HPLinks #54 – Poet of the Abyss, Crypt unearthed, Angell Street, Coq translated, The Spark Devil and more…

12 Friday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #54.

* The latest The Vermilion reviews a new Italian book whose title translates as H.P Lovecraft: Poet of the abyss (2025). Not on Amazon UK, or even Amazon Italy.

The review is in English but seems to have been auto-translated from the Italian into English. Thus I’ve clarified it in this quote…

… an exhaustive manual [of Lovecraft], full of information of all kinds, suitable for readings of different intensity, and with a narrative that includes biographical details and curious anecdotes, together with an in-depth analysis of the entire work and exploring the literary, philosophical and esoteric connections of its production. The book does not neglect a critical and attentive look at the vast secondary literature …

* I seem to have missed noting a ‘zine release. Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu #115 was published back in summer 2023, and I see it can still be had as a digital ebook. Mostly fiction, but there’s also an interview with Richard A. Lupoff, and an essay comparing “At the Mountains of Madness” with the 1933 novel which was later made as the ‘finding Shangri-la in the mountains’ movie Lost Horizon.

* The HPLHS has announced their new edition of The Gentleman from Angell Street, being the 1961 book of Eddy memories of their knowing Lovecraft in the Providence of the 1920s. The new $65 edition is described as a… “substantially expanded and embellished edition … more than doubling its size” to 174 pages. I should note that some of these supposed memories have been criticized as “fabrications” (Joshi and Schultz, Lovecraft Encyclopedia), and one hopes these will be footnoted as such. But the book’s page has nothing on that point. Indeed, we’re not even told if buyers will actually get any new information about Lovecraft. Nor do we see a contents-page. The new expanded edition is set to ship in September 2025, and is currently pre-ordering.

* New in the Spanish open-access scholarly journal Alambique, two reviews of the recent book Resena de Fantasia epica Espanola (1842-1903) (2024). The book…. “seeks to fill [a] historiographical gap by exploring the Spanish roots of epic fantasy through a theoretical analysis and an anthology of representative texts.” Review 1 and review 2. Freely available online, and both reviews are in Spanish.

* I see that Maurice Sand’s Conan-like epic fantasy novel Le Coq aux Cheveux D’or (1867) has been reprinted in paperback in France, by PRNG in 2024. The book…

… reads as one of the first heroic fantasy or even sword-and-sorcery works ever written in modern times. The ‘rooster’ of the title looks and acts in a similar way to Howard’s Conan. Its fictional world is also fully Howardian both for its themes and its style.” (from the journal article “A Century of High Fantasy in Latin Europe”).

The new paperback of Le Coq is in French, and scans of the original book are not on Hathi or Archive.org. However, there is now a free English translation PDF on Archive.org.

* The Sprague de Camp Fan blog has a new and lengthy survey of publications related to Robert E. Howard’s early schoolboy writings.

* VoegelinView reviews the new book John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism (2025) and asks why this English author is today “ignored by readers and academics alike?”. Well… he’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I did try to read his A Glastonbury Romance once, having managed to actually find a copy in those pre-Internet days. But I recall he was just so boring that I gave up after a chapter or two, and for £1 passed the then-scarce book on to a colleague who was seeking a copy. The new review does interest though, since it reveals something new to me, that… “his last novels are ‘fantasies’ that can read like a kind of futuristic science-fiction”. SF Encyclopedia notes the relevant titles and some details of contents, remarking that his final works are… “fabulations, some of them unhinged”.

* A new podcast “History in Flames with Robert Bartlett”, a long interview with the author of a new book on the destruction of mediaeval manuscripts over the centuries. Possibly a useful backgrounder for Mythos writers and RPG makers?

* The latest Appendix N Book Club podcast discusses H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of From The Sorcerer’s Scroll a long-ago ‘zine which had the article “The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons” (1978). Last month Grognardia had a post on this same seminal article. It appears to have been one of the very earliest attempts to translate what was then the “Lovecraftian Mythos” into role-playing games (actually it was Lovecraft + Derleth, but few could tell the difference back then).

* Grognardia is also developing a new RPG for Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and now has a public comments and suggestions post on his blog, which welcomes ideas and suggestions.

* The HPLHS has a pre-order page for their The Spark Devil, this being a complete prop-heavy Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure set in Providence in 1935. It… “makes extensive use of real Providence history and locations to create the most authentic setting possible”. Set to ship in October 2025. Also includes audio-props, which play via this device-prop which is included in the boxed-set…

* I see another nice set for luxury tabletop gaming, seemingly this very week. New Call of Cthulhu collector editions… “for Pulp Cthulhu, The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic, and the epic Masks of Nyarlathotep [adventure, in two volumes]”.

* And finally, LongPage is a new dataset of 300 novels with applied… “multi-layered ‘planning traces’ including character archetypes, story arcs, world rules, and scene breakdowns.” It’s free, uses public-domain, and seems useful for training AIs to plot and plan (or even write) novels in a coherent manner. I guess RPG makers may also find a use for this.

— End-quotes —

— Lovecraft on Angell Street —

[On the death of his beloved grandfather in 1904, Lovecraft at age 13] … mother and I were forced to vacate the beautiful estate at 454 Angell Street [built by his grandfather in 1880–81, and then numbered 194] … My home had been my ideal of Paradise and my source of inspiration — but it was to be profaned and altered by other hands. Life from that day has held for me but one ambition — to regain the old place and re­establish its glory — a thing I fear I can never accomplish.”

“… my grandfather transferred all his interests to Providence (where his offices had always been) & erected one of the handsomest residences in the city — to me, the handsomest — my own beloved birthplace! [in Angell Street]. The spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees, & a delightful fountain. Back of the stable is the orchard, whose fruits have delighted so many of my sad (?) childish hours. The place is sold now, & many of the things I have described in the present tense, ought to be described in the past tense. The house has been sold to one purchaser; the stable & orchard to another; & an ugly garage now smells to high heaven where once the crystal waters of the fountain played! Such degeneracy! Why could not the purchaser have kept his car elsewhere, & suffered the ancient fount to sparkle as of yore?”

“I never liked any other colour combination so well as black-and-gold. To my naive and undeveloped aesthetick sense that represents about the apex of dignified beauty — perhaps because that was the scheme in the front hall of my birthplace, 454 Angell Street. […] Ebony and gold is the aesthetick mixture [I like] — although old gold and rose is a great scheme, as the front parlour of my birthplace amply proved. There was an almost Oriental richness in that room, as in the palace of a caliph — I used to read the Arabian Nights there with an especial zest.”

HPLinks #53 – Penumbra, Lovecraft Annual, Dreamlands RPG, del Toro collection for sale, Beowulf vs. Conan, Conan vs Cthulhu, and more…

03 Wednesday Sep 2025

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HPLinks #53.

* S.T. Joshi’s annual journal has a new issue listed, Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism, No. 6 (Autumn 2025). Among others…

Mario Sanchez Gumiel contributes a profound analysis of the Spanish writer Pompeu Gener, whose work shows analogies with Lovecraft, Machen, and other leading weird writers. John C. Tibbetts supplies a broad overview of the weird work of English writer Saki (H.H. Munro)

* S.T. Joshi’s Blog also announces a new volume of his essays, Aspects of the Weird Tale (2025), featuring among others… “several new essays on Lovecraft [and] a long essay on the weird work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. Available now as a budget Amazon ebook, and on receiving the 10% free sample I also see an essay on the rural/city divide in Dunsany, and that the Lovecraft essays are on Lovecraft’s Egyptian mummies, poetry about Lovecraft, Arthur S. Koki on Lovecraft, “Mountains” (unknown focus), Lovecraft and Weird Art, and Lovecraft in Audio.

* Also on Amazon, the latest Lovecraft Annual No. 19 (2025) is now listed there and appears to be shipping. No sign of its fellow annual journal The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies since 2023, so far as I can find.

* New in English in a Turkish open-access journal, the substantial “Translating Violence and Horror in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos: A Comparative Study of English & Turkish Versions” (2025).

* From Charles University in Prague, a dissertation in English offering a “Literary Comparison of Beowulf and R.E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian” (2024). Freely available online.

* A stop-motion short advert, publicising a new Conan action-figure toy… “features the new Conan figure in battle with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu”. No link here, as Animation Magazine blocks all VPN users in an obnoxious manner.

* My Tolkien Gleanings newsletter is now available at a new URL. Tracking and linking news of Tolkien scholarship, though only occasionally noting items concerning The Silmarillion and the invented languages. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds etc.

* Free and available now, my distillation of Lovecraft for NovelForge AI, the $50 novel-writing software. The packages should work with the trial version of this Windows software, which so far as I know never expires.

* The Tolkien and Fantasy blog has a new post “Correcting the ‘Facts’ about A. Merritt’s Autobiographical Writings”. As you’ll recall, Merritt was admired by Lovecraft and idolized by the early readers of Weird Tales magazine.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the British edition of Astounding magazine. Looks like it’s 1943-1955, and perhaps not a complete run for those years.

* How high will it go? A copy of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters Vol. 1 (1911-1924) in fine condition, on eBay with six days to go.

* A new issue of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion.

* London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (2025).

* New to me, the forthcoming table-trembler The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026). Setting a new record in jaw-dropping academic book pricing, at £550 ($740), albeit for a brain-eating 1,900 pages. One hopes that the editor has read the recent essay in the Lovecraft Annual, which very persuasively demonstrates that Lovecraft created the modern zombie and states that the master’s standing as “the font of the modern zombie is unchallengeable” (Lovecraft Annual 2020). Lovecraft is, however, not mentioned in the book’s blurb.

* The risk of Californian wildfires, and concerns about his old age, are reportedly leading movie-maker Guillermo del Toro to auction off part of his magnificent collection. The auction is being held soon via Heritage Auctions, and one hopes there will be a fabulous free PDF catalogue. TheoFantastique has the details and links. I’m uncertain if del Toro’s life-size H.P. Lovecraft sculpture will be under the hammer. Possibly not, I would guess.

* And talking of large amounts of vintage pop culture, free at CivitAI is a new generator of Scooby-Doo backgrounds for use with SDXL image-generation models. Spooky old-school 1970s Scooby Doo-style animation backdrops galore, freely re-usable… just add your own prompts.

* Grognardia’s blog reports that he’s been so taken by Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales of late that he’s… “now devoting myself to the development of an Old School Essentials-derived Dreamlands RPG, Dream-Quest.” Not AI, I assume. I would love a well-made text-based Dreamlands adventure as a solo role-play that was run and managed by an AI. With the player untroubled by fussy-dusty stats and rules, which would nevertheless still be whirring away in the background. Nothing like that is currently available, so far as I know.

* And finally, Pickman’s Hidden Atelier is a new YouTube channel that will aim to review only Lovecraftian videogames. And fairly obscure ones, by the look of it — first up is a 1991 Sega Mega Drive title.

— End-quotes —

“I studied Old London intensively years ago, & could ramble guideless around it from Hampstead Heath to the Elephant & Castle!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933. (Mooted in a letter as the basis for an unwritten Lovecraft story starting in Old London and ending in Roman horrors elsewhere).

“In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.” — Lovecraft, opening lines of “The Descendent” (fragment).

“The [post]card from antique Londinium [London] duly came, & filled me with envy at your opportunity to behold civilisation’s capital, if only for a single full day. If I were in Europe, I would devote not less than 2 or 3 weeks to London — & might not get outside of Britain at all. The British Museum card surely reveals one of my (or Klarkash-Ton’s or Sonny Belknap’s) extra-human monsters in disguise — indeed, I am positive that this entity reached Java as a relique of sunken Mu, or of the still more monstrous & fabulous R’lyeh! Thanks!” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1932.

The most likely Java deity image in the current British Museum collection, which would also make for a postcard, would be this fine drawing of an elephant-god sculpture…

“Coming early to London, I saw as a Child many of the celebrated Men of King William’s Reign, including the lamented Mr. Dryden, who sat much at the Tables of Will’s Coffee-House. With Mr. Addison and Dr. Swift I later became very well acquainted, and was an even more familiar Friend to Mr. Pope, whom I knew and respected till the Day of his Death.” — Lovecraft uses his own childhood attic encounter with the 18th century wits, in his “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”.

“I share most emphatically your regret at the distance between 278 Grove & 598 Angell, & wish we both lived in Old London, within walking distance of Will’s & of each other’s homes.” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, December 1918. “Will’s” coffee-house was a key London gathering place of 18th century wits and poets.

Release: Lovecraft for NovelForge

01 Monday Sep 2025

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As promised, I’ve released my free Lovecraft dictionary and assistant. This is a free add-on for installing into the creative-writing software NovelForge AI 3.x. The add-on enables the writer to be guided by words and examples from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, as they write.

The ‘made by one man’ software NovelForge can be had from Medichance, and is for Windows only. Last time I looked the free trial version does not expire and is only very lightly crippled, such as not allowing the creation of a new dictionary and assistant. I have the paid version of the software ($50, one-time purchase), so was able to use it to make these Lovecraft add-ons. Thus, if you’re on Windows then you can install the free trial and enjoy this free Lovecraft add-on in perpetuity.

NovelForge does support your local LLM AIs and also free cloud AIs, but this Lovecraft dictionary (thesaurus) and assistant are not AI. More of a unique ‘half-way house’ towards AI, guiding you toward the tone and style of Lovecraft… but not actually writing it for you.

The assistant add-on may also be useful for scholars, since it can instantly display all of Lovecraft’s sentences which use a word you just typed…

… though it won’t tell you which story they come from.

Download, unzip and then…

1) Place Lovecraft.ast and Lovecraft.jpg in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Documents\NovelForge\Assistants

2) Place Lovecraft.dic and Lovecraft.jpg in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Documents\NovelForge\Dictionaries

Then load NovelForge and use the user interface to load both add-ons.

Sadly NovelForge has no ‘dark mode’, which will be a deal-breaker for many writers. But Windowtop can force that. Not ideal, but it’ll do until NovelForge does ‘dark’ natively.

Lovecraft’s letters, poetry, essays, and ghost-writing have not been ingested. I may in time create dictionaries and assistants for those as well. For instance I have the Morton letters in .TXT format. Those were downloaded from Amazon as a .AZW3 local backup of a purchased Kindle ebook, before they stopped that. But I would first need to find an AI text processor that can identify and auto-remove all the footnotes, since that’s not something I’m going to do by hand.

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

27 Wednesday Aug 2025

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.