The Greatest Adventure (1929)

01 Friday Nov 2024

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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I see that Archive.org has the short novel The Greatest Adventure (February 1929, as reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for June 1944).

The plot (below) has some resemblance to Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness. Though the only Lovecraftian comment I can find, on this interesting 1920s ‘lost race’ / ‘dinosaur survival’ combo-tale, is in the one-page introduction to its reprint in Price’s The Antarktos Cycle: Horror and Wonder at the Ends of the Earth (2006).

My plot-spoilers follow…

A whaler brings a monstrous lizard-thing to a famous scientist in California. An ice-quake in Antarctica had torn a mysterious and huge petroleum-slicked sea-passage into the heart of the frozen continent. The sailor had followed this passage, and thus found the weird lizard-thing he now shows. He also saw boulders incised with strange lizard-shaped hieroglyphs. The scientist & co. set out for Antarctica, where they find what the sailor has described. Two of the party then fly inland and from above they spy a lush green valley with giant lizard-things in it. The petroleum is partly aflame and has melted the ice, revealing the caverns below. The revealed valley also has an enormous tunnel at one end, into which the explorers fly in their plane… only to be attacked by flying lizard-things from deeper under the earth. Meanwhile, the scientist deciphers the hieroglyphs, and learns that millions of years ago a new form of life was created by an alien race, but that this new life proved impossible to control. Antarctica was then sealed to stop the alien-engineered life from infecting the planet. The boulders with the hieroglyphs were then placed around Antarctica as a ‘warning to the future’. Meanwhile, the plane explorers have blasted open a cave entrance, which has released plant-spores they think are harmless. But in the night these spores become a fast-growing plant which envelops their plane. They extricate the plane with difficulty. Thankfully the plot has provided the leaking raw petroleum (usefully held in a natural dam) which is needed to swamp and kill the noxious alien life-forms. The petroleum flood is released and set on fire, and thus the dangerous plant-spores and lizard-things are utterly destroyed. The explorers escape and the world is saved.

Somewhat similar to Lovecraft… Antarctica as a setting, mysterious stone hieroglyphs to be translated, telling of ancient aliens who artificially create ‘Frankenstein’ life-forms they could not control, but which it turns out are still very real and menacing. However, the 1929 book seems to have passed with hardly a trace. For instance, judging by Google Books the book The Search for E.T. Bell: Also Known as John Taine appears to have been able to note only one review in a California student journal. There was however one New York Times supplement review in March 1929, a review which August Derleth spotted and mentioned in passing to Lovecraft in a letter (“a lost world of horror under the Antarctic ice”) though did not send as a cutting. This aside, and the quality of the review source, would surely have had Lovecraft enquiring at the local library to see if the review could be found in the recent back-copies. However, S.T. Joshi states… “It does not appear that Lovecraft ever read Taine” (Letters to Robert Bloch, page 15). But, I’d suggest it’s not impossible that he read the 3rd March 1929 NYT review. I regret I can locate no free copy of that review, at present.

The 1944 reprint of The Greatest Adventure appeared after Lovecraft’s death, and today it can also be found on Project Gutenberg in handy readable ebook formats.

Halloween LORAs

28 Monday Oct 2024

Posted by in AI

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Another small roundup of some of the more Lovecraftastic recent ‘style plugins’ for Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image-generation. Free, and for use free local desktop software such as InvokeAI 5.x. You will however need a decent gaming graphics-card in your PC, ideally at least an NVIDIA 3060 with 12Gb.

Mostly LORAs this time around, but also one IP-Adapter.

Straight from Ulthar Labs Inc., the new Cat Face Identity IP-Adapter. This is a special kind of plug-in that plugs your cat’s face into each image generation. It’s not just a paste-in, it ‘knows’ what cat faces look like and adapts the source-face to the context. So you could have your favourite domestic kittee go on a trip to Ulthar, etc.

A 20s Silent Movie LORA, trained on scans of good-quality 1920s publicity-stills rather than old scratched celluloid frames, by the look of it. User feedback is good.

Frankenstein Tech – World Morph LORA. A ‘world morph’ LORA that makes everything you prompt for look like it’s either an interior of Frankie’s lab or else came from it. Also good for images of His Monster.

Frankenstein Tech might be combined with also-new Gothic Interiors – v1.1 LORA.

HPLinks #11 – Germans and Germany, meteors on film, flaming politics, roaring music, and more

26 Saturday Oct 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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HPLinks #11.

“… fat boars we shall tear limb from limb with our hands, and gnaw with our sharp teeth. Great Thor, but this is life! We ask no more! We know the cool of deep woods, and the spell of their gloom and the things void of name that lurk or may lurk in them. Bards sing them to us in the dark with great hoarse voices when the fire burns low and we have drunk our mead.” — Lovecraft empathising with the pre-Christian forest-life of the Germanic tribes, in a Christmas letter to Frank Belknap Long in December 1923. Selected Letters Vol. 1, page 275.

* There’s now a firm date for the forthcoming German book Kulturelle Spiegelungen zwischen H.P. Lovecraft und Deutschland (‘Cultural Reflections: H.P. Lovecraft and Germany’). Amazon UK lists it as 11th November 2024 in hardcover from WGB Academic. It appears to focus around the… “German influences [that] are extremely numerous in the writer’s stories, poems, letters and essays, [plus the] German characters appearing in the tales [and] Lovecraft as influenced by the First World War”. One wonders if it also considers the correspondents and friends who had various links to Germany in the inter-war years?

* In The Cape Cod Chronicle, “Chatham Orpheum Theater To Conjure Up ‘Strange Magick'”. Being an interview with the maker of a new film Strange Magick: A Documentary which reportedly strains to bring Lovecraft and the occultist Aleister Crowley together in history. Though billed as a ‘documentary’, from what I’ve read it seems to be best viewed as a ‘what if’ movie? For instance, the interview notes the source book used for Crowley in the USA, Secret Agent 666, which centres on Crowley in 1914 – 1919. We learn there that Crowley wrote columns for such [pro-German] weekly newspapers as The Fatherland [and in one of these] he is said to have “sowed rationalizations for destroying the Lusitania” (i.e. the notorious sinking of a British passenger ship). A paragraph or two after these apparent facts the reader is also given the name of Crowley’s propagandist… “employer, George Sylvester Viereck”. This combination of published sentiment and infamous paymaster would have made Crowley forever anathema to Lovecraft, even if they had indeed met or corresponded somehow. There is talk by the movie’s makers of “Lovecraft, Crowley’s and Little’s acquaintanceship”, but I’m uncertain as yet if it’s claimed that Crowley and Lovecraft actually met in person or perhaps corresponded.

* A documentary film directed by the German director Werner Herzog, which had escaped my notice, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020). The last film I saw from him was the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010, documentary on the mysteries of Europe’s famous prehistoric cave-paintings) and I’m glad to find there’s another like it. His new film takes the topic of flaming meteorites, ‘shooting stars’, deep-impact craters and more. A new open-access paper in the journal RuMoRes draws attention to a possible Lovecraft influence on this film. Since it observes that both men… “use similar settings, such as remote places, frozen lands or volcanic areas, and extreme natural phenomena, such as the fall of meteorites”.

* New to me, Lovecraft et la Politique (2023), in French. A translated selection of his writing on politics and political philosophy, plus the new essay ‘Lovecraft: the Marx of nightmares’. Currently available in paper.

* New in the July 2024 edition of the journal Science Fiction Studies ($ paywall) “The Non-Euclidean Gothic: Weird Expeditions into Higher Dimensions and Hyper-Matter with H.P. Lovecraft”… “The first part of the paper reviews the suite of mathematical and scientific discoveries informing Lovecraft’s treatment of higher-dimensional and Non-Euclidean geometries in his mythos.”

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has a long report on a recent trip to Mexico. During which he bravely battled with our future insect-overlords, in the form of eating a dish of fried grasshoppers (“not terribly appealing”). He also endures a long trek to reach an “immense R.H. Barlow Archive”. There he was able to obtain addresses for, and then to see on Google StreetView, two former Barlow residences in Mexico.

* Joshi also reports that his own ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale “In His Own Handwriting” is now a free and authorised HorrorBabble audiobook on YouTube (36 minutes). It turns out to be a fun combo of the ‘shaggy dog’ / ‘what if?’ tale, written for an audience of learned Lovecraftians. Though with an ending I felt might have had more punch.

* S.T. Joshi’s chunky annual journal Penumbra No. 5 (2024) is now available from Hippocampus Press. Includes, among others, “John C. Tibbetts present[ing] an interview and analysis of the weird work of Brian Aldiss”, the 1960s/70s British science-fiction writer.

* An Interview with Eric Williams, who recently collected the best translations published by the old Weird Tales magazine, in a new book now available called Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (2023). In the interview he states…

“Weird Tales continues to dominate pop culture to this day. [Creators] all have Weird Tales in their DNA.

True. And Lovecraft in particular, who is often found to be thoroughly intertwined, once you know what you’re looking for. For instance I recently encountered Harlan Ellison’s two-issue stint with The Incredible Hulk (Avengers #88 crossing over into Incredible Hulk #140), which to my surprise opened with a Lovecraft quote and then went on to gleefully and freely mix several Lovecraft story-ideas (from “Cthulhu” the swamp-bachanal scenes, hideous idols connected across cultures, south Pacific co-ordinates, from “Pyramids” the giant paw, and for good measure Harlan also threw in an evolved-insect ‘space god’ who serves the unseen ‘Dark Ones’. There’s even a 1930s pulp ‘Lost Race tale’ princess).

Most of the nods-to-Lovecraft would have sailed over the heads of most readers at that time, unless they knew their Lovecraft as early as 1971. And I suspect that Harlan dashed off this creaky collage of a story in an hour or two. But it’s fun on the page, and is an example of a nod to Lovecraft in the classic Marvel Comics. I must have read it as a boy, though it seemed new to me in 2024.

* On DeviantArt from the artist, a sample preview page for the first Randolph Carter graphic novel. This made me look again, and I now see a January 2025 publication date for a Vol. 2.

* Also on DeviantArt, an impressive new AI-generated image from Anavrin-ai…

* New to me, Amazing Figure Modeler magazine #68 (2020), which was a Lovecraft special. The issue can still be picked up for a reasonable price on eBay…

* The Great Old Ones to release new studio album Kadath in January 2025. The concept album by the French metal band offers a… “descent into the Dream Cycle [of Lovecraft…] an odyssey through the realms that teeter between fantastical wonder and cosmic dread.” On YouTube there’s already a sample track, “Me, the Dreamer”.

* In the U.S., a university “Music Department hosts an eldritch performance”. This being a 60 minute opera/reading-performance of “The Dunwich Horror”, with an ensemble of classical musicians, no less. Sounds to me like they’re building up to a fully fledged screeching-and-wailing costumed opera performance, at some point in the future.

There were three scenes within the performance, each being about 20 minutes long. Each scene had their own setting and characters, with the performers rotating off of the stage in accordance with their characters in the opera. They also had costumes fitting their unique characters, and acted along with the words being sung.

* The blog Bibliotheque de H.P. Lovecraft looks at The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of natural history and rural life (1878), a book owned and presumably read by Lovecraft in the latter part of the 1920s. Though not listed in my old copy of Lovecraft’s Library (update: it’s in the 2024 edition), and one has to wonder if the apparent HPL name inscribed in the book may actually be another example of Loveman’s late penmanship. The book detailed the hunting and shooting life of the English countryside, through the eyes and work of a gamekeeper, in the 1870s. Unmentioned in the blog post, though some readers will recall it, is that Lovecraft had once been a crack shot with a rifle and once had a large collection of guns. Thus the book would have been doubly appealing to the Anglophile Lovecraft.

* Coming soon, a single-volume collection of Two-Gun Bob’s Adventures in Science Fantasy, checked against the original manuscripts and published by the REH Foundation.

* The new Daniel Crouch Rare Books Catalogue XXXIX: “I wisely started with a map…” – a celebration of fictional cartography (2024). £50 in paper, or you can download the sumptiously illustrated PDF for free.

* At Tentaclii this week, I note “Some changes at Amazon”. Where did all those Warehouse Deals on books go? Turns out they’re still there, but hidden and only accessible via a special kind of search. You’re welcome.

* And finally, talking of affordable books for scholars, The Internet Archive is back online. No personal logins at present, so you can’t yet change your password to a new secure one. Or upload new items. Or ‘search inside’ the text of books and magazines. In the meanwhile I’m sure they’d welcome a ‘happy to see you back’ donation.

— End-quote —

“… Cyclopean phantom pinnacles flowering in violet mist, surging vortices of alien life coursing from wonder-hidden springs in Samarcand and Carthage and Babylon and AEgyptus, breathless sunset vistas of weird architecture and unknown landscape glimpsed from bizarrely balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces, glittering twilights that thickened into cryptic ceilings of darkness pressing low over lanes and vaults of unearthly phosphorescence…” — H.P. Lovecraft, recalling his early experience of the sunset cityscapes and towers of New York City, in a letter of 18th January 1930.

Some changes at Amazon

26 Saturday Oct 2024

Posted by in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Some interesting findings re: using Amazon UK.

Have you been wondering where all the ‘Warehouse Bargain’ books have gone? I had mused on the possibility that POD printer Lightning Source now had a new printing plant, and so there were no ‘slightly damaged’ POD returns to be had at nice prices. But… I now discover that only by searching in the new Amazon Resale category will you find (for instance, currently) a £15 copy of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family and Family Friends, Volume 2: 1926-⁠1936, sold and shipped by Amazon in ‘acceptable’ condition. Presumably a warehouse return, after a picky purchaser noticed a slight bump or a greasy mark left by a printing-machine? And even then you have to skim through several pages of shovelware drek to find this item. (And if there are no results then it will silently present you with the normal search-results, which is annoying).

This £15 bargain doesn’t show up in the book’s regular page, even in the lower ‘New & Used’ tab. Nor does it show up in your regular ‘sorted by low to high’ search-results.

Another trick is searching Amazon Resale with one word…

HOVSCO Electric will find nothing.

HOVSCO alone will find a heavily discounted HOVSCO Electric bicycle.

But yes, obviously the old ‘Warehouse Bargains’ are there if you know where to look. They can even be shipped to your local Amazon locker. Good to know, though… I guess that by telling readers about this I may lose out on some bargains myself. Oh well, enjoy your slightly-bumped bargains.

Note also that I find that Amazon has started hiding pages-that-exist from search results. For instance, I have Travel and Communication in Tolkien’s Worlds (1996, and reissued in 2020) on my Wish-List, added a year ago. But this no longer shows in search results — not even when using the simplest form of Travel Communication Tolkien as search keywords. Yet the page for it still exists. Amazon is thus no longer comprehensive, and this problem obvious seriously diminishes Amazon’s use as a bibliographic starting-resource for scholars. The problem will also likely push second-hand book-sellers to eBay instead, when they can’t find the page to list their item on.

Sixpenny Marvels

21 Monday Oct 2024

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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The Tearoom of Despair bemoans the lack of Marvels in the corner-shop…

you can’t just walk into a shop and buy a new Marvel comic book anywhere. So there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there. And they really did use to be everywhere…

Yes, I remember that well. Many small shops in the West Midlands of England had a spinner-rack of usually fairly random-but-recent American monthly imports, often visible from the window and priced for the British in pennies rather than U.S. cents. Sometimes they had a big job-lot of ship-ballast comics (cent-priced, U.S. news-stand returns?)… and then there were huge piles of American dynamite to sort through. And they were not sealed in bags for collectors to salt away unread either. Comics were later pre-bagged in the early dedicated comics-shops which emerged across the UK in the 1980s, and the buyer who wanted to peek inside was often treated as a pest. But in your corner-shops a comic was just cheap six-penny trash, and no-one assumed any lasting value. Which meant you could flip through and check out the art. Was that Incredible Hulk #122 one of the Herb Trimpe classics you had only seen in part in the British B&W Marvel reprint weekly? Or a rush-job where they used a fill-in artist? Nope, it was all Trimpe, and in colour…

I even recall encountering a huge ship-ballast hoard, age 10 in the unlikely spot of the newsagents in a tiny village of Banwell near the holiday resort of Weston-super-Mare. I guess the owner had probably got them dirt-cheap at auction in the port of Bristol or suchlike and hauled them back. The problem was, of course, that even if one could sift out a small run of one title, one lacked the pocket-money to buy them all up.

The British weekly B&W Marvel reprints, however (in which you could sometimes actually follow a story arc across multiple issues), were usually laid and layered on a newsagent’s wide horizontal counter. No spinner-racks, due to the difference in size and paper and the need to accommodate a thick stack of 40 or so. Weekly British comics sold well in those days. Often too well, as that week’s issue was often sold out by the time you arrived. Hence the joy of finding a complete story in an American issue. It wasn’t crudely cut up into three or four weekly parts, one of which you’d missed.

As Tearoom points out, it’s ironic that you can often find the cheesy spin-off Marvel merchandise, but not the actual comics. Still, it’s good that all the pre-PC classics are now easily available, albeit as garishly re-coloured and mummified reprints. For instance, £16 will now get you the Kindle ebook In The Hands Of Hydra, 440 pages of the classic 1968 Roy Thomas / Herb Trimpe Incredible Hulk. Whatever you missed and yearned for when younger, can now be had instantly, and perhaps also shared with interested young relatives. Great for getting boys to keep reading outside of school, I’d imagine. And boys do still read comics, even in an age of abundance with videogames, audiobooks, movies and TV shows galore. A robust National Literary Trust 2023 survey showed that 44% of British boys read comics for pleasure at least once a month, with a modest-but-expected 10% tail-off as they move from age 10 to 17. Sadly the huge survey doesn’t seem to have asked where these comics came from. Nor did they ask about any U.S. superhero / Japanese manga divide in reading tastes.

I would query Tearoom‘s statement that…

there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there.

Well, not physically. But if one ventures into the pirate websites, that is the very format. Covers, covers, covers, by date of arrival… and thus mixing new superhero comics, indies, kiddy-humour, and vintage reprints. No walled gardens, no locked-down reader apps. Pretty similar to the old spinner-rack at the corner store, I’d suggest. No sixpences required.

Of course, I’m not condoning piracy here, just pointing out it exists and kids can easily access it. If you have an income to spend, you should be supporting the artists and writers.

HPLinks #10 – Teutonic subs, weird decadents, ancient astronauts, cosmic radios, painted zoogs, a new Bram Stoker tale and more

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— End-quote —

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

The Cosmic ‘Radio’

15 Tuesday Oct 2024

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

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[The narrator is an intern in a Catskill Mountains insane asylum]. I placed… “upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic ‘radio’; hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream-world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse…” — “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” (1919).

Stable Diffusion 1.5.

HPLinks #9 – swamps, theory, a century of Rats, a new bio graphic-novel, and more

14 Monday Oct 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

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HPLinks #9.

“[in the] foreign colonies one sees a gradual Americanisation” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, February 1932.

* Sky News Italy reports on a new graphic novel about the master H.P. Lovecraft…

Recounting the life of the famous writer in a dreamlike and imaginary way, a soon-to-be-published graphic novel combines biographical and fantastic features to explore the genesis of H.P.’s literary works.

The chunky new graphic novel is HPL – Una vita di Lovecraft. By writer and cartoonist Marco Taddei, illustrated by Maurizio Lacavalla. Lacavalla has a rough and inky style that reminds me a little of Nicole Claveloux…

To be published in Italian by Edizioni BD. The 234-page table-trembler was launched in September at the Treviso Comic Book Festival, Italy, and is set for general release on 15th October 2024. Amazon UK shows an affordable £9 Kindle version (presumably with a free-sample on release), while Amazon Italy has both the digital and dead-tree versions.

* L’Antique Sentier has a well-illustrated new blog post on “La decadence de Red Hook”, in French, with extended translation of Lovecraft’s letters. Worth seeing for the pictures alone, though of course you can auto-translate.

* Swamp Atlas has a new and long survey of marshes, bogs and swamps in H.P. Lovecraft’s works, including those found in the poetry. In Italian.

* From 2012 but new to me, “H.P. Lovecraft: creencia estetica y asentimiento intelectual”. Freely available as part of the Catalonian open-access journal Taula. Examines the formation of…

Lovecraft’s theory of cosmic horror” arising from “the deep connection between his narratives and scientific images of the world, his distinctions between intellectual assent and aesthetic belief and between the mundanely gruesome and true cosmic fear.” Also notes how this feeds into… “the metaphysical assumptions that underpin his late literature.

* Free in open-access from Brazil, the 294-page ebook As Nuances Do Gotico: do setecentos a atualidade (‘The Nuances of Gothic: from the 17th century to the present’) (2023). The lead essay is on the modern nature of the monstrosity revealed in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

* The German Lovecraftians reported in September that the latest annual… “double-issue of our magazine Lovecrafter is nearing completion”. This year the magazine takes the topics of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ / ‘Lovecraft and the cinema’.

* In France, the article “The Rats in the Walls: un centenaire, mon chat, et la restauration monumentale” celebrates the centenary of “The Rats in the Walls”. Freely available online, in French.

* A review of the new Dagon videogame adaptation, as played on the PlayStation console, from PlayStation Universe…

Dagon Complete Edition is a captivating, engaging, and informative piece of content that truly loves and respects H.P. Lovecraft. […] the visual quality is so enjoyable and vivid that the [one hour of] bare-bones gameplay never wears out its welcome.

The reviewer usefully notes that one of the DLC easter-eggs is a cel-shaded toon adaptation of Lovecraft’s very juvenile tale “The Little Glass Bottle”, written when the budding master was about seven years old.

* Horacio Lalia: Una Vida Dibujada, a 2023 book on the life and work of an acclaimed comics artist. He has produced several books of Lovecraft adaptations, among his other horror comics.

* New to me, a collection of comic-book adaptations HPL Vol. 1: Comic Adaptations of the Works of H.P. Lovecraft, all by Canadian Nick O’Gorman. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Doom that Came for Sarnath”, and “The Cats of Ulthar”. Apparently the Herbert West: Reanimator serial is also made to fit into the book’s 156 pages, and thus I guess we should expect a little truncation. Published by Target Destroyed in summer 2023, and available as a budget Kindle ebook as well as in paper. The maker (I think I had previously noted his recent Imprisoned with the Pharaohs comic-book adaptation) expects to eventually illustrate all Lovecraft’s works in this way, culminating with “At The Mountains of Madness”. The Vol. 1 book is “quite violent and gory” says one reviewer, so it’s not a kiddie-comics edition of Lovecraft.

* In Spain, the citizens of the city of Pamplona celebrates their link with Lovecraft, in the form of a new book…

In 1927, the American writer H.P. Lovecraft had a strange dream that took him to ancient Pompaelo [Pamplona]. An illustrated book will recreate the story that was left unfinished. Lovecraft dreamed that he was an Ancient Roman and was undergoing the ancestral rites of the so-called ‘mountain people’. Almost a hundred years later, author and editor Oihane Amantegi and illustrator Unai Gonzalez have come together to create the first adaptation of Lovecraft’s dream-story. In order to carry it out, they have launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Verkami platform. […] the story shows the extensive knowledge that Lovecraft had of ancient history, of Hispania [Spain] and of the Basques in particular.

It’s already been handsomely crowd-funded, with 23 days still to go.

* In table-top games, a big crowdfunder for Trail of Cthulhu 2E (2nd edition) is being launched about now. Trail is a core Lovecraftian investigation RPG that uses the Gumshoe play system.

* A new links page for Bob Byrne’s collected Robert E. Howard essays posted at Black Gate.

* Archive.org is still offline, after a serious hack. The Wayback Machine is back online today, though in read-only mode. The Archive is reportedly due back in “days, not weeks”, apparently. When it’s back, you may want to save out your own torrent magnets and host them on a blog post etc as a backup. So long as you’re still seeding what you posted, your files should (theoretically) then still be available to the public even if the Archive goes down again.

* And finally, the largest exploration spacecraft ever built has today successfully launched on a SpaceX rocket. The craft will search for evidence of alien life in the dark waters below a frozen ocean, on a large and mysterious moon near the edge of the Solar System. Very Lovecraftian!

— End-quote —

“There recently appeared before the public a rather unsophisticated volume entitled Pollyanna, which preached a sweetly artificial doctrine of converting ills into blessings by the contemplation of possible calamities still more direful. [Though the book proved a success with girl readers,] poor Pollyanna became the target of every penny-a-line hack reviewer and little-wit in Grub-Street [i.e. mass-market journalism]. They loftily demonstrated that the easing of melancholy by force of imagination is a vastly unscientific thing. Impossible, they vowed! Or, even if possible, it ought not to be […] The New York Tribune, in fact, deemed the inoffensive Pollyanna sufficiently culpable to merit a sneering editorial. So runs the worldly-wise current of twentieth-century life! Your modern philosopher had rather be mature and miserable, than childlike and contented; and he deems you a monstrous imbecile if you can be happy at a time when he thinks you have not sufficient cause to be happy. Heaviness of spirit, he doth asseverate, is a sacred obligation of every thoughtful and responsible citizen. [… I confess to] no little amusement at the wailing of these worshippers of morbid maturity. […] It is dangerous to dabble in realities, and if more of us were able to retain the happy illusions of our infancy, those illusions would be so much nearer truth [in reality, and yet meanwhile] on the pleasures of the fancy rests all the mighty framework of art, poesy, and song”. — H.P. Lovecraft, “In the Editor’s Study”, October 1916.

More dark and character LORAs

08 Tuesday Oct 2024

Posted by in AI, Lovecraftian arts

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A few more Lovecraft-adjacent LORAs, released or spotted recently. These are free ‘style-guidance’ plugins for AI image-generation models based on Stable Diffusion 1.5.

* Nightmares of the Machine Age LORA. Vehicle designs to inspire your Lovecraftmobile.

50s Noir Movie LORA.

* Tabletop RPG / Call of Cthulhu – Old style Photos LORA. Apparently requires trigger-word retro, not specified on the record-page.

The same maker also has Call of Cthulhu RPG document generators, 1, 2 and 3.

The Great Cthulhu – Character LORA. The same maker also has Deep Ones and The King in Yellow LORAs. Note the Clip Skip requirements.

Still waiting for a good ‘Lovecraft as character’ LORA.

HPLinks #8 – Yog-sothothery, Ward Illustrated, movies, weird non-fiction, catlands and more

06 Sunday Oct 2024

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

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HPLinks #8.

Fully fun-checked.

* A new Italian book of essays was published on 2nd October 2024, Yog-sothothery – Oltre la soglia dell’immaginari (‘Yog-Sothothery – Beyond the threshold of the imagination’), edited by Salvatore Santangelo and published by Castelvecchi Editore. The book…

explores the life and works of H.P. Lovecraft, highlighting his unique cosmogony [and] includes essays by experts on Lovecraft’s work, including: Angelo Clementi, graduate in philosophy, screenwriter and journalist; Virginia Como, graduate in literature, specialized in philology, linguistics and cultural anthropology; Pietro Gurriello, founder of the Dagon Press magazine and editor of the Lovecraftian Studies magazine; Paolo Mariani, writer of short stories in the horror and fantasy genre; Adriano Monti Buzzetti Colella, essayist, journalist and head of the Culture Editorial team of TG2; Miska Ruggeri, journalist with experience in politics, travel and culture; Salvatore Santangelo, journalist and university professor, expert in international politics.

The publisher’s website finds nothing for a search for either ‘Lovecraft’ or ‘Sothothery’. Nothing about the book on the front page, either. But at least Amazon Italy has a page which reveals the book is out, is 160 pages and is in print only. No table-of-contents, that I can find.

* Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, illustrated by Jason Eckhardt (2024). The book is available now from Necronomicon Press. It also has maps, handily placed on the back cover.

* Mark Finn’s biography Blood & Thunder: The Life of Robert E. Howard is now available as a Kindle ebook, and note that…

This is the updated and expanded second edition of the Monkeybrain Books 2006 edition. This is the author’s ‘director’s cut’ of his popular biography […] a total of 35,000 more words

* I fondly if vaguely recall the 1970s British Orbit paperbacks of R.E. Howard tales. I’m fairly sure I had Worms of the Earth and Swords of Shahrazar, if not others, in the 1980s. There’s now a new YouTube video celebrating and showing them, “Robert E. Howard in Orbit | 70s Brit paperbacks”.

* The local Portland Tribune reports “It’s a cornucopia of cosmic horror in the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and gives handy summaries of many films. I’ve linked to an Archive.is copy, since the Tribune region-blocks all visitors from the UK and EU.

* Over in Holland, I also noticed a Zienema: Lovecraftian Halloween Special cinema evening in Groningen. Set for 29th October 2024.

* Now crowdfunding, All Tomorrows by C.M. Kosemen, a solo-artist artbook and apparent timeline of future ‘speculative evolution’…

I knew that the many weird species I created would be impossible to unite with a single coherent story, so I went with historic narration — similar to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Olaf Stapledon’s incredible books, Star Maker and Last and First Men.

* The Silver Key has a new review of the academic book
Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft (2019).

* The scholarly journal The New Ray Bradbury Review now has the latest issue #8 online, which has the theme of Bradbury and the early U.S. space programme. Free and open-access.

* A brave attempt at starting a new paid-for non-fiction web-a-zine with a leftist slant, Speculative Insight: space, magic, footnotes. Partly paywalled, subscription, and no RSS feed.

* The latest SFFaudio Podcast #806 summons Robert Silverberg’s “Demons of Cthulhu” (1959). Freely available online.

* I now have the volume of Lovecraft’s letters to Toldridge in my hands. I see it doesn’t include the letters she sent to him and which have survived. Some of which are at the John Hay repository and can be freely seen online…

   bdr:422815
   bdr:422816
   bdr:422817
   bdr:422818
   bdr:422819

* Spotted on eBay, a ‘perhaps’ business-card for HPL’s optician? We know that the younger HPL wore glasses, loved the upmarket covered Arcade of shops as his natural home for purchases and haircuts, and that when young he felt that money was no object (i.e. he wouldn’t ‘shop around’ to get a cheaper pair).

Slightly weighing against this possibility is the mid 1890s ad in his boyhood astronomy journal, for the Providence optician R.H. Allen. The boy Lovecraft has spotted in the newspaper that Allen was selling a second-hand astronomical instrument of some worth.

* Also found on eBay, another ‘perhaps’ picture. A curious and rather precarious-looking building that may have been a familiar sight to Lovecraft, on the seaward approaches to and from his favourite town of Newport…

* And I also spotted a nice set of pictures from someone selling a set of the Gollancz hardbacks, UK ‘yellow jacket’ editions once easily found in our public libraries.

* And finally, I came across the “weird science-fiction adjacent” ‘zine Perhaps You Might Try The Soup, hailing from the inner-city ‘catlands’ of Dublin, Ireland. I hadn’t before heard the word ‘catlands’, but it’s a fine psychogeographic shorthand. Where people keep cats in inner-city England (and presumably also Dublin), the streets are nearly always more pleasant than streets where mostly dogs are kept or no pets at all. It’s a simple and effective metric, and an apt word. One can even imagine an eccentric map which marks out the ‘catlands’ of a large town or city. I find that the word first occurs in Scribner’s Magazine in 1893, where in W.E. Henley’s long poem “Arabian Nights” (man recalls the tales and magical lands he knew in boyhood) the figure of Puss-in-Boots is described as… “King over all the Catlands, present and past and future”. Thus the word has ‘prior art’, and could presumably be used as the title of a new book or comic — without fear of trademark trolls.

— End-quote —

“One may easily sympathise for a time with the rebellious artists who point out the insignificance of human inhibitions, but they begin to fatigue one when they persist in denying equal insignificance to the freakishly extravagant instincts which they so consistently exalt. Where so little sense of proportion exists, it is impossible to feel any sense of serious power — and as art material, this conventional perversity is becoming woefully hackneyed …” — Lovecraft writing to Belknap Long, the quote being a possible source for the title of the forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.

HPLinks #7 – Esquire, Bok, the voice of CAS, dogs and cats, Shadow Out of Time movie, and more

30 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

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HPLinks #7.

* With thanks to ‘Eastman’, fresh scans of “Lovecraft cultist” by J.C. Henneberger as published in Esquire magazine, March 1946. Also “The Ten-cent Ivory Tower” by John Wilstach in Esquire magazine, in the Christmas issue dated January 1946 (with a continuation on page 160). And an author’s rebuttal in Esquire, June 1946. I commented at length on these back in 2020, though the post’s images were later lost in the site-move.

* New from the HPLHS store, the book Night-Black Deeds, being an “enriched” edition of Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”.

* A new Hannes Bok LORA, being an illustration-style add-on for Flux. Flux is the latest ‘hot thing’ in AI image-generators, and more stable than the wayward Stable Diffusion.

* Deep Cuts takes a lengthy look into Lovecraft collaborator Hazel Heald’s Letters To August Derleth.

* Insolita: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Insolito, da Fantasia e do Imaginario (‘Insolita: Brazilian Journal of Studies of the Unusual, Fantastic and Imaginary’). In open-access, with seven issues all in Portuguese. Very much focused on horror and the weird, and with a strong tilt toward screen culture. Articles have included ‘Cyclopean Games: the Lovecraftian heritage in games’, and the latest issue has an article on the film adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space”.

* New on YouTube, Clark Ashton Smith Reads a Letter to H.P. Lovecraft (1930). Genuine letter? Who knows, but the voice is well done. I assume AI-generated + some kind of ‘olde time radio’ audio filters, but perhaps not.

* New from Psilowave Records, a 70-piece, 8-figure, “Colour out of Space” custom 8-inch figure set. Ordering now.

* 2024 illustrations and storyboarding roughs for the Lovecraft story “Cats of Ulthar”. By a student at the Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka, Hungary. Also a short account of his making of an illustrated book. Freely available online, though not free to re-use.

* Another interactive game which adapts Lovecraft’s “Dagon” is due for release on 10th October 2024. Announcement Trailer on YouTube.

* A new free audiobook on LibriVox, an A-Z Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953). The focus of the tome was on American books, and each entry included a plot digest. On pursuing it on Archive.org one finds a whole lot of best-forgotten 1920s and 30s novels of lost races and ‘princesses in need of rescue’, but also some works that may interest. This is the format used for entries…

As you can see… plot spoilers.

* Horror comics have risen from the dead. The latest Comics Experience podcast peers nervously through the cemetery gates.

* Slightly misleading… the official George Kuchar (1942-2011) bibliography lists “Graphic Classics: H.P. Lovecraft, Vol. 4, Eureka Productions, 2002. (2nd edition includes Kuchar’s bio of H.P. Lovecraft, originally published in Arcade in 1975, [and this 2nd edition was dated] 2007)”. But I see that the 2002 edition also had a reprint of the tendentious 1970s ‘underground comix’ bio-strip.

* A U.S. legal case has reportedly led to the… “U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cancelling Marvel and DC Comics’ joint trademark for the word ‘Super Hero'”. Superhero, super-hero, and variants were also covered, until now. Creators and publishers are now free to trade using the word(s) in the U.S. Springing to mind… “HPL: Supine-hero!”.

* The International Documentary Association has a review of the acclaimed art-house ‘Lovecraft meets Pessoa’ movie Telepathic Letters, reviewed by a fellow film-maker… “In the film, Lovecraft says, ‘The universe may be a dream, but it cannot be considered a human dream'”.

* The IMDb is listing The Shadow Out of Time (2025), a $500k low-budget movie from Weird Howard Films. Due for release October 2025.

* At the Philippe Labaune Gallery in New York City, “Hell, Ink & Water: The Art Of Mike Mignola”. From 19th September – 26th October 2024. The gallery has an online one-page version of the ‘for sale’ items in the show, though it takes a while to load.

* At the Heath Robinson Museum on the western outskirts of London (UK), the large exhibition “The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy”. From 28th September – 5th January 2025.

* And finally, I’ve ordered the volume of Lovecraft’s letters to Toldridge, which should arrive before mid October. I’ll hope to post some notes on these letters by late October and then into November. These letters are more cheery, by all accounts, than the Sully letters — and thus not such a show-stopper as those were.