Heating and freezing futures

14 Saturday Sep 2024

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context

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An Italian Lovecraftian this week points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with their tale “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for the Californian Summer 1935 issue). The Earth is slipping imperceptibly closer to the Sun, in their fictional future-scenario, and heating up accordingly.

The Italian author observes that… “When this story was written, fears of this kind were certainly much less present in society”. Sort-of, I’d add. While it’s true that the “fears” were not then both widespread and hysterical, there was concern that verged on alarmist. A quick scoot around the Web shows such worries were then quite prominent in the press, and such reports presumably prompted the tale. A few examples (sans CO2) will suffice…

L.A. Times summary of the year

An agency wire-report from Switzerland, reported as far afield as Australia.

British Met Office reportedly anticipating half of England being wiped off the map by flooding.

Thus, when I say they did “alarmist” fiction first, I mean they did fiction that was published in a timely manner and amplified the popular alarmist press coverage.

One can now see that this was the 1920s/30s flipside of a widespread Victorian / Edwardian false consensus of a gradual and unavoidable cooling. Here is H.G. Wells on the topic in 1931, remembering the way that this belief hobbled the optimism of the late Victorians and early Edwardians, and indeed the world…

… the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world — and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling [book] Universe Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years. Given as much as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour of regret that one was born so soon.

This is from his 1931 preface to a new edition of his famous book The Time Machine (1895). Wells refers to the idea that the Sun only had a limited store of material to burn, and must inevitably cool as it would use this material up before another million years had gone by — and with its depletion the Earth was also forever cooling and would relatively soon become inhospitable to life. Here is the younger Wells of 1894 in a leading London paper, noting the consensus of his day…

On the supposition, accepted by all scientific men, that the earth is undergoing a steady process of cooling …” (“Another Basis for Life”, Saturday Review, 22nd December 1894).

Just as many Tentaclii readers will have lived in times which saw scientists flip (in our case between the 1970s panic about a new Ice Age, and the current greenhouse warming), it appears Lovecraft and his generation lived through a similar flip.

27-minute Horrorbabble reading of “Till A’ the Seas” audiobook, free on YouTube.

HPLinks #4 – table-trembling translations, Polish letters, Martians in 1924, ‘Little Bobby’, Tom Sutton, Lovecraftian tabletop gaming, and more

09 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by in Films & trailers, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #4.

* French publisher Gallimard is to publish a huge table-trembling single-volume slab of Lovecraft’s tales in French. Recits (‘Tales’) is due shortly before Halloween 2024, and has 29 new translations in 1,408-pages. I’m told the La Pleiade imprint being used is highly prestigious in France.

* A new Polish edition of Lovecraft’s selected letters, Lovecraft Listy Wybrane 1906-1927 (‘Lovecraft: Selected Letters 1906-1927’). Due for publication in a 544-page hardback by Vesper, on 13th September 2024. The book’s cover doesn’t inspire, but I dug up the publisher’s page and this reassured me. At the end of the blurb found there, one reads that…

The letters were selected and translated by Mateusz Kopacz. He is a Lovecraft expert and translator of, among others, the major Lovecraft biography by S.T. Joshi.

* Edgar Pera’s new feature-length film Telepathic Letters (2024, 69 mins), now on the film festival circuit. It’s getting a lot of flak from the AI-haters, it seems, as he used Stable Diffusion to make the movie.

   i) The Trailer.

   ii) An ICS review… “avatars of Pessoa and Lovecraft speak to one another … Pera introduces two thematic threads that both Pessoa and Lovecraft believed to be the foundation of humanity – fear and madness – and explores how they both influence artistic expression”.

   iii) A Cineuropa review of Telepathic Letters… “The film seamlessly shifts between documentary and portmanteau horror, and its multifaceted formalism could also be seen as a video-art piece – a collage of bizarre, unsettling and otherworldly imagery”.

   iv) The Hollywood Reporter had an interview with Edgar Pera about the new film, in English. ($ possible paywall, but I had the whole interview).

… while preparing The Nothingness Club, about Pessoa’s heteronyms, I found many more invisible links between them. Now I have tons of their books, [where I have] written in the margins “Link Lovecraft” or “Link Pessoa.” And since we were already preparing then The Spiral of Fear, a Lovecraft feature, I thought that making a film about them might be a good way to make Pessoa and Lovecraft readers meet.” (Pera)

   v) A long interview on Telepathic Letters in the open-access journal Rotura, with choice screenshots. In Portuguese.

   vi) The Portuguese newspaper Espresso has what might be a new profile-interview with Pera, but it’s behind a $ paywall.

* Postscripts to Darkness has a new long article on “”The dread contemplation of infinity”: Some Thoughts on George M. Gould and Cosmic Horror Before Lovecraft”. Continued in the follow-on long post “Lovecraft, Lucretius, and Leonard’s Locomotive-God: Further Thoughts on Cosmic Horror”. The latter essay…

further explores Lovecraft’s developing conception of cosmic horror by focusing on another of Lovecraft’s under-recognized contemporary influences; namely, the American professor, poet, memoirist, and translator, William Ellery Leonard.

* Centauri Dreams tunes in to “The ‘Freakish Radio Writings’ of 1924”. In August 1924 the earth seemed to be receiving radio messages from a fast-approaching Mars, at least according to credulous press reports. It was actually bona-fide research that…

was serious SETI for its day. A dirigible was launched from the U.S. Naval Observatory carrying radio equipment for these observations, with the capability of relaying its signals back to a laboratory on the ground. A military cryptographer was brought in to monitor […] any signals from [the closely approaching] Mars as detected by the airship

Very likely to have been a point of discussion with Lovecraft at the Kalem Club, I would imagine. And even today it may be a real-life hook on which some Mythos writers could hang a 1920s story.

* Congratulations to all involved with The Fossil, journal of the historians of amateur journalism. It has now reached issue 400 (July 2024). The issue is freely available online in PDF, and includes… “Past Editors Ken Faig, Jr. (2024-2012) and Don Peyer (1996-1997) recalling their years editing The Fossil, and Monica Wasserman describing the involvement of Sonia Greene Lovecraft in amateur journalism.” Plus a note about the mysterious listing of a “H.P. Lovecraft in the 1917 Los Angeles City Directory”. Another real-life hook which may interest some Mythos writers, I’d suggest.

* Wormwoodiana reviews the new book L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy…

Anyone interested in how a modern literary estate was usurped can learn from the vitriol and scheming profusely detailed in this book. […] Derleth comes across as scheming, duplicitous, and extremely petty. The evidence is all here.

* Deep Cuts has a new long article on the scholarly Mexican work of Lovecraft’s young friend Barlow, “Deeper Cut: R.H. Barlow & the Codex Huitzilopochtli”.

* An article in the Italian open-access journal Classica Vox, “Exotika e Outer Ones”, sees a connection between a 1927 lecture heard by Lovecraft, given by Sir James Rennell Rodd on classical antiquity, and the story “The Whisperer in Darkeness”. In Italian, with English abstract.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the French journal Revue Roumaine for April 1966. In a review of a volume of the poetry of Emil Botta, one finds…

For in Emil Botta’s poetry there is nothing more striking than this feeling of perpetual flight towards a ‘beyond’ that the poet tries to evoke. Botta’s poetry is an attempt to fly over a territory, completely unknown, in a strange and sad universe above a “no man’s land” located between life and death. Let us note a striking resemblance, although devoid of any material possibility of filiation, between Botta’s lyrical adventures and the dreams of another great dreamer of our time, Lovecraft. There are almost disturbing correspondences here that seem to suggest a coherence of their dream universe. But while Lovecraft is a narrator whose descents into the depths of dreams are pregnant with dark events, Botta’s poetry pilots brief, violent, exhausting plunges into this obscure empire of shadows.

* The Spanish open-access journal Helice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction publishes in Spanish and some English. Of special note is the 2023 English article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe (1838-1938), and Beyond: A Historical Overview”. Freely available online.

* DMR has new review of Tom Sutton’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” Portfolio (1978). An item new to me, and with impressive penmanship judging by the scans shown…

See also the 2023 Dark Worlds Quarterly article “The Lovecraftian Tom Sutton at Charlton Comics”. I think I actually had a couple of his Charlton issues in my collection, back in the day. Long lost, now. But I see that a 148-page collection of the best of Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things (Charlton) was issued in 2015, and still appears to be available in a $90 hardback in the USA.

* Said to be newly available on a streaming movie service in the USA, the HPLHS movie adaptations The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. Though they seem to be region-locked, and thus are not yet available for me in the UK…

* The religious multi-author online magazine Protestia reports “Oldest Baptist Church in America Hosts Cthulhu For Horror-Themed NecronomiCon”, with some interior pictures of the event. Reports ‘with a frown’ and a wry tone, I note. But that modest reaction in itself shows how far we’ve come, from the foaming-at-the-mouth of the 1980s evangelical ‘satanic panic’.

* Mysteries of Montreal has a short overview of the NecronomiCon 2024 RPG gaming-related panel discussions which he attended, and some criticisms.

* RPG maker Chaosium’s Fall and Winter Releases list for 2024. Includes a new Investigator’s Guide for Cthulhu by Gaslight (the Lovecraftian RPG set in late Victorian / early Edwardian Britain, as I recall). I imagine this may interest both Mythos and Sherlock Holmes writers, as well as the intended audience of RPG players. Also due from Chaosium before Christmas is At The Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, which looks amusing.

* And finally, an online museum dedicated to the various felines Famous On th InterWebz. Lovecraft’s cat not yet among them.

HPLinks #3 – revisions, the Lovecraft Annual, Old Worm, Lovecraftian theatre in Hamburg, telepathic letters and more

02 Monday Sep 2024

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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.

Four more LORAs

31 Saturday Aug 2024

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I spotted a few more new Lovecraftian-adjacent style-guidance plugins (LORAs), free for the free Stable Diffusion 1.5.

Transparent Specimen LORA, giving an x-ray creature effect. Perhaps especially useful for those making old 1920s x-ray plates, as part of a RPG game?

World of Green Mist LORA, looking very suitable for Innsmouth pictures, though you may want the Sponge tool in Photoshop to tone down the end results. It could be used with the also-new Creature in Myst LORA.

Starry night, for generating an Earth landscape with a starry night sky and moon.

HPLinks #2 – Innsmouth Festival – London Festival – Metal Hurlant special – and more

26 Monday Aug 2024

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HPLinks #2.

A new book for August 2024, published a few days ago. H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend — Wilson Shepherd Remembered, 1932–1938, by John Camack Shepherd. Published in hardback and as a $20 paperback, 290 pages…

In a rural Alabama town, during the 1930’s, a teenage boy had dreams of being a science fiction publisher. In a dirt floor cellar, using primitive, second-hand presses, he managed to publish several science fiction/weird fiction magazines. Along the way, he came into contact and developed a correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, who became his ‘fine’ friend. He was nineteen years old when he wrote his first letter to Lovecraft.

The blurb mentions no discovery of new letters, and I assume that new material would have been mentioned. Shepherd was also the publisher of the History of the Necronomicon. I see Collected Essays V also has “Correspondence between R. H. Barlow and Wilson Shepherd of Oakman, Alabama Sept – Nov 1932”, but this was Lovecraft’s attempt “to unsnarl” a misunderstanding that had arisen between Barlow and Wilson. Joshi calls the farrago “unintentionally comical”.

* Tickets are still available for the Innsmouth Literary Festival here in the UK. The event appears to be a large and well-organised reunion convention, post lockdowns, for British mythos writers and their fans and publishers. On Saturday 28th September 2024 in the town of Bedford. On looking up the town on the map, I see it’s conveniently midway between Birmingham and London, and between Oxford and Cambridge. The map shows it has not one but two railway stations.

* Now published, Michael Bukowski’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated (August 2024).

* Goeliminal has a long NecronomiCon 2024 convention report. As yet, I can find no other blogs reporting on NecronomiCon 2024. But, looking for such, I found a gushing new review of the novel I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas (2017)…

“a wonderfully-constructed mystery [which] follows the goings on at the annual Providence-based convention, the Summer Tentacular, where fans gather each year to share their love for all things Lovecraft.”

I see this is now also available as an audiobook.

* There is however one Armitage Symposium 2024 talk on YouTube, “The Shadow Over Lake Erie: Cleveland and H.P. Lovecraft”. Though regrettably, its very poor audio makes it un-listenable. Though I can just about hear something about Lovecraft’s New York friend Kirk hailing originally from Akron, Ohio.

* Dr. Edward Guimont will be giving a talk at the AstroAssembly 2024, “When the Stars are Right, H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy”. The gathering takes place in early October 2024, at the Seagrave Memorial Observatory in Rhode Island.

* Now available, Metal Hurlant No. 12: H.P. Lovecraft. This is the current incarnation of the famous French comic-strip magazine, here publishing a new 272-page follow-up to the best-selling Lovecraft issue of 1979.

There’s also a Metal Hurlant ‘Special Lovecraft’ YouTube video, in French. No page previews, just interviews about the special.

* XRAY.fm produces a regular music podcast. For Lovecraft’s birthday in 2024, episode 551 was an hour of the best “Mythos In Metal” (August 2024).

* RPG blog Grognardia posts on “The War Against Lovecraft”. Comments arise from the ‘trigger warning’ found in the recent large-format artbook for The Dunwich Horror.

* Deepcuts has a long and detailed overview of what was staged at the 2023 London Lovecraft Festival, a theatre and dramatic-readings festival dedicated to Lovecraft adaptations.

* New on YouTube, a talk on The Metaphysics Of Lovecraft: “Dreams In The Witch House”.

* A new channel on YouTube, a side-project of HorrorBabble called ‘FantasyBabble’. The channel’s first offering is The Complete Hyperborean Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith as a YouTube playlist, six hours of readings in total. Possibly new readings(?), since the old HorrorBabble version of this cycle was 24 minutes longer.

* Reddit reports that film director Richard Stanley (The Color Out of Space) is once again working on The Dunwich Horror as a potential big-screen movie adaptation. Incidentally it appears that he should no longer be deemed ‘cancelled’ (see the bottom post in the Reddit thread). Although I suspect that may not make much difference to the ‘once accused, always guilty’ cancel cultists.

* CounterPunch writes “In Praise of the Weird”, commenting on recent spats occurring as part of the U.S. presidential election campaigning. To repeatedly refer… “to your opposition and their policies as ‘weird’ is to denigrate it as abnormal” [which can seem] a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion’.”

* New at the Bowery Boys website, a mega-list of Every Bowery Boys History podcast in chronological order by subject. For free, a great many polished podcasts on the history of New York City. Many of which offer useful background for aspects of Lovecraft’s exploration of the city in the mid 1920s. Including: #274 Ghost Stories of Hell’s Kitchen; #114 Supernatural Stories of New York; and #172 Ghost Stories of Brooklyn.

* I see that the World Fantasy Convention (who knew?) is to be held in here in the UK, from 30th October to 2nd November 2025.

* And finally, 2,000 year old mosaic discovered at Virconium in England. An Ancient Roman site. One creature depicted, if you look at it from a certain angle, almost looks like one of the Old Ones.

More LORAs

22 Thursday Aug 2024

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Another pick of the recent free plugins for local/offline use with the free Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator.

* Style of Milton Caniff LORA, able to do 1930s men’s suits and hairstyles in an illustration style. Of obvious relevance for anyone crafting 1930s Lovecraft-era artwork.

* VintageBW LORA for a vintage b&w photography look, and it could be combined with the also-new DarkLight – RimLight lighting LORA for noir rim lighting.

* DonM – Fossils LORA for generating fossils or polished stylised bas-reliefs.

* Mythicc Lands LORA, an unusual landscape generator that combines the landscape with a ‘geometric portal’ composition. Especially suitable for aiding attempts to emulate 1980s style sci-fi paperback cover-art, I’d suggest.

And an oldie, someone made an EMBEDDING (use like a LORA) for SD 1.5 which gave them a consistent Erich Zann face/head for a storytelling project. Still waiting for the consistent-character LORA for Lovecraft himself.

In the meanwhile, Centerflex model + the wasmoebius embedding has a fair idea of what Lovecraft looked like, though you may need to use negatives (Auden, Lincoln, Keaton) and stretch the resulting image up by 70 pixels to get the ‘long face’…

HPLinks #1

20 Tuesday Aug 2024

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HPLinks #1

Tentaclii is back, after a summer break. Rather than trailing out itty-bitty daily posts of link-based items, I’ve decided to experiment with a chunkier weekly news-digest format. At least for a while. Tuesday or Wednesday seem like the best weekdays for a weekly posting-day, though I’ll see how that notion settles down over time. There may also be other posts, such as ‘breaking news’ or longer research-based posts, but only as-and-when.

Thus here, on Lovecraft’s birthday, is my HPLinks #1…

* Druillet – Lovecraft. Due for publication 18th Oct 2024, as a 288-page hardcover. Likely to sell out in a micro-second, so you may want to pre-order quickly when that option is available.

This work brings together in a single volume everything that Druillet produced around [Lovecraft and his mythos]: the complete reissue of Demons et Merveilles published by Opta in 1976, now legendary; its pages from the Necronomicon; the covers he created for H.P. Lovecraft’s novels published by J’ai lu; and finally rare or unpublished paintings and sketches. A major meeting in the field of fantastic arts!

Note that Galerie Barbier, Paris, is… “launching a pre-order campaign on Ulule [French crowd-funding site] on 26th August 2024. Numerous goodies and exclusive rewards will be offered during this campaign.” The book appears to follow the gallery’s brief one-month Paris exhibition of the originals, in June-July 2024.

* The German Lovecraftians now have their own online shop. They also report that their annual magazine The Lovecrafter is on track to issue number 13 in paper in August. German writers should note that the rolling Web version, Lovecrafter Online, requires a new editor.

* A polished and long-running ‘Lovecraft as character’ webcomic set in 1926. The free Lovecraft is Missing was by Larry Latham of Oklahoma, whose day-jobs were Disney animator and animation teacher. Archive.org now newly has the collected pages for arcs that ran 2008-2014, packaged as handy .CBZ files for your comic-book reader software.

Larry sadly passed away in 2014 and Lovecraft is Missing .com site has long vanished. There were hopes that the concluding story arc(s) and any loose ends could be covered by collaboration with other artists, shortly before he passed away. But the story was very complex and it seems that these hopes could not come to fruition. Though note that ArtStation has pencilled pages from that possible collaboration, hinting at what might have been. Ten years after his passing, it appears unlikely there’ll now be a collected book and a rounded-out finish.

* Newly posted, a scan and transcription of a Postcard from H.P. Lovecraft to R.E. Howard, postmarked 13th November 1932. The front shows the gardens Lovecraft revelled in at Maymont, and the back discusses the prevalence of blond “Scandinavian types” he had seen on the streets. Note that… “The owner of the postcard, Mitch Kirsner is contemplating selling it. It has been in his possession for several years.”

* New on YouTube, “The Thing on the Doorstep” read by Wayne June (78 minutes). Joshi states of this later and lesser tale that… “This tale was written frenetically in a matter of four days, 21st–24th August 1933, in a scribbled pencil draft” that was almost illegible, presumably at the new address of 66 College St. Lovecraft was at this time “disgusted at much of my older work”, and thus “Thing” has the cosmicism of earlier tales only as a relatively thin veneer.

* New on Archive.org, a downloadable .PDF for the anthology Creeps By Night (1944). Featuring Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann”, along with Wandrei’s “The Red Brain” and Frank Belknap Long’s “A Visitor from Egypt”.

* A table-of-contents for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter for Spring 2024 (mailed July 2024). “Contains the first known typescript of Worms of the Earth”, as well as a Lovecraft letter.

* “Lovecraft’s Murder Mystery: Revisit Poe’s Haunted House” (2024), being a new paper which offers… “a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe”.

* Anime News Network, “Visualizing Lovecraft: An Interview with Manga Creator Gou Tanabe”, along with his translator and publisher. Tanabe’s 288-page Call of Cthulhu is to be released in English in mid October 2024, by which time his Dunwich book should also be shipping in French and German. Possibly this interview is actually a transcript of a recent panel that I recall he was on, at some large U.S. comics convention? On visualising the 1920s in America, he says…

“When it comes to Lovecraft, one thing that’s pivotal to making manga is that you draw daily life as being extremely ordinary as possible. It’s a period piece set in the ’20s, so I tried to use movies as examples.”

* Francois Baranger’s illustrated “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in its French edition, titled L’ombre sur Innsmouth: Illustre, due in mid October 2024 according to an early listing on Amazon UK.

* Set for mid November, Les Archives Lovecraft, a 324-page compilation of the Carnets Lovecraft books published in French by Bragelonne from 2019 to 2022. Together… “with new illustrations, a complementary illustrated short story (‘Pickman’s Model’), and numerous bonuses.”

* The Lin Carter papers at Duke University Libraries. Found while looking for Crypt of Cthulhu #70 (1990) which has all… ” the Lin Carter Necronomicon as survives in his notes.” This is out-of-print, unavailable in .PDF and not on Archive.org, as it turns out.

* A large new Public Work mega-repository of public-domain re-usable images, all ingested from the wealth of university and museum repositories now online. Slickly and speedily presented, and with a choice selection of results for the search-word “Lovecraft”. No actual Lovecraft images in the results, you understand, but all Lovecraft-adjacent and worth browsing…

* Call for Submissions: A Bestiary of New England’s Creatures, Creepers, and Cryptids and an accompanying online Bibliography. Both dated August 2024.

* And finally, should you wish to emulate a Lovecraftian binge at some rural ice-cream slurperie… there’s a new map showing a 100-place “ice cream trail” in Massachusetts, New England.

See you later, in August…

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Housekeeping

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As usual I’ll now be taking a few weeks of late-summer break from Tentaclii, and from my usual daily blogging. I hope to be back with my readers towards the end of August, barring some urgent news that needs to be conveyed. And there may perhaps be something for Lovecraft’s 134th birthday on 20th August 2024.

In the meanwhile I’ve added a WordPress plugin that gives you a link to a random older blog post. It used to be the case that one could append ?random to a WordPress URL and that would do the job. No more, it seems.

So here is the new plugin-powered random post link, and those new to Tentaclii should be prepared to see some broken images on older posts. This was caused by a domain move, some years ago.

The Dreaming Stone (1996)

27 Saturday Jul 2024

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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New to me, and now new on Archive.org, another Dreamlands RPG book. This one is Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands – The Dreaming Stone (1997). 66 pages, out-of-print and offered for silly prices on Amazon in paper. It begins…

The Dreaming Stone [RPG] is intended as an introduction to H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, as put forth in Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu supplement, The Complete Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any Dreamlands. Even if the investigators have already experienced the Dreamlands, The Dreaming Stone still offers a considerable challenge. Though ostensibly written for the 1920s, the adventure can be transferred to the Gaslight or Cthulhu Now settings with relative ease. Any number of investigators can participate, though groups of at least four to six are recommended. If there are fewer, the keeper may wish to tone down the number of encounters or foes, or let the investigators roll additional Dreamlands-residing characters to bolster their ranks. Investigators are assumed to have a few adventures under their belts before playing this scenario, as their reputations and an already-established rivalry draw them into the action. If you are planning to run [as] an investigator [i.e. player] in The Dreaming Stone, read no further. The remainder of this book is intended for the keeper’s [i.e. game master’s] eyes only.

Reviews note that this is… “The only ever adventure book for H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands”, and that it is a “skeleton” on which to build rather than a mighty Table-Trembling Tome of Total Tale-telling.

“that Canton madhouse”

26 Friday Jul 2024

Posted by in Picture postals

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In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, he writes of the “sanitarium at Canton” and going to “… that Canton madhouse, and [then] together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth.” Canton, Massachusetts, is about twelve miles south of the city of Boston. And about two-thirds of the way from Providence to Boston. At circa 1900 there was, however, no madhouse or even a disease sanatorium there.

But the presence of Canton Junction on the Providence – Boston train line suggests Lovecraft knew it, at least from the train windows. There is a large viaduct which carries the train, and Lovecraft would have enjoyed sweeping views across the Canton topography. He must have been across it many times.

Longest and tallest railway viaduct in the world, when built in 1835.

Interestingly Canton is about two miles east of Walpole, and of course Walpole is also the name of the father of the gothic novel. There was however no asylum at Walpole, Mass. Looking at the list of train stations on the line, and the map, Lovecraft may have been able to see East Walpole in the distance, across the marshland, from the Canton Viaduct.

There was however a large and real asylum at Foxborough (aka Foxboro) (opened 1893, closed 1976), originally the state’s treatment asylum for chronic alcoholics. Foxborough was two train stops before Canton, on the Providence to Boston line. It’s thus not impossible Lovecraft knew that asylum from the train window, as it was likely within sight as the train passed.

Train line passing alongside the asylum site, Foxboro station just a quarter mile south. (With thanks to the ghost-hunter who identified the laundry building of the site, and thus gave me my bearings).

A blogger who has investigated it talks of a road approach through marshlands made of “cranberry bogs [that] looked like blood pools”. He also usefully notes… “After 1905, the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates went through a gradual transition to a psychiatric institution”, which another source states was due to the alcoholic inmates constantly escaping in search of drink. Thus by the time Lovecraft came to write “Innsmouth”, it was indeed a general “madhouse”.

What of “my poor little cousin” in “Innsmouth”? I assume he was loosely modelled after Lovecraft’s beloved-and-lost cousin, Phillips Gamwell. Thus Gamwell’s home in Cambridge, Mass., might be the place to look. But I can find no asylum or sanitorium there.

There was also the large official Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane, at Worcester, which may have formed a mental model for Lovecraft. It certainly looks like the sort of place many readers will have in mind.

What of Canton, Ohio? No madhouse there. The nearest was Massillon which is eight miles away, and also the main Ohio state asylum at Columbus some 130 miles from Canton…

But my feeling is the Foxborough asylum was the inspiration for the Lovecraft called the “Canton madhouse”, knowing that readers in his circle who knew the Boston – Providence railway line would make the connection with Foxboro madhouse (four miles south, on the train track, from Canton).

Lovecraftians will also recall Lovecraft’s planned but never written ‘Foxfield’ stories. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). Also to be found in Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos. For those unable to pay the prices now asked for either of these, The Lovecraft Encyclopedia usefully summarises the essay… “it indicates that Foxfield is east of Aylesbury and Dunwich and northwest of Arkham.”

Three new LORAs

25 Thursday Jul 2024

Posted by in AI

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My pick of three recent free Lovecraft-adjacent ‘style plugins’ (LORAs), for use with the free AI image-generator Stable Diffusion 1.5…

Style of Edward Gorey LORA.

Neon Pop Haeckel LORA, Haeckel being an influence on Lovecraft. Though for laying out a “sane” non-religious view of the universe, rather than his deep-sea expedition imagery. Joshi calls him a… “central influence on [Lovecraft’s] metaphysical thought of the time”.

Pulpy Comics Style Inkifier LORA, for a neo-pulp modern comic-book style.