog investigates a topographic aspect of Lovecraft in New York City, and finds a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse, in… “the secret Village behind brick walls, embowering trees, iron fences, and horsewalk doorways”. With photographs.

* A new 23-minute making-of video on YouTube, “Making a Lovecraft-inspired light-up water-well diorama”, as in the well and well-sweep from “The Colour Out of Space”.

* New to me, from France, the free open-access academic journal Imaginaires (2019—). Special issues since 2019 have included: ‘Gothic, Teen, and Pop Culture’ and ‘Ireland: Spectres and Chimeras’.

* At VoegelinView, “The Theology of Fantasy”, reviewing the book Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination (2023).

* And finally, one of the more pleasing bits of Yog-Sothery I cooked up with the AI image-generator Stable Diffusion, and which was then tickled with Photoshop. Feel free to colorise, use as a book cover or album cover, etc. I place this image under Creative Commons Attribution.