HPLinks #61.
* New on eBay, two postcards from Lovecraft and one from his friend Everett McNeil (then very elderly, on his way to Tacoma and thus weeks from death), all sent to Talman.
i) The card on the left is unpublished, judging by the internal dating: Talman appears to be honeymooning in New York City, “Poor old Mac is going west Oct 20”, and Lovecraft gives Talman his Barnes St. phone number (“DExter 9617”) in anticipation of a visit from the newlyweds.
ii) Also unpublished. Everett McNeil offers the useful information “I have left behind me most of my books”, and we also get the exact Tacoma address he had moved to. No mention of where all his Lovecraft letters (still missing, today) were, though. It sounds to me like he was keeping the rent paid on his New York flat for a few months, just in case of a return, and that the Lovecraft letters were likely there along with the books. But then the flat would have been cleared after his sudden death. Presumably any New York bookdealer and/or family members would have had no idea of the $$$s they were throwing away, as they discarded what would now be perhaps a million dollars worth of letters. Note that this flat was not the Hell’s Kitchen flat where the Kalems met, but a new one he had for a short time due to some unexpected book royalties… “in Astoria at the foot of Ditmars Blvd.”
iii) The 1929 Lovecraft card is partly unpublished. Letters to Wilfred B. Talman only has it (p. 119) as a brief excerpt, as previously printed in The Normal Lovecraft.
* Newly listed on the HPLHS Store, Ken Faig Jr’s new scholarly essay collection More Lovecraftian People and Places (2025).
* We’re still waiting for the long-awaited Lovecraft in Florida (the book), but for now there’s a completed Lovecraft in Florida (the screen documentary)… “Mike T. Lyddon’s new short documentary film Lovecraft in Florida is now in the mix for the 2025 – 2026 film festival season.” This appears to be unrelated to its namesake book, except via the topic.
* A Reddit review of the CD of The Curious Sea Shanties of Innsmouth.
* Freely available online, the “Blood and Insight: Monstrosity in Bloodborne” (2021). Originally in a small journal from the Gothic Studies crowd that appears to now be defunct, with its website dead — Aetemum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. The article has this week popped up again on HCommons.org. The author makes special reference to Lovecraft in videogames.
* Everything Theatre has a theatre review of a recent staging of H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” at the Old Red Lion Theatre, London. The staging had a 1920s setting, and it sounds like the show was a fine success.
* For Halloween DMR Books blog outlines “The Long Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe”.
* Decadent Serpent has a long footnoted essay on “Horror To Some Purpose: H.P. Lovecraft and Colin Wilson”. Freely available online.
* Blavatsky News has a Halloween post on “Blavatsky & H.P. Lovecraft”. Who knew that… “Blavatsky herself penned some intriguing occult tales, published in Theosophical magazines, gathered in [the collection] Nightmare Tales”. Actually, now… there’s an interesting starting hook for an alt-history fiction: the head of the Theosophist Soc. hires Lovecraft as Blavatsky’s ghost-writer circa 1931 (literally her ghost-writer, as she died in 1891), at a price he can’t resist. Then, as he takes a long wished-for trip to Britain on the handsome proceeds, her spirit actually starts to contact him from the great beyond.
* A new “Lovecraft-inspired” one-off 33-page comic-book of the First World War in Europe, “Whispers Beyond the Trench”. Is that an alt-history Lovecraft on the cover, joined up and shipped to France? Only Kickstarter backers get to find out, it seems. Since that’s the only way to get the comic.
* The Weird Tales brand is set to offer a new comics anthology via Kickstarter. Sadly it’s not a set of linked true-life tales and poignant biographical vignettes drawn from the magazine’s rich publishing history. But rather a collection of new horror strips containing, among others, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Skulls in the Stars” novella, plus two Mythos tales by modern writers.
* The Online Review of Rhode Island History this week has a new page of Providence City Hall Photographs, 1885 to 1916. Photos from the City Hall, not of the City Hall. One of these reveals something I’d never noticed… “In the upper window of the Market House is the Masonic symbol.” Removed, after it became the Board of Trade house. Also interesting to know is that the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Providence served as a substantial membership library, having… “a 4,000-book library with 70 daily and weekly newspapers”. One wonders if similar libraries were part of the attraction of YMCAs, for Lovecraft on his travels?
* Por Por boggles at some of the (other) figures in Penthouse magazine for October 1978… “This October issue of Penthouse had a lengthy article, ‘Science Fiction Fever,’ by journalist Tom Nolan. The article covers the science fiction boom then sweeping the popular culture.” The post reminds today’s readers of the power of print SF publishing in those days, with Penthouse revealing that Starlog magazine was circulating 500,000 copies per issue, and Bantam Books had sold 17 million Ray Bradbury paperbacks.
* The Shadowed Circle has published a “50th Anniversary Edition” of Gangland’s Doom (1974), one of the first non-fiction books on the long-running pulp magazine character The Shadow.
* In Chicago, the large art exhibition Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination, on now at The Art Institute of Chicago.
* And finally… thinking of fleeing the UK, before the tragic Autumn Budget announcements? I see the increasingly popular expat destination of Dubai now has a special museum and cafe to make fantasy fans feel welcome, Legendarium Fantastic Museum Dubai. The slick website alone is impressive, and gives a crisp and colourful view of the themed exhibit rooms.
— End-quotes —
“That metropolis [New York City in 1922, when Lovecraft first saw it and was not yet disenchanted] wouldn’t be much without honest old Mac! And because it is [now] a vision-metropolis; “out of space, out of time”, and without linkage to the mundane, the material, and the perishable; it indeed never need be without him. Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces, and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod [as a] phantom among phantoms…” — Lovecraft fondly recalling his passed-way friend Everett McNeil.
In the notorious Hell’s Kitchen slum, McNeil’s… “little flat [is] an oasis of neatness and wholesomeness with its quaint, homely pictures, rows of simple books, and curious mechanical devices which his ingenuity concocted to aid his work — lap boards, files, etc., etc. [Due to poverty, for many years] He lived on meagre rations of canned soup and crackers,” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 114.
“I recall the first time I saw him — at Dench’s, by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [by the old then-rural Dutch ‘marsh country’ of New York City]. He used to like to go there […] And I recall how he shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination […] and through it all the little white-haired guide plodding along with his simple, idyllic dreams of sunny Wisconsin farm-worlds, and green, beckoning, boy-adventure worlds…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 94. McNeil was a farm-boy from Dunkirk Township, Wisconsin. He upped and walked to New York to seek his fortune, aged 32. He achieved success as a professional writer there from 1906 onwards, got into the movies and then became one of the best-known writers of historical-adventure books for boys. Despite this his publisher Dutton trapped him into a series of what Lovecraft called “vile starvation contracts”.
“And I remember when good old Mac display’d Hell’s Kitchen to Little Belknap and me — a first glimpse for both of us. Morbid nightmare aisles of odorous Abaddon-labyrinths and Phlegethontic shores — accursed hashish-dreams of endless brick walls budging and bursting with viscous abominations and staring insanely with bleared, geometrical patterns of windows — confused rivers of elemental, simian life with half-Nordic faces twisted and grotesque in the evil flare of bonfires set to signal the nameless gods of dark stars — sinister pigeon-breeders on the flat roofs of unclean teocallis, sending out birds of space with blasphemous messages for the black, elder gods of the cosmic void — death and menace behind furtive doors […] fumes of hellish brews concocted in obscene crypts…” — Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, page 122.
My detailed biography of McNeil is titled Good Old Mac.
