HPLinks #52 – the Lovecraft Protocol, Hess letters, Lovecraft as blogger, Lovecraft and wolves, and more…

27 Wednesday Aug 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

HPLinks #52.

* The latest issue of the Brazilian open-access fantastic fiction journal Abusoes is a special on ‘histories and theories of fantasy in the 21st century’. A number of their back issues are also fantasy or science-fiction specials, and there’s also large special issue dedicated to Lovecraft. Mostly in Portuguese.

* The Science Fiction Foundation has a call for contributions to a forthcoming “100 Years of Wonder” special issue of its journal, with a submission deadline of 5th April 2026…

2026 marks the centenary of Hugo Gernsback’s [magazine] Amazing Stories. To commemorate and critically explore what many regard as the birth of genre science fiction, the Autumn 2026 issue of ‘Foundation’ (No. 153) will present a series of articles that investigate and re-evaluate the history of the science fiction pulps.

* The journal Messengers from the Stars plans a 2026 special issue on cityscapes in fantasy & science fiction. Deadline: 1st September 2025.

* A preprint paper on PsyArXiv, “The Lovecraft Protocol: A Clinical Guide for First Contact with Functionally Plural Systems”. Now withdrawn, but archived at Reddit. Appears to have been an HPL Birthday spoof of psychology ‘personality assessment’ papers, that made it into Google Scholar.

* In the new $155 academic-theory book Theorizing Stephen King (2025), I see there’s a chapter titled “A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King”.

* New in the open-access megajournal Humanities, “Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery”. Traces the influence of the fin-de-siecle Decadents through Machen to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series and beyond.

* Deep Cuts look at the Clara Hess letters held at Brown University, in “The Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess”, and transcribes letters she sent to August Derleth. As I understand it Derleth also interviewed her about her memories of Lovecraft, probably in late 1948.

* New articles at Grognardia on “Lovecraft the Blogger” and “Lovecraft the Fantasist”…

Like [R.E.] Howard, Lovecraft peopled the Dreamlands with decadent civilizations, perilous sorceries, and monstrous foes. Like Tolkien, he gives us a secondary world with its own geography, history, and laws. The difference is perhaps one of emphasis. Howard’s heroes carve their fates with the sword, Tolkien’s with the burden of virtue, and Lovecraft’s with the dreamer’s restless desire to glimpse what lies just beyond the horizon.

* For Lovecraft’s birthday, DMR had the article “Lovecraft at 135: Yeah, He Won”. If one pinpoints 1925 as the beginning of Lovecraft’s strong influence on other creatives, then he’s now endured for a century…

By this time in August of 1925, HPL had turned the heads of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and many, many others. ‘Others’ like C.L. Moore and Manly Wade Wellman. ‘Others’ like Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury. [… and now 100 years later] The ‘lens’ of most horror fiction is filtered through the paradigm Lovecraft refined and perfected [and he also lives] rent-free even in the minds of even his most ardent haters.

* This week Wormwoodiana surveys “Those Thick Omnibuses from the Thirties”, and recommends some core 1930s books which collected the best ‘weird’ stories between hardcovers.

* A new audiobook The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, being a quality seven-hour reading of the classic Professor Challenger novel. From the same reader, there’s also “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith. Both free on YouTube. Avoid the YouTube ads by downloading with desktop freeware such as Mediahuman’s YouTube To MP3 software.

* I’m pleased to see that Fred Blosser has just published a new R.E. Howard reader’s guide, The Solomon Kane Companion: An Informal Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Dark Avenger. Billed as the “first-ever comprehensive guide” and available now.

Includes a “Kane chronology and a glossary of people and places” in the tales.

* Perhaps useful for some involved in fantasy illustration and RPG-making, a proper ‘savage wolf’ LoRA for SDXL-based image generator models. The free A Better Wolf… “fixes a lot of the wolf related issues in SDXL”.

* Bandcamp Daily has a new long article and survey “Exploring the Mystical Realms of Fantasy Synth”, which is shorthand for ‘synthesizer-based electronic music’…

Think of a fantasy setting or a specific corner of mythology, and there’s almost certainly a one-person synth project out there taking its lore and turning it into music.

* Robert Bloch’s short Mythos novel Strange Eons (1978) was re-issued by Valancourt Books in early August 2025. Now shipping. Bloch makes frequent use of Lovecraft-the-man via letters etc, to prop up the rather dialogue-heavy tale. There’s no audiobook, it seems.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of Weird Tales for January 1946, including an indication that The Necronomicon had been dropped into the swirl of bookseller’s lists as early as 1945…

Also new on Archive.org, a Sprague de Camp snippet in Future Science Fiction, August 1954. His regular column lets drop a few details on his then-recent visit to Providence — giving the colours of Lovecraft’s homes and calling 10 Barnes a “monstrous” building.

* From Poland in Polish, the undergraduate dissertation “Shades of Cosmic Horror: An analysis of the cinematic expressions applied in adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space””. The author considered “all seven film adaptations” of “Colour”, and discussed the methods used to visually and scientifically convey the idea of a fictional colour. Not yet online.

* And finally, Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” adapted as a 1992 Japanese TV Movie (who knew?). Now subtitled in English and newly and freely available on Archive.org.

— End-quotes —

[In 1904, as a thirteen year-old] “… Latin now captivated my fancy, and I became a haughty Roman with scant use for the barbaric darkness of the modern world. The impress of this phase is still upon me, and I still thrill at the Roman name and the fasces and the figure of the Wolf of the Capitol.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“… nocturnal howling has an element of fearfulness for me. I always associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night’s small hours. Wolves and other animals are of course the ultimate basis of the hereditary folk-fear on which my impression is founded.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, January 1928.

“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very in-frequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.” — Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”.

“[I] fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk — a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney” — Lovecraft, “The Shunned House”.

A trip to Cydonia

23 Saturday Aug 2025

Posted by in AI

≈ Leave a comment

A first proper experiment with ‘modern, 2025’ AI writing, using Msty for Windows (not Msty Studio) as the desktop host. The Drummer’s new local Cydonia-24B-v4 Q2-K model proved the best and it also has very reasonable speed in its lightweight Q2 GGUF form, running on a basic entry-level 3060 12Gb graphics card.

I requested a story about a frog, a rocketship and a library, written in the style of Nabokov. A tough test, I thought.

Here’s the 30% re-written and slightly expanded result, blended with a few little ‘nice touches’ spotted in results had from the lesser models Gemma 3 12b and Mistral Instruct 7B.

An Encounter With The Unnatural:

Walking briskly through his high and labyrinthine aisles, the Unnatural History librarian wore his usual frown. He felt it was depressing to see so many dust motes dancing lazily, down the long light shafts that fell across his gloomy paths. Dust smacked of decay. Suddenly he adjusted his round spectacles and gasped. In all his time in this section he had passed many strange items left by the borrowers — potted fungi from the outer Solar System with some very peculiar growth patterns; student watercolor renderings of imaginary animals yet to be created by genetic engineering, a silvery packet of black seeds with a label that would send them plunging into the clouds of Venus — but nothing quite like what he now found where the aisles of ‘Classical Natural History’ shaded over into ‘Antique Philosophy’.

It was a tiny specimen of what appeared to be the Common Frog of Old Earth, Rana temporaria, its emerald hide standing out quite remarkably even in the dim light, and perched upon the silvery cone of a strangely detailed miniature rocketship. The frog made no damp and sudden movement that might show curiosity about its discovery. Its eyes blinked not at the observer’s presence. It was unaware that it had, for a moment, brilliantly excelled all the library’s surrealist poems. Not by words, but by such an unlikely proximity and stillness.

The librarian was an elderly man of Old Mars and thus a grandchild of colonists averse to the poetic. Yet he felt it his duty to wonder about the temporal history of this curious conjunction. Perhaps the creature had arrived with its tiny ship or perhaps — his prosy mind rejected this thought as absurd yet delightful — the tiny frog was itself the pilot. Some astronaut from a water planet, come to seek knowledge beyond his own amphibian ponds? Certainly the rocketship seemed to pulse faintly beneath the clinging frog, like a heart beating and as if newly arrived from destinations and light-years undreamed.

Deciding the matter to be far too curious and detailed to be some student prank, the librarian gently lifted both clinging frog and rocketship, walked some distance and placed them on a table exactly equidistant between ‘Old Earth Science Fiction’ and ‘Classical Natural Philosophy’. Then, with a swirl of his cloak, he continuing on his vigilant way. The frog, oblivious to its own absurdity, merely flicked out its tongue, tasting a few dust motes from the library’s honeyed light shafts. A few young library patrons passed it occasionally, without noticing.

Kind of reminds me of a strange 12-page standalone comic-strip that one might have once encountered in the pages of some old 1980s Heavy Metal magazine, illustrated by Caza.

HPLinks #51 – birthday presents, NecronomiCon dates, an Italian Lovecraft festival, Lovecraft’s Calculator, periwigs and more…

20 Wednesday Aug 2025

Posted by in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #51.

* Eusebeia – a mystical Lovecraftian short film… 3DVF has it that… “the film evokes a universe worthy of Lovecraft”. Freely available on YouTube.

* Dates have been announced for the NecronomiCon Providence 2026, 13th-16th August 2026. No further details or trailer-poster, as yet.

* My Lovecraft LoRA for SDXL and ComfyUI, now freely available in time for Lovecraft’s Birthday. My next HPLinks will hopefully have more links to birthday goodies from others.

* The 2025 birthday has been used as a means of re-promoting the Italian essay collection Yog-Sothothery (October 2024), and the new promo usefully has a few details of what’s inside.

Seven essays in Italian in total, including…

    – a survey of places in New York City frequented by Lovecraft

    – an examination of the scientific details in “At The Mountains of Madness”

    – a study of mass-media ‘adaptations’ of Lovecraft and their distortion by leftist politics

Also announced is a spin-off from the book…

The Yog-Sothothery project is a multimedia project inspired by Lovecraft’s imagination, evoking the profound symbiosis between Providence author and and his dark myths. It will be articulated through events, audiovisual productions and interactive content that will be presented in the coming months in Rome and L’Aquila, on the occasion of two symbolic anniversaries. 100 years of “The Call of Cthulhu” (set in 1925), and 50 years of the publisher Chaosium. Among the promoters and supporters of the project include L’Aquila Reborn, Rome Creative Hub, People and Territories, Lightson, Mokona’s, Studio Comunico, Rome Film Academy.

* Live on YouTube later today, the R.E. Howard Foundation on “Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft: Opinionated Pen Pals”.

* Newly released, the book Lovecraft’s Calculator: Physics, Paradox, and a Scientific Guide to Cosmic Horror…

This book doesn’t describe cosmic horror. It proves it. Using real equations, peer-reviewed papers, and a narrator who has clearly been awake too long reading arXiv at 3 a.m., Lovecraft’s Calculator drags you down the spiral staircase of reality, one unsettling scientific fact at a time. You’ll explore vacuum decay, black holes, dark energy, Boltzmann brains, and the nauseating possibility that the universe itself is a malfunctioning simulation with no tech support.

There’s an affordable Kindle ebook edition. How much it actually references Lovecraft’s work and his 1900s-1930s scientific context is unknown.

* In the latest edition of the journal Zeitschrift fur Katalanistik, the Catalan article which translates as “Ofelia Dracs and the reception of H.P. Lovecraft in Catalan literature”. Freely available online.

* From Poland in English, and published in the latest issue of a Malaysian open-access journal, “Which hollow is Witches’ Hollow? : an empirical study on translating toponyms”…

It was decided that the proper name for the study should be Witches’ Hollow — a toponym from a short story that was first published in a collection of weird fiction tales, “The Watchers Out of Time”, by August Derleth. […] it takes place in the cult world of Cthulhu Mythos, inspired by Lovecraft’s works and notes he left, and stylized as Lovecraftian, but not authored by Lovecraft.

* On DeviantArt, Red-Vanguard has new illustrations for The Horror at Martin’s Beach, The Black Bratt of Dunwich, and The Dunwich Horror, in the sort of artistic style one imagines Lovecraft might have had is he had been published on the covers of the ‘slicks’ rather than inside the ‘pulps’. Red-Vanguard also has earlier works for “The Lurking Fear” and others.

* Grognardia blogs on Lovecraft’s awe…

What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense — sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious.

* Another new blog essay from Grognardia is “Of Periwigs and Pallid Masks”, which co-incides nicely with my now completed and very enjoyable re-reading of Dexter Ward…

[What fascinated the Anglophile Lovecraft was that time when] Boston remained loyal to the [British] Crown, when the [American] frontier still loomed dark and unknown, and when superstition and science existed in uneasy proximity. […] To the best of my knowledge, Chaosium has never released a full supplement set in 17th- or 18th-century British North America. […] The early 18th century was a period when science, superstition, and theology all vied for dominance in the human mind. A figure like Emanuel Swedenborg, for example, could be taken seriously not only as a scientist and engineer but also as a visionary who conversed with spirits. That intellectual ambiguity suits the Mythos perfectly.

* And finally, ‘Oh noes, we iz expozed… burn th periwigs, guyz!’ New on YouTube, the documentary Inside America’s Insane Lovecraft-Obsessed Fraternity.

— End-quotes —

“I’ve never attempted long hair [i.e. in the decadent manner] because I always think of myself in a periwig rather than following the post-1775 fashion of wearing my own hair. The common thing in periwig days was to clip or even shave the head — so I worry along with close haircuts and imagine my wig hanging on a wig-block or the bedpost.” — Lovecraft to Virgil Finlay, October 1936.

[My] “dream-self has come to represent me so perfectly that in waking hours I sometimes feel odd for lack of my three-cornered hat, powdered periwig, satin small-clothes, silver sword, and buckled shoes.” — Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, January 1933.

“… one June day in 1917 I was walking through Swan Point Cemetery with my aunt and saw a crumbling tombstone with a skull and crossbones dimly traced upon its slaty surface; the date, 1711, still plainly visible. It set me thinking. Here was a link with my favourite aera of periwigs — the body of a man who had worn a full-bottom’d wig and had perhaps read the original sheets of The Spectator. Here lay a man who had lived in Mr. Addison’s day, and who might easily have seen Mr. Dryden had he been in the right part of London at the right time! Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me? I looked long at that grave, and the night after I returned home I began my first story [of my adult life]” — Lovecraft to Galpin, April 1920.

[Lovecraft recalls being a boy who had discovered Alden’s] THE READER [… This old book] was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence [for it] reflected in all its completeness the Georgian rhetorical tradition of Addison, Pope, and Johnson, which had survived unimpaired in America even after the Romantic Movement had begun to modify it in England. This, I felt by instinct, was the key to the speech and manners and mental world of that old periwigged, knee-breeched Providence whose ancient lanes still climbed the hill […] Little by little I hammered every rule and precept and example into my receptive system, till in a month or so I was beginning to write coherent verse in the ancient style” […] “At the same time I was reading the 17th and 18th century poetical translations of the classics and the old Queen Anne essayists as fast as I could, so that periwigged Georgianism was absorbing me as utterly as if I had been actually born in its midst.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

Lovecraft’s Birthday: my SDXL LoRA freebie

20 Wednesday Aug 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft! My present this year is a ‘Lovecraft’s likeness’ add-on for guiding AI image generation. Specifically, my Lovecraft SDXL character LoRA. Included is a workflow that also does automatic facefix at a higher resolution, useful for when he’s in the middle-distance of an image. As you can see below, a middle-distance Lovecraft (that looks at bit more like William Burroughs) becomes more Lovecraft-like and especially so around the eyes. Not perfect, but better.

The middle-distance fix-up is achieved by an ‘automatic facefix’, which re-renders the face at a higher resolution then seamlessly patches it in. My supplied workflow gives you the auto-facefix plus a Controlnet which can process using either MistoLine (extract lineart as a guide to the image generation) or OpenPose (extract a posed figure as a guide). Above you see an old Sherlock Holmes film-still guiding the image via a MistoLine Controlnet, along with the Lovecraft LoRA. The head is angled, to show that angles are possible. Emotions can also be prompted for.

Note that making the workflow functional will require the host software ComfyUI, plus several ‘custom nodes’ and models. The ComfyUI workflow has the details of these. Of course one also requires a good NVIDIA graphics card in the PC, with a 3060 12Gb being generally regarded as the base entry-level.

Change the image-generation prompt to do things like having 18th century clothes and settings…

Include hpl in the prompt to trigger the LoRA into action.

Enjoy!

HPLinks #50 – Lovecraft as theologian or prophet of the occult, Miskatonic diploma, Lovecraft and Lovelock, filming on Benefit Street, and more…

17 Sunday Aug 2025

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

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #50.

* A new PhD thesis, sadly under embargo, Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025). There is, however, a lengthy abstract.

* A new Masters dissertation, “Fear, Cosmic Horror and the Sublime in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction” (2025). Freely available online. Examines Lovecraft’s personal and societal… “fears and how they had an impact on his writing, how said fears created the genre of cosmic horror” and the relation to ‘the sublime’.

* A recent Masters dissertation, “H.P. Lovecraft: Prophet of the Elder Gods: Investigating his Influence over the 20th and 21st Century Occult and Religious Worlds” (2024). Not freely online, but it appears to provide a survey of the various… “researchers, occultists, and occult organizations that seek to venerate or utilize Lovecraftian entities in occult practice and worship.”

* An official announcement from the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, the HPLFF Returns to Providence 22nd-24th August 2025. More than 30 films, plus Q&As and talks.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he writes…

I am in receipt of an extraordinary project, The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, compiled by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. In addition to a two-volume edition of Lovecraft’s complete fiction (which uses my corrected texts), there is a supplementary volume, A Reader’s Guide to Selected Works by H. P. Lovecraft — a most appealing and heavily illustrated work containing much information on […] key works. Every devotee of Lovecraft will want to secure this major undertaking.

GameSpot’s review of the same also spots among the collectables… “a diploma from Miskatonic University [and the University’s] Undergraduate Course Book, presented as a small booklet”.

* There’s an update on the New England Folklore Bestiary. They report expanding entries at a healthy rate, and a suitable illustrator has now joined the project.

* Feuilleton surveys Akihiro Yamada’s Lovecraftiana.

* In France, “Lovecraft honoured at the 7th Cinematographic Meeting of Charolais Brionnais”. This appears to be a local newspaper puff for a cinema sub-event at the Lovecraft event featured in my last HPLinks.

* In Hamburg, Germany, tickets are now on sale for a series of stage performances of “Dreams in the Witch House”.

* New on Archive.org, a 1987 small magazine translation of Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” into Romanian.

* New on Archive.org, Sam Moskowitz on “The Prophetic Edgar Allan Poe”, from the Christmas 1958 edition of Satellite magazine…

… his greatest contribution to the advancement of the genre was the precept that every departure from norm must be logically explained scientifically. This made it easy for the reader to attain a willing suspension-of-disbelief and accept the unusual. The greatest names in the history of the field owe a profound debt to his method: “that everything must be scientifically logical”

* Also new on Archive.org, “Lovecraft meets Lovelock”. A thoughtful five-page section in the book Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)…

Mixing the horror of Lovecraft with the romantic rationalism of Lovelock produces a volatile concoction.

* Free RPG Day (who knew?) this year gave away Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure, a scenario for the Arkham Horror Roleplaying Game. Having bagged his freebie, Rlyeh Reviews offers an experienced gamer’s in-depth review.

* Kay Talks Games celebrates “The Fantastic Narration of Wayne June”, though appreciating June’s voice-work on the Darkest Dungeon games rather than the Lovecraft tales.

* Have you spotted any stolen Steve Ditko original comic-art boards? There’s now a chunky $20,000 reward.

* And finally, “J.J. Abrams films Ghostwriter in Providence, RI”. Ghostwriter is apparently set to be a blockbuster “retro” (i.e. set in the 1980s) sci-fi/mystery movie… “about an author who finds that the mythical world he imagined is real”. Sounds familiar, and the filming locations on Benefit Street, Wickenden Street and Hope Street all strongly suggest a possible Lovecraft-the-man wrinkle in the movie.

— End-quotes —

“What depths of mental poverty and aesthetic paralysis yawn in the simple fact that hordes of people, each supposedly endowed with individual perceptive faculties and a responsive imagination, vary not a whit in their stolid, incurious reactions to the world’s wonders, and glimpse not a vision beyond the bare, material, geometrical outlines of the scene before them. One patient herd; one conglomerate mind; one universal coma! [… yet with free expression, such as that enabled by amateur journalism, we may taste a little of the … ] golden antiquity of freedom, beauty, intensity, and individuality. From one grey world the artist escapes to a colourful cosmos of hundreds of brilliant worlds — for does not an awakened imagination shatter all barriers and empower the mind to shape the impressions it receives?” — Lovecraft’s Presidential message to fellow amateur journalists, in the National Amateur of July 1923.

“I’m not the only one to see a really serious problem ahead for the sensitive aesthete who would keep alive amidst the ruins of the traditional civilisation. In fact, an attitude of alarm, pain, disgust, retreat, and defensive strategy is so general among virtually all modern men of creative interests, that I’m sometimes tempted to keep quiet for fear my personal feeling may be mistaken for affected imitativeness!” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

“I’ve learned from experience that this kind of negligence [in correspondence] is extremely common [such as Cook’s case, in 1930]. He was so utterly shot to pieces that he left Athol and all his responsibilities behind, giving no address and allowing his mail to pile up […] I’ve noticed that other nervous people — including some of the finest characters alive — react the same way under stress. When crowded and harassed to the limit […] they save their equilibrium through a temporary gesture of complete repudiation […] Then, when things calm down a bit, they belatedly drop notes and try to pick up the threads again. While this is irritating (& sometimes disastrous) enough to those who write them, one can’t afford to confuse such cases of desperation with pure callousness or malevolence.” — Lovecraft to Hyman Bradofsky, November 1936.

HPLinks #49 – Lovecraft Annual 2025, Lovecraftian mapping, bestiaries, “Ulthar” movie, “Outsider” in puppetry, and more…

07 Thursday Aug 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #49.

* Hippocampus Press has details of the forthcoming Lovecraft Annual 2025. Among others, the journal will have articles on…

    – Lovecraft’s Boyhood Cat.
    – “Iä, Iä!”: Its Origin and Significance.
    – Lovecraft and Wales.
    – Lovecraft in the Netherlands.
    – Lovecraft in Mexico.

Looks good. Set for release in August 2025. Not yet listed on Amazon UK.

* The French journal Epistemocritique also produces a line of free ebooks. One of their latest books is Ecrire avec les cartes (2024). Along with chapters on maps and the fiction of Kipling, Stevenson and H.G. Wells, this book includes “Cartographies d’outre-tombe: la posterite cartographique de la Nouvelle-Angleterre imaginaire de Lovecraft” (‘Cartographies from beyond the grave: the cartographic posterity of the New England imaginary of Lovecraft’), which is well illustrated with maps. Freely available online.

I propose to examine how these [popular, post-Lovecraft] maps relate to Lovecraft’s [original] fiction, with particular reference to “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. I suggest that these maps can be grouped into three categories, according to the function they perform and their graphic style. This abundant popular cartographic production affects both our reading of Lovecraft, and our perception of real spaces.

Available in PDF, and easily auto-translated. Historians of science-fiction may also want note Epistemocritique’s first such free ebook, on Jules Verne and the popularisation of science.

* From the Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century (2022), “Fantastic Letters: Writing in a Fictional World”. Letter-forms devised for fantastic worlds. Freely available online.

* In the French journal Belphegor, “Le bestiaire medievaliste comme produit derive” (2024, ‘The medievalist bestiary as a [modern] derivative product’), in French. Freely available online, but easily auto-translated. This examines modern gaming ‘monster manuals’ — most familiar to Lovecraftians via Sandy Petersen’s Field Guide to the Lovecraftian Horrors, Creatures of the Dreamlands etc — but does so with a medievalist’s eye to the mediaeval prehistory of the form.

* Also in gaming, the HPLHS Store has what appears to be a new series of “Audio Props”, each tuned to a specific variety of Lovecraftian game.

* Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” adapted as a 2024 puppetry film. With finely-crafted puppets, complex sets and FX. Free on YouTube.

* S.T. Joshi latest blog post mentions a film version of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar”, from Wales. He links to a trailer and a Kickstarter. Joshi seems to be right that many liberties have been taken with the tale. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the Kickstarter from nearly reaching its goal with a week to go.

* A review of a stage production of “The Call of Cthulhu”, in Hamburg, Germany. The show has just closed its run, but if you’re in the city then you can catch the same troupe’s “Dreams in the Witch House”, on stage “in mid-August”.

* A UK meetup for Mythos writers and also traders, the Innsmouth Literary Festival 25 is set for Saturday 27th September 2025, in the English town of Bedford. Located conveniently midway between Birmingham and London, and between Oxford and Cambridge, and with not one but two railway stations. Booking now.

* In the world of R.E. Howard, this week we have free on YouTube Editing Robert E. Howard’s Conan: A Conversation with Dr. Patrice Louinet. Also new and free on YouTube is a good reading of “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance” by Robert E. Howard. An excellent pirate adventure featuring an Irishman seeking his vengeance in the Caribbean. With a few tweaks, it could have been a ‘Conan the pirate’ tale.

* Tellers of Weird Tales feels the effects of Strange Rays & Weird Waves in Weird Tales of the mid 1920s.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the Deep Magic Ezine, 2002-2006. Includes short interviews with fantasy writers and artists.

* A pleasing and new-to-me view of a spot on the Brown University campus that Lovecraft likely visited, given his interest in Ancient Rome. An exact replica of an ancient statue of Caesar Augustus in Rome, installed on the Brown campus in 1906 and there until the early 1950s. Indeed, we can be fairly sure Lovecraft visited, in the company of his visiting geologist friend Morton. Since, after 1915 the adjacent Hall housed the Geology Department on the ground floor and in the basement. Morton would surely have prompted Lovecraft to visit the Dept. when visiting Providence.

* Talking of Brown University, the modern-day Providence campus and its library (home of most of the Lovecraft letters) are set to become a little safer to visit, after Brown reaches a $50m settlement over its campus antisemitism. Brown must now take… “significant, proactive, effective steps to combat antisemitism” including “proactive measures to protect Jewish students”, and it appears that progress is to be closely monitored.

* And finally, Lovecraft’s birthday is on the 20th of this month. ‘Presents’ have been a feature of past birthdays. As my present, I plan to release my recently-made “Lovecraft’s face/head” LoRA. This is intended as an add-on for use with SDXL models re: image-generating AI. Here’s a preview of ‘without and with’, when the generated figure is in the middle-distance and a facefix is automatically applied. Close-ups give a far better likeness (no facefix needed for close-ups), but this demo shows the LoRA can also work at a distance — which will be important for comic-books. It will also work with the head at an angle, and a prompt can change the expression (here seen in neutral)…

— End-quotes —

“My own nervous state in childhood once produced a tendency inclining toward chorea, although not quite attaining that level. My face was full of unconscious & involuntary motions now & then — & the more I was urged to stop them, the more frequent they became.” — Lovecraft to Richard F. Searight, March 1935.

“After 1904 [i.e. age 14] I had a long succession of 22-calibre rifles, and became a fair shot till my eyes played hell with my accuracy.” (Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, November 1933) / In Lovecraft’s “Polaris”… “my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts”.

“I used to have to wear them [spectacles] all the time, and they kept my nose and ears in a state of perpetual irritation. Now I wear them only for steady middle-distance vision — as at the theatre, or at illustrated lectures.” — Lovecraft to Bloch, June 1933.

“It’s all as plain as the nose on your face …. or even that on my face, which is something else again.” — Lovecraft on his large nose, to Talman, February 1931.

“I do not claim to be 100% Teuton. My dark hair and eyes forbid me that honour. […] I am content to survey my ample height and pallid complexion […] your old Grandpa is pretty well satisfied to be a Nordick, chalk white from the Hercynian wood and the Polar mists” — Lovecraft joshing with Frank Belknap Long, December 1923.

HPLinks #48 – Lovecraft and music, new and old comics, D&D 5.5e Lovecraft, and more…

31 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #48.

* The Great Dangerous Books podcast this week on H.P. Lovecraft & The Apocalypse. Discussing the… “philosophical implications of Lovecraft’s stories, particularly the themes of knowledge, reality, and the human condition.”

* In France, the 23rd Festival de Bourgogne (seems to be in Burgundy, France) is to offer a two-day “The World of Lovecraft” event in late August 2025…

Films by Marc Thomas Charley and Martine Chifflot will introduce the world of Lovecraft to mark his birthday on 20th August 2025. Three short biopics, and bio-fiction films in the evening. The 21st August meeting will then address the themes of witchcraft, documentaries, and Lovecraftian fiction. Two documentaries, three biopics, and audience discussions will take place before another evening screening, which will feature a documentary by Marc Charley, “The Curse of the Feathers,” a true case of witchcraft, followed by a new black-and-white version of Lovecraft’s “Dreams in The Witch House”. “Ritual” will be shown that evening. Followed by discussions with the audience, these screenings revive the spirit of the Festival’s film club by presenting inventive art-house films. A moment of sharing, discovery, and emotion for all in the Chauffailles cinema.

* In the latest Cryptology #3 (Spring 2025), Lovecraftian Will Murray has an article on the Charlton horror comics. I recall some of these titles fondly, when they were unusual items found in the dusty bargain-boxes of British comics shops.

Writer Will Murray does the first part of “A Requiem For Charlton Horror”, looking at their early horror titles with a selection of covers.

* Also in comics, Broken Frontier reports this week that Gou Tanabe’s Comics Adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ “is to be translated and published by Dark Horse” in English. Set for January 2026.

* Feuilleton has “Lettering Lovecraft”, meaning hand-lettering.

* DiGRA 2025 now has its papers and abstracts online. This year’s major videogames think-fest will offer papers such as “Tentacle to the Metal: Ecosophy, Metamodernism, and Splatoon 3″, “The Fractured Imbunche: a Study of Chilean Horror Games”, and (abstract only) “Ecology of Killer Insects and Violent Nature in Grounded”.

* Also in the world of games, Form of Dread has a new and very detailed and technical review of Cthulhu by Torchlight. This new gamer book is meant to transform the core tabletop RPG game D&D 5.5e into a Lovecraftian world.

The single biggest highlight of Cthulhu by Torchlight are the subclasses, which are among the better-designed out of all those that I have seen made for 5e. [But the] bestiary [is disappointing], specifically the statblocks of the Mythos Deities. These are genuinely underwhelming, having few options to influence the battlefield and generally being ‘bruisers with one extra trick up their sleeve’.

Not to be confused with Cthulhu by Gaslight.

* A fledgling attempt to pin down some of the linguistic specifics of a R’lyehian language.

* Forthcoming, a French edition of Encyclopedie H.P. Lovecraft, being the encyclopaedia by Joshi & Schultz. Due in mid October 2025 from Bragalonne, according to Amazon UK. 500 pages and newly illustrated.

* A very niche new survey of a subset of Lovecraftian tales, the illustrated Powerpoint presentation “Cthulhu Returns to Camelot: New Works of Lovecraft-Inspired Arthurian Fiction” (May 2025). Available from academia.edu, and note that a Google Scholar search will get you an open PDF download without having to sign up to academia.edu.

* Seeming to me to be relevant to Lovecraft’s travels and campaigns to keep venerable old buildings, and his sense of resigned loss when they were demolished, is the new journal article “Spectres of gentrification: Towards a hauntological framework for exploring the impacts of gentrification” (2025)…

Using a case study of a gentrifying neighbourhood in New England, this article describes the utility of the hauntological framework in understanding ‘more than material’ impacts of gentrification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, alongside photovoice and walking interviews with long-time residents, this article describes how participants and residents are often haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood.

* A new book chapter, “Empty horizons: Library music and the occult”, meaning stock ‘music library’ tracks which were licensed by production companies and broadcasters and used to accompany supernatural scenes. Part of the new book Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2025).

This essay focuses on a particular strain of library music that engages with the occult and the supernatural, produced at a time when there was a countercultural fascination with esoteric belief systems. New technologies such as the Moog and Arp synthesizers were able to create other-worldly sounds, the like of which had not been heard before

* And finally, in keeping with this HPLink’s focus on comics and music, “The Music from Beyond”. A Chamber of Darkness comic-book adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Zann”.

— End-quotes —

“Decidedly, Grandpa is an eye-man & not an ear-man! If any one thing killed my musical taste it was the violin-lessons I took betwixt the ages of 7 & 9. Back in ’97 I thought I liked music, but a year or two of classico-academic drill on a 3/4 size fiddle soured me completely. They wouldn’t let me scrape the tunes I wanted, but confined me to useful exercises & insipid folk-tunes out of a book. As a result, practicing became a hell, & the whole damn practicing became a hell, & the whole damn business drove me so close to nervous exhaustion that two physicians (I was little short of a neurotic semi-invalid as a kid) told my mother that a halt would have to be called. […] Today I can scarcely tell one end of a violin from another, & don’t recall a cursed thing about reading music” [i.e. from sheet music] — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., December 1936.

“Merely because the world is haphazard & imperfect, with certain satisfactory [aesthetic] adjustments attainable by only a part of the population, he jumps to the erroneous & irrelevant conclusion that nobody can attain such adjustments; that those who say they do merely pretend it, & that it is a waste of time to seek such a type of felicity. In other words, because some people can’t appreciate music, it is foolish for anybody to seek the pleasures of harmony.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, October 1933.

“I revel in absolutely frivolous light opera & musical comedy airs, I cannot bear serious Music with a capital M. However, I am not so narrow that I do not understand its aesthetic value, & I never laugh at it in the manner of Lord North and other celebrated anti-musical personages. So fond am I of light and catchy music, that I tried to write a comic opera when about ten years old!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Despite my vast ignorance [of music], there are musical compositions which tend to evoke from my imagination certain definitely visual concepts which could be expressed (had one the skill) either in poetry or painting.” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, May 1934.

HPLinks #47 – vitalist Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the Po Delta, re-evaluating CAS, a new Lovecraft Atlas, and more…

24 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

HPLinks #47.

* More Lovecraft + philosophy. New from Hungary, “Lovecraft, antimodernism and new vitalisms” (2025)… “H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre is considered as a specific genre iteration of antimodernist themes, but also as a formative influence on the philosophy of speculative realism.” In Hungarian from the Dept. of Philosophy at Zagreb, and freely available for download.

* Overthink podcast Episode 134: Weirdness with Eric Schwitzgebel, interviewing Eric about his philosophy book Weirdness of the World (Princeton University Press, 2024). With a substantial discussion of the book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

* Aetherium Arcana blog has a new short article on “Lovecraft and the Unconscious Structure of Empire”, followed by the new longer essay “Self-devouring Racism: Subversion and Collapse in Lovecraft’s Mythos”.

* New from Spain in English and open-access, “Development of Expert Systems by means of Large Language Models”. The authors feed Lovecraft’s fiction to a leading AI LLM, and have it try to find and map connections. Freely available online, those the images are rubbish quality and partly unreadable even in the source zip. This is as good as they get…

* Strange Aeons has a Catalog and Contacts link-list for the Italian Lovecraftians. Seems to have first appeared in 2023, and was last updated on 23rd July 2025.

* Also in Italy, Wu Ming 1 on Lovecraft, appearing at the Lunatico Festival. On 25th July 2025 he presents his new novel featuring Lovecraft-as-character, and then… “the geographer Francesco Visentin and Andrea Olivieri will dialogue with the author”. Followed by a presentation of…

The graphic-musical project [that depicts] the imaginary journey of H.P. Lovecraft in the Po Delta in 1926, between hallucinated visions, esoteric confraternities and monstrous water creatures. Designed by the Italian-English musician Jet Set Roger and the Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograph, preseting a concert event that merges music and literature in a game of cross-media references with the Wu Ming novel.

* Decadent Serpent considers “The Reevaluations of Clark Ashton Smith”. Part of the discussion is of “The Quest of Iranon” by Lovecraft, compared to “Xeethra” by CAS.

* Black Gate has a long event-report with excellent photographs, “Post Oaks and Sand Roughs: A first trek to Howard Days” 2025.

* A useful new survey article of all the “Biographies of Robert E. Howard”, issued prior to the new and well-reviewed biography from the University of North Texas Press.

* Forthcoming in French, Atlas Lovecraft, a 180-page book that sounds like a cartographic atlas for Lovecaft. Due in October 2025 from reputable publisher Bragelonne.

A completely unprecedented atlas offering tangible geographic and cartographic representations of the emblematic places of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. An illustrated work in colour presenting plans of Providence, the State of Massachussetts, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich and its region, a map of the Antarctic Expedition and a cartographic statement of mountain areas… [etc]

* And finally, a LoRA add-on for Flux, meant for generating images of whimsical toon Happy Shoggoths. Not on CivitAi, thankfully — since (as of today) the go-to site for creative AI is effectively banned here in the UK. I’m happy now that I nipped in just in time with my Windows 11 Superlite upgrade, and thus I now have the SD 1.5 turbo LoRAs, SDXL, Flux Kontext and Wan2.1 all downloaded and set up with workflows and ComfyUI to run them.

— End-quotes —

“I have always been fond of maps & geographical details (I’ve drawn a map of “Arkham’ to keep my local references straight), & my lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., February 1936.

“I used to row [in a boat] considerably on the [River] Seekonk, which you’ll find on your city map … and also on general maps of R.I. Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, April 1934.

[Lovecraft is delighted to find that he can circumnavigate the city of Charleston entirely via its many graveyards …] “the President of the Charleston Garden Club some time ago form’d the notion of mapping out an idyllic cross-town walk which might include as many as possible of these with a fair degree of continuity.” — Lovecraft, “An Account of Charleston”.

[Lovecraft rises to the very top of the highest building in New York City …] “The assembled clan’s first move was up — clean up to the top of N.Y.! It costs half a ducat [dollar] per rube [person], and is worth it. Loveman was dizzy, but your grandpa wasn’t — gawd knows how hard I worked when I was ten years old to conquer my native tendency to dizziness from altitudes! I walked on high railway trestles, and hell knows what not! But I digress. All Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City lay below, outspread like a map — in fact, I told Mortonius [Morton] that the city-planners had done an excellent job in making the place almost as good as the map in my Hammond Atlas at home.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1922.

HPLinks #46 – Lovecraft & Science conference report, CAS conference, Sonia update, Vondy letters, Tanabe and Stanley at work on new projects, and more…

17 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #46.

* In the journal Transatlantica, a new and detailed 5,000-word summary and conference report from the recent major international conference on Lovecraft and the Sciences, held at the University of Poitiers from 4th-6th December 2024. In French, but here’s the Google Translate link.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Among other things, he has news of a one-day conference “The Smith Circle: A Clark Ashton Smith Conference”. To be held in Smith’s hometown of Auburn, California, at the Auburn Carnegie Library on 18th January 2026. Booking now.

* My thanks to Ken Faig for tipping me off to Sean Donnelly’s long article on the Vondy-Spink correspondence file…

I sat down with the file of Vondy-Helm letters and hoped to find some clues. After all, they both knew Lovecraft and they were writing to each other during the last 14 years of Lovecraft’s life. There must be some reference to him in all those letters.

* The Papers of Sonia H. Davis blog (on Lovecraft’s wife) has an update on 2025 Sonia Scholarship.

* New from the Italians, Potrebbe anche non esserci piu un mondo (2025)…

Lovecraft’s longest single letter, delivered to the Italian reader in the form of a book. Here is Lovecraft as a man who is sober and calm, full of healthy common-sense, an acute and resigned critic of the modern age and anticipator of the future.

Possibly the letter to Woodburn Harris, then? Although the blurb has it that the letter was addressed to an unknown recipient.

* A 700-page script? No problem, for the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre. Purgatory Chasm is their new audio production with a difference, a choose-your-own-adventure in audio with multiple storylines and music. The setting is 1922, when a geologist discovers mysterious glyphs and artifacts in a New England cave.

* Another excellent new reading of R.E. Howard’s ‘El Borak’ tales, “The Lost Valley of Iskander”. Free on YouTube. Note that the reader’s Patreon patrons are able to suggest stories to be newly recorded in future.

* Gou Tanabe has reportedly started work on his manga adaptation of Dexter Ward. Given the length and complexity, I’d imagine it might be offered across two or more graphic-novel volumes? Although, given the glacial pace at which his work reaches an official English translation, I guess we may not see it in English for three or four years yet.

* Another more long-term project should be underway relatively soon. Richard Stanley’s movie version of The Dunwich Horror is still planning to start filming in Providence in early 2026. The movie aims to be the follow-up to his acclaimed Color Out of Space movie, set well after the events of Color and making Dunwich into “a futuristic version of Arkham”. It seems that Stanley hopes to film on the Brown campus and on College Hill, in his words… “to actually shoot the beast on College Hill and on the Brown campus”, fees and campus politics permitting. So presumably digital CG / AI / FX will give the present-day Providence a makeover, transforming it into a future-Arkham. Sounds good.

* HPL in the 18th century.

* Call of Cthulhu Ireland (Chaosium, 2025) is… “an update of the 2012 Miskatonic University Library Association (MULA) Monograph ‘Mysteries of Ireland'” for role-play gamers. 230+ pages, a 1920s setting, and also likely to be of interest to writers (as a spur to ideas and plotting within this setting). Currently nominated for the 2025 ENNIES Awards for new RPG books. Doesn’t appear to be on Amazon, and is possibly only on DriveThru RPG (which flung a ‘captcha’ road-block at me on trying to visit, and thus I didn’t visit and they don’t get a link here).

* And finally, order now to beat a 5% price-rise at print-on-demand publisher Lulu. All the store’s print book prices go up by 5% from 1st August 2025, due to inflationary back-end costs.

— End-quotes —

“… according to O’Hart’s Pedigrees [Irish Pedigrees (1892)] [in my family-tree] my Caseys are descended from Baudoin Ui Niall (O’Neill), 137th King of Ireland. Begorra …” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1933.

“My mother and aunts knew the daughters of Joseph Banigan from childhood, and found them really worthy in every respect. The grandchildren were my earliest playmates, though it made me shudder in my British soul to know ‘Dicky Banigan’, ‘Robert McElroy’, ‘Edmund Sullivan’, etc!! [… The Banigan mansion is now] one of the ‘show places’ of the neighbourhood, and excited Klei[ner]’s vast admiration when he was here. It is a Gothic manor-house of brick and stone, such as its peasant builder may have seen and admired at a distance in his boyhood in Ould Oireland. The grounds are extensive and beautifully kept, with hedges, trees, and stables of pleasing architecture. It lies almost exactly half way betwixt the house where I was born, and that which I inhabit. Altogether, I fancy the Irish have helped rather than harmed the locality!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, September 1919.

“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.” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

“Most conservative anthropologists think it unlikely that — despite the vivid legends of diminutive Picts and elfin brownies in Scotland, tiny fairies and subterrene leprechauns in Ireland, sinister underground ‘little people’ in Wales, and Robin Goodfellow’s merry crew in England — any miniature race has ever actually inhabited the British Isles. We derive such tales entirely from the experience of our ancestors at a former stage of migration on the European continent.” — Lovecraft, “Some Backgrounds of Fairyland”.

HPL in the 18th century

12 Saturday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

≈ 1 Comment

HPL in the 18th century. Would he have been a College Hill gent as he hoped, or (more likely) a jobbing waterfront printer and local news-sheet editor?

No, not the result of the new Flux Kontext, which is a bit ‘off’ in terms of this sort of thing since it works from a single image. Also slow. Instead I made an SDXL LoRa of his face and shoulders, and used it with the superfast four-step SDXL checkpoint realvisxlV50_v50LightningBakedvae.safetensors   Considering this generates a 1024px image in about 3 seconds on a very modest 12Gb graphics card, the quality here is acceptable. Not superb, a little glitchy if you look hard for it… but acceptable. And yes, tweaking the prompt will cause him to smile. But I thought I’d spare the reader that.

The new Flux Kontext does have its uses though, including easy manga-fication of images.

HPLinks #45 – more Lovecraft philosophy, Hokusai, Pennell for SDXL, fine bindings, Carter by Tanabe, horror sound FX, and more…

10 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #45.

* In the latest edition of the journal Castilla: Estudios de Literatura, a review in Spanish of the Spanish book A Traves del Abismo: H.P. Lovecraft y el horror ontologico (2024). (‘Through the abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and ontological horror’). The review is freely available online, under Creative Commons Attribution. The book is also reviewed in the latest 2025 issue of the open-access journal Brumal: Revista de investigacion sobre lo Fantastico.

* A new book-a-journal from Argentina, Ontologia Analeptica IV, H.P. Lovecraft: La Anti-vida y el destino cosmico (2025). (‘H.P. Lovecraft: Anti-Life and Cosmic Destiny’). The book is paid, and is currently available to buy.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the most decisive writers who speaks to our present moment. With his work he penetrated to the heart of the great civilization changes, progress and modernity that define contemporary times. In doing so he has become a prophet of the future of humanity. Therefore, his work is here analyzed from an eminently philosophical perspective, while also engaging closely with the literature.

* Deep Cuts takes an extensive look at “Lovecraft & Hokusai”, the Japanese print artist. Lovecraft — an appreciator of Japanese screen actors and arts since his teens — saw a 1934 exhibition of his prints in Providence, and heard a lecture on them…

a splendid lecture & special exhibition pertaining to my favourite Hokusai, & the entire [Art Museum, Providence] quarterly bulletin was devoted to the subject of Japanese prints”. (Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V, page 127)

* Flame Tree Publishing is offering a 2026 Wall Calendar, Lovecraft: Illustrated by Jason Engle.

* The Yog-Blogsoth blog is in the midst of drawing and posting some of the more obscure creatures referenced in the Lovecraft mythos and beyond.

* New on YouTube, the explainer video “What is the Robert E. Howard Foundation?”. Also a fine new Josh Greenwood 84-minute reading of the ancient Irish tale “The Grey God Passes” by Robert E. Howard.

* Adam’s Notes / Eric’s Notes delves into “Robert E. Howard, Grettir the Outlaw, and the origins of two-fisted Weird Fiction”.

* PulpFest surveys “Fifty Years of The Man of Bronze”, anticipating the Doc Savage Doc Con 2025 and PulpFest combo in August 2025. In a fine example of local outreach, note also that the article states… “The general public is welcome to attend our afternoon and evening programming events free of charge”.

* Who knew? A Jack Kirby exhibition in Los Angeles, on now. “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity” is a substantial exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, until 1st March 2026.

* The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2025, set for 22nd-24th August 2025 in Providence. No tickets available yet, but it can’t be long now.

* The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) announce their forthcoming The H.P. Lovecraft Experience, a sumptuous table-trembling volume of the Joshi-corrected texts, plus… “a reader’s guide to ten of the most significant tales”. Currently pre-ordering.

* Amazon is listing Gou Tanabe’s L’Indicible for release as a French hardcover on 4th September 2025. This appears to be his graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter tales, presumably minus the Dream Quest. Possibly with some biographical detours(?)…

Gou Tanabe brilliantly gives body to Randolph Carter, Alter Ego of H.P. Lovecraft … and through him express the thoughts and fears of the inventor of the cosmic horror.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of “Bibliography Of H.P. Lovecraft”, which was published in the journal Extrapolation in 1961. Long since superseded as a bibliography, but some may want it as an indicator of what was available to scholars by the early 1960s.

* And finally, need sound FX .WAV files for your project? An Archive.org .torrent has Stable Audio Open 1.0 WebUI Portable for Windows. This AI ingested all the public domain field-recording clips at Freesound, into a prompt-able local AI in a very simple interface. Tested and working on Windows 11. See the review for useful instructions for this standalone portable version. Not to be confused with a very similarly named music-generator.

Multitracking is done in the prompt, e.g. “A balanced mix between a good field recording of a man walking through dry leaves in winter, and a recording of small birds calling plaintively in the surrounding Canadian boreal forest.”

— End-quotes —

“Fine bindings don’t make good text!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1936.

“Acquire as many books of the right sort as you can afford to house, for ownership means easy and repeated access and permanent usefulness. Don’t be a foppish hoarder of fine bindings and first editions. Get books for what’s in them, and be glad enough of that. Marvellous bargains can be found on the dime counters of second-hand shops, and a really good library can be picked up at surprisingly little cost.” — Lovecraft, “Suggestions for a Reading Guide”.

Though some items may be curiously unobtainable…

“A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith.” — excised from an unpublished typescript for Lovecraft’s “The Hound”, before publication.

And don’t forget to buy some fire insurance…

“The flames devoured the volumes greedily — leaping up in strange colours and emitting indescribably hideous odours as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormy bindings succumbed to the devastating element.” — Lovecraft recounts a dream he had, to Bernard Austin Dwyer in August 1933.

HPLinks #44 – Whelan in the Mountains, Howard Days recordings, sea serpents and saurians, and more…

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #44.

* Deep Cuts this week examines “Black Thirst” by C.L. Moore and notes Lovecraft’s several reactions to the story when it appeared in Weird Tales in 1934.

* From the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, a Musical Engineering team issue a final report for 2025. Freely available online…

We chose the Cthulhu mythos as a conceptual anchor — not for its narrative, but for its emphasis on the “indescribable” and the unseen, which aligns with sound’s capacity to express fear beyond the visual realm. Guided by psychoacoustic theory, we designed two contrasting video clips with different sonic objectives.

* On SubStack, “The Life of Michael – artist Michael Whelan at 75”. Showing and discussing his painting “The Astrophysicist” (2008). Elsewhere, DMR brings news that Whelan is not resting on his 50 years of laurels, and that… “he is, at this moment, finishing up a glorious illustrated version of Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ for Centipede Press.”

* Broken Frontier reviews Gou Tanabe’s “The Colour Out of Space” graphic-novel in its just-released English translation. Spoilers-alert (for those who haven’t read the tale, which apparently includes at least one of Lovecraft’s most vocal critics).

* The latest The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast has a long discussion of “Art and the Cthulhu Mythos”, and the topics-list suggests the listener will enjoy widely-spiralling flights through esoteric dreamlands.

* From an Argentine journal, a new survey of “Nueva ficcion extrana Latinoamericana: hibridaciones narrativas, cine y juegos de rol” (‘New Latin American Weird Fiction: narrative hybridations, cinema and role-playing games’) (2025). Freely available online.

* Faunus 51 has been published, this being the scholarly journal devoted to Arthur Machen.

* A new scholarly overlay journal which may interest some, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism. The editors welcome your news of items and links of interest.

* Lots of R.E. Howard audio material this week, in the wake of the annual Howard Days event in Texas. Recordings now online include “Bob Howard & the Spicy Adventurers” (from PulpFest, rather than Howard Days), “Robert E. Howard in 1935, Professional and Personal”, “What’s Up with REH?” (on new publications coming down the dark river), “Spear & Fang” (REH’s first published story), and “Bob’s Photos”. Also, new on YouTube is a good free reading of the Solomon Kane tale “Rattle of Bones” by Robert E. Howard. A weary Solomon visits a forest inn for the night, with a travelling companion.

* Talking of rattling bones, a free LoRA add-on for models based on the AI image generator SDXL titled Wizard’s Vintage Creepy Creatures. This is Wizard as in ‘the vintage weekly British comic’. This well-loved title may recalled by British readers of a certain age, who may also recall the ‘Ken Reid’s Creepy Creations’ splash pages.

Ken (or perhaps a company heavily inspired by him) was also into generative art long before anyone else, shipping a long-ago ‘dial a monster’ cardboard-constructed frame to toy shops. Cleverly constructed with knobbed-dials which changed the head, eyes, nose, mouth/chin parts, to assemble an ever-changing random ‘creepy portrait’…

I recall it fondly from boyhood, but have never been able to find any trace of it since it was jettisoned during a house move. Until a Facebook page popped up recently, from the owner of what must now be one of the rarest vintage toys in the world. He too had been utterly unable to discover anything about it, but he managed to obtain one after a long search.

* Talking of generative image-making, I’m currently testing the new free image-editing AI called Flux Kontext Dev run in ComfyUI. I find it excellent for difficult watermark removal (e.g. a slip of cellophane with lettering on it saying “DO NOT COPY”, placed over the image of an eBay postcard). But it’s too crude for auto-colorisation of b&w images, compared to online services such as Palette or Kolorize. That’s a pity, and its line-art/comic style-transfer also leaves much to be desired in terms of subtlety. It can however easily take a head-and-shoulders picture and envision the person in a new environment. Such as Lovecraft riding the ‘last bus to Innsmouth’, here made by using Khoi Nguyen’s digital sculpt of Lovecraft’s head as the seed…

I’ve yet to explore its similar full-body capabilities, which apparently include the ability to keep intact the character costumes in the seed image (e.g. full-body character concept-art).

* For the real Lovecraft, visit the Wisconsin Historical Society H.P. Lovecraft | Photograph page, as there they offer the option to purchase a large version. Hopefully without what looks like a dreadful bit of scanner-moire across HPL’s cheek. Though perhaps that’s there to stymie AI upscaling using Gigapixel AI. Or maybe just original protective cellophane. From their ‘Harold Gauer papers, 1935-2008’.

* Now that I run Windows 11 as my OS, I can also test various locally-run “LLM” AIs. Next up, installing LM Studio AnythingLLM MSTY and trying out some of the local AIs. Eventually ones for audiobook and music/FX production, and Zork-style ‘choose your own adventure’ text-RPGs. Not to mention eventually distilling a ‘Lovecraft reanimated’ AI chatbot. I know… it’s a pleasant summer (for once) in England and I should be jigging around and eating dodgy hot-dogs at music festivals etc. However, living the high-life costs $’s and AI is free. No contest, and no dysentery.

* Talking of audiobooks… Librivox has just released a Weird Tales Double Feature public-domain audiobook. This being “The Salem Horror” by Henry Kuttner and “The Black Kiss” by Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.

* In the latest edition of The Fossil, the worthy and long-running journal of the Historians of Amateur Journalism… “David Goudsward describes a sea serpent that was the subject of a 1923 story written by Sonia Greene [Lovecraft’s wife]”. Freely available online.

* Hot from Pulpfest, a recording of a panel on Pulp Paleontology”, on dinosaurs and dinosaur-hunters in the pulps.

* And finally, talking of digging up fossils… “Startling Percentage of Neuroscientists Say We Could Extract Memories From Dead Brains”, referencing a paper published in the open-access megajournal PLOS One. Maybe we could store them inside the Moon in future?

— End-quotes —

“A few days ago I went over to Anastasia Island […] Tall trees casting a sinister twilight over shallow lagoons — funeral garlands of trailing Spanish moss — and the whole ground surface alive with scaly, wriggling saurians” — Lovecraft visits an alligator island in Florida, May 1925.

“… many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance — scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling.” — from “The Nameless City”.

“I am not only a non-modern but a violent anti-modern. Intellectually I believe in nothing; aesthetically I believe only in the irradiate dreams of childhood. Sophistication I loathe and abhor with all the venom inherited from aeons of reptile and saurian ancestors in palaeolithic abysms of terrestrial history, and I even despise intellect when not directly concerned in the process of philosophical and scientific intellection. By this latter paradox I mean that I see nothing of beauty or pleasure in intellect, but only the hideous fascination of the forbidden Golden Door for the miserable Agib who stands before it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, October 1921.