HPLinks #77 – Armitage Symposium, Madness low-budget screenplay, orchestral “Colour” in Berlin, Bilal retrospective, Welsh mythos, and more…

14 Saturday Mar 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

* The NecronomiCon’s Armitage Symposium has its calls for papers out. Set for 13th-16th August 2026, in Providence, Rhode Island. The Symposium…

is mainly dedicated to the life and works of the Providence-based weird fiction writer, the father of cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft, but also to his milieu: his literary predecessors, contemporaries, and current successors of the genre.

Submissions are welcome from all, if one can give an in-person presentation. Presentations will be considered in due course for Lovecraftian Proceedings No.7. Deadline: 24th May 2026.

* The NecronomiCon art-show, Ars Necronomica 2026, does not yet have details for the forthcoming show. Other than that it will run in Providence… “for most of August 2026”.

* New from Charles University, the PhD thesis Lovecraftova literarni tvorba v kontextu objektove orientovane ontologie (2026) (‘Lovecraft’s literary work in the context of object-oriented ontology’). Freely available online, in Czech with English abstract. Also in Czech, this week they have the official translation of Tanebe’s mammoth The Shadow over Innsmouth manga adaptation.

* The hub website hplovecraft.com has a new page for Collections of Lovecraft’s Works, made re-sortable by year, publisher or title.

* Deep Cuts considers two 1973 publications about Lovecraft and Sonia.

* Sechrist’s grandson has made contact, via my 2018 Tentaclii post on Edward Lloyd Sechrist (1873-1953). See the comments at the foot of the post.

* Parker’s Ponderings reviews “The Craziest Commonplace Book Ever” ($ paywalled, Substack), apparently through the lens of an interest in notebook-keeping methods. It’s Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, in a new illustrated version.

* One I missed back in 2016. Daniel Birmingham produced “At the Mountains of Madness” as a low-budget screenplay as the final dissertation submission for his Screenwriting degree… “Rather than scale the film to make it larger than life, I wanted to write a quiet, chilling piece that could be shot on a low-budget.” Now freely available online, from his university repository.

* The German Lovecraftians report on a forthcoming premiere for a drone-orchestral-visual “Colour Out Of Space”, in Berlin…

After more than 10 years of work and the creation of over 700 images, The Dunwich Orchestra will perform their complete production “The Colour Out Of Space” live for the first time, on 23rd April 2026 the venerable Babylon cinema in Berlin. The German Lovecraft Society is sponsoring the project as an official cooperation partner. Berlin-based comic artist and illustrator Andreas Hartung and The Dunwich Orchestra have adapted this horror parable as a dark, episodic visual show with an atmospheric soundtrack, entirely without words, drawing the viewer into a hypnotically slowed vortex of horror – a profound drone-comic visual spectacle.

* The Enki Bilal Collection, on show from June 2026 in Paris, France. The major retrospective will be ticketed and priced. Many Tentaclii readers will know Bilal from his distinctive artistry and storytelling in Heavy Metal and elsewhere.

The artist [himself] is opening the Enki Bilal Collection in the Marais district of Paris. Serving as both an exhibition hub and a creative studio, this museum [quality] exhibition space will showcase the painter and author’s works, allowing visitors to explore his creations firsthand. In addition, it will host temporary thematic exhibits, panel discussions, screenings, book signings, and meet-and-greet events. A retrospective exhibition showcasing Enki Bilal’s work is set to inaugurate the venue, running through September 2026.

* Also in comics, Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson was published last month as an affordable paperback and ebook. Wrightson’s various collected 1970s work for Creepy magazine. Including an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”, and with all the strips kept in b&w rather than being coloured.

* Publisher DMR has a new free ‘best of’ sword-and-sorcery story sampler book, The Battle Rages On: A Free Anthology from DMR Books. If you like what you read they have plenty more.

* The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press has a new fundraiser book to aid the restoration of Howard’s home, titled First Cuts – the Drafts and Fragments of Breckinridge Elkins. Elkins being Howard’s irascible hillbilly from Bear Creek.

* Talking of Howard, I see Titan Books have published a new… “Solomon Kane novelette, Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black”, a $1.99 ebook read…

Journeying back to his native [English county of] Devon, Kane finds his homeland is not as he left it. A foulness has spread across England, changing it forever. The devils that inhabited far-off lands have infiltrated this blessed plot.

No sign of it via search on Amazon UK for “Where the Whitethorn Meets the Black”, but it turns out the ebook is there. It also turns out that this is No. 2 in a series and that a similar No.1 ebook slipped out just before Christmas 2025 as Solomon Kane: The Lair of the Mari Lwyd. No. 1 was set in Wales, and appears to have had good reviews.

* Talking of Wales, the Welsh regional newspaper Powys County Times brings news of a new Lovecraftian anthology with a regional Welsh flavour…

‘Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country’ brings together tales inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the influential American writer, and features stories by six Welsh authors […] The collection explores Lovecraft’s literary connections [with Wales], particularly his debt to Caerleon-born author Arthur Machen.

Sounds good, and better I see it’s on Amazon UK as a budget ebook. Amazon’s listings suggests Night Country may be a follow-up to the editor’s first Cthulhu Cymraeg (2013) anthology, rather than a reprinting.

— End-quotes —

Over Christmas and New Year 1927 Lovecraft dug out his crumbling copy of some old notes on the family tree… “I had copied it from my late great-aunt Sarah Allgood’s chart (plus a chart of the Lovecraft side) in 1905, and it had nearly fallen to pieces”. On re-copying for preservation, he discovers a… “shocking revelation of hybridism”…

“… who is this dame that my great-grandfather William Allgood married in 1817? Rachel Morris — yes, I knew that before. But where did she come from? Wales! [and] my great-great-grandmother, born in 1774 and died in 1845 […] was Isabella Purcell, daughter of Owen Purcell of Llanariba, and of his wife Susanna Rees, daughter of David Rees or Rhys. A Welsh gentlewoman of unmixed Celtick blood!” [and] my great-grandmother Rachel Morris had a mother wholly Celtic Welsh, and a father one-quarter Celtic Welsh.” — to Belknap Long, January 1927.

There is no Llanariba in Wales. Llan is common and simply indicates a place with an enclosed church and graveyard. a-riba or ariba is not Welsh, nor is there anything like it if one assumes an h for a mis-transcribed b.

Writing to Barlow in 1934, he still thought he had… “a good deal of Celtic blood from Welsh, Cornish, and Devonian lines.” Also in 1934 he wrote to Rimel… “Only lately did I learn that Rhys (on my Welsh side) is [pronounced] Reez. I had called it Riss.”

“Oddly — for one whose Devonian and Welsh and Cornish lines imply a good proportion of Celtic blood — my weird imagination is not at all Celtic. I not only lack but dislike the Celt’s whimsical angle toward the unreal world. When the genes were juggled around in the formation of my cerebral cells, the Teutonic ones seem to have pre-empted the fantastic division. However, I like to apply that Teutonic imagination to themes which may be far from Teutonic. The fact is, my instinctive loyalties and area of interest seem to follow cultural rather than biological lines … a tendency directly opposed to the Nazi tribal ideal. Undeniably, my own blood kinsfolk on the continent [i.e. the Germanic cultures] interest me less than my cultural kinsfolk, whose blood diverges sharply from my own as the stream recedes in time.” — Lovecraft to Barlow, June 1936.

HPLinks #76 – Dream-Quest illustrated, book reviews, Lovecraft’s voice, and more…

06 Friday Mar 2026

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HPLinks #76.

* From Spain, a new illustrated edition of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest, though here titled as En Busca de la Ciudad del Sol Poniente (trans: ‘In Search of The Sunset City’).

published by Alianza Editorial in its Singular Books Collection (LS). Translation by Francisco Torres Oliver, and illustrations by Gonzalo Gruber. A hardcover with 216 pages.

Finding the publisher’s page for the book also reveals it’s available from them in paperback and ePub. Turns out it’s even on on Amazon UK right now as a £13 Kindle ebook with free sample. The publisher’s website also has details of the artist…

Gonzalo Gruber, graduate in fine arts, forest firefighter, and tireless draftsman. Always immersed in impossible projects that combine his passion for art and nature. Like “Ear Ashes”, his elusive graphic novel/essay which now has more than 300 illustrations and is always in progress. In 2026 he immersed himself in the unique dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft, illustrating Dream-Quest for Alianza Editorial.

* The Pulp Super-Fan has a useful and informative review of H.P. Lovecraft, A Fine Friend (2024).

* The Independent Horror Society offers a short review of the recent London Lovecraft Festival.

* The Portland 30th H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, now successfully Kickstarted and set for mid September 2026.

* ‘Technologies of the Fantastic’, an online conference set for 13th-15th May 2026. The title seems somewhat misleading, since the organisers say they intend to focus on “the technologies of fantasy” in particular. Such as… “carefully constructed runes and magical glyphs that operate as locks and keys; in the textile metaphors of spell weaving; in the taxonomy of the naming [of natural elemental forces]”. Registration is not yet open, but it will be via Eventbrite.

* Guest Posts at Wormwoodiana, for “The Centenary of Amazing Stories” pulp magazine, part one and part two.

* Deep Cuts considers the Lovecraft recollections of his friend Mrs Miniter, which were preserved in various amateur journalism publications of the 1920s. In giving a talk to the amateurs, she wrote that Lovecraft delivered with a voice having a… “staccato utterance and an air of temporarily abandoning Greek for this time only”.

* New to me, the historical survey book The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (2008), from Yale University Press. No mention of Lovecraft, it seems, but the early chapters have plenty of cultural context, re: Lovecraft’s times and NYC.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog post notes that his Mythos fiction survey book The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos has appeared in Russian translation.

* New on Archive.org, a run of the 1970s Cartoonist PROfiles magazine. Cartoonist PROfiles #30 (1976) has a previously unpublished Dunsany comic-book adaptation introduced thus…

Back in 1966, Russ Jones, an advocate of more sophisticated and more ambitious comic book continuity formats, put together a Pyramid paperback entitled Christopher Lee’s Treasury of Terror. Classic stories by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Bram Stoker were robustly аnd intelligently illustrated by veteran comic-book artists, two or three panels to a page, sideways. Jones’ initial “great picture stories of supernatural horror” compendium should have merited a second edition: Jones planned a follow-up, and though adaptations and finished illustrations were assigned and produced, they never saw the black of the press.

The unpublished Dunsany here was from the planned second book. Turns out the ‘Lovecraft’ item in the first book was “Wentworth’s Day [1957] by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth”, hardly a “classic”.

And in Cartoonist PROfiles #24 (1974), an illustrated Tom Sutton interview with a fabulous 1974 Charlton cover in b&w. The cover as published was rather badly coloured.

* At Substack, The Obelisk reviews Bloch’s Strange Eons…

Strange Eons is nowhere near Bloch’s best work. In fact, one has to have a strong fondness for cheese to merely enjoy this paean to Lovecraft’s universe. Pretty much every twist in the narrative is followed by digressions on the greatness of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. That’s all well and good, but I can understand the criticisms of Strange Eons, especially in regard to its adolescent-esque prose. Bloch almost seems to be writing for a teenage audience here [and there are a vast] number of Easter eggs buried throughout. […] Ultimately, Strange Eons is best enjoyed as a kind of love letter to an old friend.

No free audiobook, it seems.

* William Emmons Books has the book review “Elak! Out From The Shadow Of Conan!”. This being a review of Henry Kuttner’s novelette Thunder in the Dawn, published in two issues of Weird Tales, 1938. The long review has plot spoilers. Thunder was written for a pulp audience used to a fast-paced story, yet as the review observes…

this novella starts to cross the bridge from sword and sorcery toward epic fantasy [and the hero’s quest] is at least creeping towards epic fantasy.

I see there’s a free and well-read audiobook of it on YouTube, running to 140 minutes. Long, but the latest version of the YoutubeDownloader freeware can handle it.

* Talking of freeware, those seeking to restore old fandom tape-recordings (interviews, convention panel discussions etc) may like to know of the new LavaSR v2. State-of-the-art superfast automatic audio-restoration, via a locally-installed AI model. Free, as is all local desktop AI (if you have the graphics-card to run it, entry-level being an Nvidia 3060 12Gb card).

* And finally, U.S. Library of Congress archivists have discovered a lost 19th century film by Melies in some rusting old film cans. They realised…

we were looking at ‘Gugusse and the Automaton’ a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George Melies […] made around 1897, [which] was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century.

— End-quotes —

“I once owned an Edison machine of the primitive type, with recorder and blanks; and I made many vocal records in imitation of the renowned vocalists of the wax cylinder. My colleagues would smile to hear some of the plaintive tenor solos which I perpetrated in the days of my youth!! But sad to say, I gave the old machine away about a year ago to a deserving and not too musical youth who occasionally performs useful labour about the place. I wish now that I had retained it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917.

“Something over a decade ago I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results — mothers are not always unbiased critics — but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive, ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack [famous Irish principal tenor]. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, May 1918.

“It took the bizarre & nondescript tonal & rhythmical hashes of post-war jazz to get me disgusted with popular ballads — & even now I relish the old-time [pre-jazz] inanities when they are revived on the radio …. though this may be merely because they recall the lost illusions & optimisms of the youthful period when I first knew & ululated them. […] with a gang of fellows whistling or howling the tin pan ditties of the period with overt & genuine gusto, as Grandpa must confess to having done in the lost golden days of ’06 & thereabouts!” — Lovecraft to Helen Sully, February 1934.

HPLinks #75 – ‘Terrible Old Man’ film, a new Lovecraft tarot pack, sanity as a game mechanic, and more…

27 Friday Feb 2026

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

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HPLinks #75.

* From Italy in English, the “Fragments from Elsewhere: the Weird as a Transmedia Genre” (2025). Possibly a Masters dissertation? Freely available online.

* Pierre Deleage’s blog posts about his new book Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow and Burroughs, noting… “It is a revised, corrected and quite expanded version of my article ‘La transmigration de Robert H. Barlow'”.

* The new open-access book Crossing borders between countries, scholars, and genres: Commemorating the late Kathleen E. Dubs (2025) has two relevant chapters. “Crossing Genres, Crossing Media: The Cthulhu Mythos Through the Ages”, and “Liminal Aspects of the Hero’s Journey in the Major Works of Neil Gaiman” has the comparative sub-section titled ‘From Lovecraft to Gaiman’.

* The Italian Tolkien journal now has a book collection of the best articles, in English translation, as Arda Notebooks: the Best of I Quaderni di Arda. In the new book one can find the acclaimed German scholar Thomas Honegger in English on “Re-enchanting a Dis-enchanted World: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. The publisher Walking Tree has free abstracts for the book’s contents.

* Also from Italy, a film adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” as “Il vecchio terribile”. It premiered a few days ago in Rome, and is now reportedly destined for the film festivals circuit… “The short film The Terrible Old Man, a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous horror novel, premiered last night [24th February 2026] at the Cinema Caravaggio in Rome”.

* New on Archive.org, a good scan of The Collected Poems and Letters of Hart Crane (1952)…

I have been greeted so far mostly by his [Lovecraft’s close friend Samuel Loveman] coat tails, so occupied has Sambo been with numerous friends of his here ever since arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her pipingvoiced husband, Howard Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there), kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him, and I think he is making the usual mistake of people visiting NY, of attempting too much, getting prematurely exhausted, and then railing against the place and wanting to get back home.

* Popping out shortly before Christmas 2025, which means I missed noting it here, the podcast The Atlantean Archive: Retro Books & Shows had A Chat with “The Lovecraft Geek”, Dr. Robert M. Price.

* Publishers Weekly reports that sales in U.S. comic-book shops hit a new high in 2025 at $2.2 billion. Said anecdotally to be largely due to the influx of a new paying audience in the form of Generation Z (now ages 14 to 27). I guess many are earning wages now — and thus many Z-ers can walk into their local comic-shop with far more than dad’s pocket-money in their wallets. A further guess would be that many will also have recovered from childhood manga overdoses, and are now discovering the joys of Proper Comics. Theoretically, such demographic and economic changes should also feed into Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related sales, especially as the U.S economy booms.

* In the academic Game Studies book Video Games and Mental Health (2025), the chapter “The Sanity Metre: Madness as a manageable resource”. Sanity as a finite resource… “renders madness operationalisable for a game’s code, has its historical roots in psychiatric discourse and its cultural roots in cosmic horror”. The editors kindly offer the book free, in its Kindle ebook version.

* Also in games, the forthcoming Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth has a free audio phone-app ‘trailer’ from Chaosium…

Our coming board-game Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth takes you on three adventures set in and around [Innsmouth. It is trailed by the new] Miskatonic Tales app (not required to play), which offers immersive audio recordings of the introductions and all paragraphs from the three scenarios. Simply select a scenario and a paragraph number, and the app will read the corresponding passage from the storybook. You can adjust the background music, volume, and playback speed.

* Talking of Innsmouth, Francois Baranger’s fully illustrated edition of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is now pre-ordering, for “release later this year”. If you know the tale well and just want the art, apparently the sumptious large-format artbook is already available in French.

* Up for auction, Gahan Wilson’s original sketch of a stylized bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently… “the inspiration for the original statuette for the World Fantasy Awards”, rather than the other way around?

* The catalogue for the coming auction of The Peter Hansen Collection of Comics, seemingly the largest collection of vintage British comics yet to come to auction. With high resolution images of original artwork/layouts, unwatermarked, and available without registration. Effectively, a free online exhibition. Also includes some early fanzines, comic-related toys and trading-cards. A few British underground issues, in one lot. A few art-posters, such as the Barry Windsor-Smith poster seen below. No newspaper strips, that I noticed, other than a bound collection of U.S. one-page Sunday newspaper strips all from 1945. Here’s my pick…

* Now available, Blood N Thunder 2025 Special Edition magazine. Includes…

Pulp historian and novelist Will Murray tells the complete story behind “The Golden Vulture”, a Shadow novel originally written by Doc Savage scribe Lester Dent in 1932 but shelved for six years until being revised by Walter B. Gibson, chief chronicler of The Shadow’s exploits. [Plus] a comprehensive history of “The Bat, the legendary master criminal who first appeared in a 1920 play subsequently adapted several times to film and TV. Most importantly, The Bat was acknowledged by Bob Kane to have influenced the creation of a certain Caped Crusader still plying his trade in movies and comics.

* And finally, new to me is a Lovecraft Tarot pack from Spain. 78 cards, and to my experienced eye the artwork doesn’t appear to be AI generated. Might also be useful for writers, providing randomised starting-point ideas for a basic plot framework? Seemingly new, and not yet sold-out.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft on the value of pomposity-picking humour and “amusements of a lighter sort”. What he says seems to be relevant to cartooning and comics.

“There is art and sanity in psychological deflation …. One of the most contemptible ostentations of the human primate is a priggish dignity and particularly about non-essentials of form, custom, convention, regularity, and so on. It is this devastating pusillanimity which has created the repulsive beast called Babbitus Americanus, and which has paved the downward path toward standardisation, time-table helotry, and glorified mass-mediocrity. No saviour is more deserving of praise than one who can jolt and kick these cow-like conformers into something like a semblance of vitality, individuality, and well-proportioned perspective — who can air out their stuffy and meaningless primness and precision, and give them at least a pinch of that basic sense of humour, porportion, relativity, and cosmic irony which makes real men as distinguished from grotesque sawdust-stuffed homunculi. All hats off to the lusty deflater!” — Lovecraft to Maurice Moe, January 1930.

“One of the greatest obstacles to be combated during this unsettled era is the mistaken notion that amateur journalism is a non-essential and a luxury, unworthy of attention or support amidst the national stress. The prevalence of this opinion is difficult to account for, since its logic is so feeble. It is universally recognised that in times like these, some form of relaxation is absolutely indispensable if the poise and sanity of the people are to be preserved. Amusements of a lighter sort are patronised with increased frequency, and have risen to the dignity of essentials in the maintenance of the national morale. If, then, the flimsiest of pleasures be accorded the respect and favour of the public, what may we not say for amateur journalism, whose function is not only to entertain and relieve the mind, but to uplift and instruct as well?” — Lovecraft during wartime, in the United Amateur for May 1918.

“… comicality always depends wholly on the system of thought and values held by the perceiver; that, in short, ridiculousness is relative, and conditioned by the truth, inflexibility, or paramountcy of certain common ideas which are absolute to the multitude yet merely virtual to the closer inquirer. Intelligence and education, as they open new fields of risibility, close old ones; so that the laughing-stock of one stage of culture is often the gospel of the next, and vice versa. [Thus] we perceive the difficulty of laying down permanent laws of laughter in an age when all standards are plastic. […] is it not possible that some of the Philistine hyperticklishness at unaccustomed whimsies springs from a lack of that deeper and more pervasive humour which sees in all human life and effort an ironic comedy? Verily, laughter is an art for the discriminating.” — Lovecraft in The Conservative, July 1923.

HPLinks #74 – Lovecraft and Kafka, 1924 in NYC, voice-cloning, Lovecraft at the Miskatonic Library, and more…

22 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #74.

* The open-access book Tierwerden und Pflanzendenken in der Literatur: Okologische Entgrenzungen von Franz Kafka und H.P. Lovecraft bis heute (September 2025). Being a comparative study exploring the ecological thinking of Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft. In German, but under CC-BY and in .PDF, so auto-translation should be relatively straightforward.

Key chapter titles in translation…

– The Question of Comparability: Kafka and Lovecraft in their times and in relation to each other.
– “The Metamorphosis” and “The Rats in the Walls”: Visions of becoming animal.
– “A Report for an Academy” and “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn”: Becoming animal as becoming human.
– “The Burrow” and “Shadow over Innsmouth”: Rhizomatics and Hybrid Beings.
– “Investigations of a Dog” and “At the Mountains of Madness”.
– Varieties of Ecological Thinking in Kafka and Lovecraft.

* Deep Cuts looks at the letters sent to Weird Tales by Hazel Heald after Lovecraft’s death… “Lovecraft was a gift to the world who can never be replaced — Humanity’s Friend.” (Heald).

* From France, Lovecraft 1924: Love Before Cthulhu is a slick 24 minute film on Lovecraft’s pivotal year. It blends archival footage of NYC, Ken Burns-style slow zooms/pans on photographs, and occasional colorised images. YouTube auto-dubs it to English, for me.

* For sale on eBay, two issues of Barlow’s The Dragon-fly.

* The Grognardia blog considers “H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing”. (Part I) and (Part II).

* In Spanish, Krill magazine examines “La clonazione vocale: Iperrealismo sintetico tra utopia e fragilita del reale” (‘Voice cloning: Synthetic hyperrealism between utopia and the fragility of reality’), through the lens of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Freely available online.

* The Italians have just published a book whose title translates as ‘The Horror at Miskatonic University’. Turns out to be a 48-page comic-book. Not quite long enough to be a BD, but experimentally put into hardback and aimed at Italian bookshops and collectors rather than the flagging news-stands. It appears to offer a self-contained story set at Miskatonic University, but perhaps set in the 1970s or 80s (it opens with a Dr. Nimoy – ‘Spock’ – giving a lecture there), and the review finds that it’s neither an “intellectualistic rereading of Lovecraft […] nor a faithful, masterful adaptation” of Lovecraft. Just a fun romp by the sound of it, and with rather nice b&w artwork…

The story is by Giulio A. Gualtieri, with collaboration from Marco Nucci, two well-known names in Italian comics of the last few decades, with art by Matteo Buzzetti.

* British gamer Boring Dad Gaming has a six-part in-depth play-through review of The Dark Rites of Arkham, a point-and-click detective videogame set in Arkham in 1933. Part one and you can find the rest linked at his YouTube channel. Made in old-school Pixelvision…

The respected Rock Paper Shotgun calls it… “a well-made ode to Lovecraft’s Mythos which will appeal to anyone who loves Call of Cthulhu and ’90s adventure games.” It’s a $15 indie, available now on Steam and Itch.io.

* A new book which may interest British readers, Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995. Published a few days ago, it explores the nooks and crannies of weird and supernatural British TV in its glory-years.

* Marzaat reviews both volumes of A Means to Freedom, the letters of R.E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

* And finally, the HPLHS Raffle Ticket 2026. Prizes include, among others, both volumes of A Means to Freedom. The raffle prize-pick is on 15th March 2026.

— End-quotes —

“The original Arabic [of The Necronomicon] was lost before Olaus’ time, & the last known Greek copy perished in Salem in 1692. The work was printed in the I5th, 16th, & 17th centuries, but few copies are extant. Wherever existing, it is carefully guarded for the sake of the world’s welfare & sanity. Once a man read through the copy in the library of the Miskatonic University at Arkham — read it through & fled wild-eyed into the hills…” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1927.

“… Mulder’s infamous Ghorl Nigral. I even saw a copy of this once — though I never opened or glanced within it. It was many years ago in Arkham — at the library of the Miskatonic University. I was in a shadowy corner of the great reading-room, and noticed a huge volume in somebody’s hands across the table from me. The reader’s head was completely hidden by the massive tome, but on the book itself I could descry the words “Ghorl Nigral” in an archaic Gothic lettering. What I knew of it made me shudder — and I felt vaguely alarmed when others began glancing at the silent reader and quietly edging out of the room one by one. When I saw that I was wholly alone but for the unspeaking page-turner, my feeling of disquiet became almost overpowering — and I too edged toward the door …. keeping my eyes resolutely away from the reader for some unknown reason or other. Then I saw that the room was growing very dark, though the afternoon was by no means spent. I stumbled over a chair, and gave vent to a wholly involuntary cry — but heard no answering sound. At this point came a horrible glare of lightning and a deafening stroke of thunder, though those outside the building observed no sign of a storm. Attendants came running in, and someone brought a candle after the lights were found out of commission. The man who had been reading was dead, and his face was not pleasant to contemplate. He had a queerly foreign look, and his hair and beard seemed to adhere in unhealthy patches. The book, from which all eyes were sedulously averted, was tightly clasped in the brown, bony hands — and the attendants seemed slow in trying to dislodge it. When at length they did so, they encountered something very singular. For the hands, instead of releasing the book, came irregularly off at the wrists amid a cloud of red dust — whilst the body, pulled forward by the attempt, collapsed suddenly to a powder, leaving only a heap of greenishly mouldering clothes in the chair. Those clothes were later identified as belonging to a man buried 30 years before — whose tomb in Christchurch Cemetery was found to be empty. Never since that day has the Ghorl Nigral been taken from its locked vault in the library basement.” — Lovecraft to Willis Conover, August 1936.

“Candlemas is only five days off, and I am carefully rehearsing the formulae in the Book of Eibon — having borrowed the mediaeval Latin version of Philippus Faber from the library of Miskatonic University. A look of doubtful expectancy seems to have subtly gathered on the stony muzzle of the Eidolon [a carving sent to Lovecraft by Smith], and I am reminded hideously of an elliptical allusion in the original Dusseldorf edition of the Black Book. Everything, of course, depends upon the precise identity of It. Let us hope that the problem will not be solved in too hideous a way!” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, January 1932.

“The aspect of the Eidolon [Smith’s carving] as the mystic Solstice approaches is such as to breed a vague disquiet. There is too much of a suggestion of unaccountable anticipation and satisfaction lurking about Its muzzle, and one cannot be quite sure as to a half-opened eye. I am even now collating the ritual texts in Dee’s Neconomicon and in the Latin copy at Miskatonic University, in order to be safeguarded to the utmost on the Night.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, October 1932.

HPLinks #73 – Long and Loathsome, Joshi annotates The King in Yellow, Winged Death, Reanimator to be filmed, and more…

13 Friday Feb 2026

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HPLinks #73.

* New on Librivox, Ben Tucker unleashes his latest set of audio readings “Unutterable Horrors and Loathsome Entities: Early Frank Belknap Long”. Nineteen good readings of the early tales, all kindly released into the public domain.

* Deep Cuts considers Mara Kirk Hart’s “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” (1993).

* A hardback edition of The King in Yellow, annotated by S.T. Joshi. Apparently pre-ordering now.

* The acclaimed new French translations of Lovecraft are now also available as Amazon Kindle e-books.

* New to me, an Italian website/journal devoted to Poe and news about Poe scholarship, Edgar Allan Poe: Rivista culturale aperiodica su Poe.

* The latest Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature journal is a ‘Mythlore At 50: A Celebration’ (2026) special issue, including a detailed history of this long-running journal of fantasy literature studies and book reviews. The journal mostly carries scholarly articles on Tolkien and his Inklings circle and various near-neighbours, but Lovecraftians will find occasional book reviews of interest — for instance a review of the Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature in 2025.

* The complete 2026 Lineup for this year’s London Lovecraft Festival. Also note the cover in a sidebar, which makes me wonder if there’s to be a print book of this year’s festival’s playscripts/transcripts?

* On YouTube, Horror Babble has a new audio reading of one of Lovecraft’s ghost-written tales, “Winged Death” by H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (1932). In the tale Lovecraft is obviously not taking Heald’s outline too seriously, and he adds an absurb ending, but the tale managed to land in Weird Tales in 1934. Still, if you don’t take it too seriously then it’s entertaining weird hokum, and it allows Lovecraft to imagine an African setting at length. Which shows that he could write about unvisited places if he had to. He had previously placed his “Fishers from Outside” horrors “far, far in the interior” of Africa, somewhere behind the hilltop trading outpost of Great Zimbabwe. In this tale we discover their location is actually 600 miles north of Zimbabwe, in British Uganda…

This jungle is a pestilential place — steaming with miasmal vapours. All the lakes look stagnant. In one spot we came upon a trace of Cyclopean ruins which made even the Gallas run past in a wide circle. They say these megaliths are older than man, and that they used to be a haunt or outpost of ‘The Fishers from Outside’ — whatever that means — and of the evil gods Tsadogwa and Clulu.

* The local Illinois newspaper The Telegraph reports the planned filming of a movie of Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Reanimator”, the serial-shocker he wrote for Home Brew.

This June, cousins Roger and Jeff Lewis will start filming “Herbert West: Reanimator” […] Jeff Lewis joins the Alton [Alton, Illinois] film scene with 30 years of experience in Hollywood, where his makeup work was nominated for six Primetime Emmy awards, and he spent nine years working on “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

* In the latest Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM, “From the pages to the gaming table: Designing a homebrew system to adapt a book series into a tabletop RPG”. Offers useful advice, based on playtesting, for those about to tackle the earliest stages of such a venture.

* And finally, the release of FPHam/Regency-Aghast-27b-GGUF, a free local AI LLM trained only on old texts and knowledge. The AI fancies that it is still in Regency era England (1811-1820). Lovecraft fancied himself… “an old British Colonial ever faithful to His Majesty, King George the Third!” (reigned 1760-1820). Sadly it’s a 27B model, and thus too huge in size for me to run on my PC, even as a GGUF.

— End-quotes —

“… the centuried houses [of Providence] with their fanlights and knockers and railed steps and small-paned windows had a strong and significant effect of some sort on me [as a young boy]. This world, I felt, was a different one from the (Victorian) world of French roofs and plate glass and concrete sidewalks and piazzas and open lawns that I was born into. It was a magic, secret world, and it had a realness beyond that of the home neighbourhood. It had, I knew, been there long before the home neighbourhood existed — and I felt it would still be there after the other had passed away. […] It was familiar —I had always known it — I had seen it before — it was part of me in a sense that no other scene ever was. …. and so I dreamed about it by night and visited it by day whenever I could. I used to have (as I still do) favourite vistas — looking up such and such a street and wondering what lay around the curve at the end. Could I walk into the time of Hogarth and the Revolution, if I followed one of those cryptic ways to its unknown end some evening when the twilight was purple and the yellow lamplight flickered up softly behind ancient fanlights and tiny window-panes? On rainy evenings, when the little old gas lamps (now gone) cast strange reflections on the glistening cobblestones and brick sidewalks, I could almost see the figures of yesterday plodding along …. cloaks, three-cornered hats, queues [white wigs] losing their powder in the rain ….. and I began to dream of myself in those scenes, witnessing tantalising fragments of 18th century daily life that faded too soon into wakefulness.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, 1931.

“Even now it is difficult for me to believe that Marblehead exists, save in some phantasticall dream. It is so contrary to everything usually observable in this age, and so exactly conformed to the habitual fabrick of my nocturnal visions, that my whole visit partook of the aethereal character scarce compatible with reality. […] That miracle is simply this: that at the present moment the Georgian Marblehead of 1770 stands intact and unchanged! I do not exaggerate. It is with calm assurance that I insist, that Gen. Washington could tomorrow ride horseback down the long street namd for him without the least sensation of strangeness. Wires are few and inconspicuous. Tramway rails look like deep ruts. Costumes are not marked in the twilight. And on every hand stretch the endless rows of houses built betwixt 1640 and 1780 — some even with overhanging gables — whilst both to north and south loom hills coverd with crazy streets and alleys that Hogarth might have known and portrayd, had he but crossed the ocean to discover them. It is a dream, a grotesque and unbelievable anachronism, an artists or antiquarians fancy stept out of his brain and fixt to earth for publick inspection. It is the 18th century. There are no modern shops or theatres, and no cinema show that I coud discover. The railway is so remote from the town-square, that its existence is forgotten. The shops have small windows, and the men are very old. Time passes softly and slowly there. I came to Marblehead in the twilight, and gazed long upon its hoary magick. I threaded the tortuous, precipitous streets, some of which an horse can scarce climb, and in which two waggons cannot pass. I talked with old men and revelld in old scenes, and climbd pantingly over the crusted cliffs of snow to the windswept height where cold winds blew over desolate roofs and evil birds hovered over a bleak, deserted, frozen tarn. And atop all was the peak; Old Burying Hill, where the dark headstones clawed up thro the virgin snow like the decayd fingernails of some gigantick corpse.” — from Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner.

“[In Philadelphia the] Georgian publick buildings [are] as any antiquary’s soul cou’d ask for. [Congress Hall etc…] To circumnavigate this splendid colonial array, viewing it from all angles and especially from the square to the south, whence many other colonial buildings may be seen, is to live again in that subtle atmosphere of the urban 18th century, of which so few perfect specimens now survive. The effect is marvellous — elsewhere one may find the spirit of the colonial village and small town, but only here may one grasp to the fullest extent the soul of the colonial city — mature and populous when the third George [III] sate upon our throne. [It is a] city of real American background — an integral and continuous outgrowth of a definite and aristocratick past. What a poise — what a mellowness — what a character! [… And elsewere, for those who seek them out, are] Those mazes of colonial brick alleys, that red and black brickwork, those projecting eaves and corniced gables, those slanting cellar-doors and lateral footscrapers, those iron sidewalk posts, those panell’d double doors and semicircular fanlights, those zigzag brick sidewalks, those ancient needle-like steeples, those “F.A.” house plates, those queer window reflectors — all these urban things, with the glamour of quiet squares and venerable churchyards where the ghost of Dr. Franklin wanders.” — Lovecraft to Morton, June 1926.

HPLinks #72 – Lovecraft festival at the Sorbonne, Barlow monograph, REH’s Haunted Seaports, Metal Hurlant, Lovecraft on ghosts, and more…

06 Friday Feb 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #72.

* H.P. Lovecraft is to be celebrated at the Sorbonne university in France, in March and April 2026. A large programme with a conference, interviews with translators, film screenings, and an exhibition at the Edgar Morin University Library. Also a related… “day in Boulogne with Lovecraft board games and role-playing”.

* The open-access journal Brumal (2025, Vol. 13) has the Spanish article ‘Cosmic horror and the fantastic narratives of H.P. Lovecraft in videogame mechanics’ (my translation). Also in Spanish, a book review of Across the Abyss: H.P. Lovecraft and Ontological Horror (my translation).

* Deep Cuts considers the memoir Memories of Lovecraft (1969) by Sonia H. Davis & Helen V. Sully.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post brings news of the new monograph Transmigrations: Lovecraft, Barlow, Burroughs (2026). Available now as a budget-priced Kindle ebook or paperback. This…

slender but substantial monograph is one of the most penetrating studies of R.H. Barlow ever written, examining not only his weird fiction but also his anthropological work in Mexico to paint a much fuller portrait of Barlow than has been available elsewhere. Along the way, Deleage examines Barlow’s relations with both his mentor, H.P. Lovecraft, as well as William S. Burroughs, who briefly studied with him in Mexico.

* Death At The Flea Circus is writing a series of Fungi From Yuggoth -inspired sonnets… “S.T. Joshi has accepted my sonnet “Immortal Bird” for number 24 of Spectral Realms magazine.” Spectral Realms No. 24 appears to be shipping now.

* A new Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter, for members. Including the typescript of the letter “To H.P. Lovecraft, ca. August 1930”.

* SpraguedeCampFan has posted “Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard: Additional Books”. This is part three of the post series, and we reach the the more interesting books (from a Lovecraftian perspective). A Guide to REH’s Lovecraftian fiction, which includes the appendix “Horrors from the Deep: Howard’s Stories of Haunted Seaports”. Plus the Annotated Guide to Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fantasy.

* ICV2 report that a mammoth R.E. Howard Art Chronology book-set is planned for 2026…

Troll Lord Games revealed a four volume Robert E. Howard Art Chronology set […] 1,600 pages and 7,000 images chronicling Robert E. Howard’s publication history in the U.S. The book tells the narratives of the artists who adapted Howard’s characters …

* Talking of artwork, I hear that major comics publisher Titan has a new magazine, titled The Savage Sword of Conan: Reforged. It take the best tales from Marvel’s original Savage Sword of Conan b&w magazine and adds careful hand-painted colour. It’s appears that it’s not to be compared to the sort of hideous day-glo colouring we’ve seen in the past, on comics such as Moebius b&w classics. Two issues so far, and another due in February.

I also see that Titan are re-issuing the original The Savage Sword of Conan magazines as budget-priced Kindle editions. They seem to be on a release schedule of about one a week. #14 arrives next week. The lead tale has art by Neal Adams. ‘Nuff said. …

Titan also have a new reprint and ebook of the Shadows Over Innsmouth (1994) Lovecraftian anthology. Good to see that Neil Gaiman hasn’t been excluded from the contents-list. The reprint is set for March 2026.

* Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) No. 18 (new series), April 2026, will be another Lovecraft special.

In this issue, echoing the Lovecraft Special of 1978, you will find the nectar of Lovecraftian comics from the 1970s to the 1990s. Whether among the Americans or the Franco-Belgians, H.P. Lovecraft had a deep and sprawling impact on the creativity of fantasy authors, and Metal has selected for you the best. So dive with us into the universe of the Master of Providence alongside the legendary Moebius, Bilal, Caza, Claveloux, Chaland and all the others!

* From the world of Lovecraft theatre, the board-treaders of the Miskatonic Theatre write from Hamburg, Germany…

After the ‘world’s only horror theater’ was set on fire by unknown perpetrators in March 2025 and burned to the ground, the Miskatonic Theatre endured a turbulent season in exile at Sprechwerk and Haus73 on the north side of the Elbe. [But] it will now reopen its doors in Hamburg in autumn 2026, which with your support will be bigger and better.

* In Spanish, Hijos de Cthulhu blog usefully discovers a ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale tucked away in the English-language anthology War of The Worlds: Global Dispatches (1996, 2021). The book has stories of the Martian invasion encountered elsewhere in the world, as told by historical “celebrity eyewitnesses”. Don Webb’s “To Mars and Providence” tale was set in Providence, and he had the young telescope-peering Lovecraft encountering Martians. Wikipedia still keeps a copy of an old page for the story which summarised the plot, and which the WikiPolice later deleted from the main Wikipedia.

* Talking of anthologies, Dark Worlds Quarterly this week surveys Horror Anthologies of the 1920s…

We tend to take Horror anthologies for granted. […] Back in 1920, not so much. There were ghost story collections [and] 1913’s Ghosts & Goblins from the UK is a Pulp before Pulp collections. Pearson’s, the British publisher, did Uncanny Stories in 1916. […] The stage was set but what was missing was the Pulps.

* And finally, the Ghosts and Goblins (see the mention above) caused me a bit of trouble in its tracking down, but Heritage Auctions saved the day. Published by The World’s Work in London (not ‘The Lord’s Work’, as HA amusingly has it), and the book appears to have been a shilling-shocker issued and promoted by the sensationalist tabloid newspaper The News of the World. Not online.

Update: Not published in 1913. HA have the date wrong.

— End-quotes —

“Miss Fidlar’s remark that war horrors have exhausted the capacity of the world for receiving new horrors may be answered [by saying that] The physical horrors of war, no matter how extreme and unprecedented, hardly have a bearing on the entirely different realm of supernatural terror. Ghosts are still ghosts — the mind can get more thrills from unrealities than from realities.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, 1921.

“To my mind, the sense of the unknown is an authentic & virtually permanent — even though seldom dominant — part of human personality; an element too basic to be destroyed by the modern world’s knowledge that the supernatural does not exist. It is true that we no longer credit the existence of discarnate intelligence & super-physical forces around us, & that consequently the traditional ‘gothick tale’ of spectres and vampires has lost a large part of its power to move our emotions. But in spite of this disillusion there remain two factors largely unaffected — & in one case actually increased — by the change: first, a sense of impatient rebellion against the rigid & ineluctable tyranny of time, space, & natural law — a sense which drives our imaginations to devise all sorts of plausible hypothetical defeats of that tyranny — & second, a burning curiosity concerning the vast reaches of unplumbed and unplumbable cosmic space which press down tantalizingly on all sides of our pitifully tiny sphere of the known.” — Lovecraft to Harold S. Farnese, April 1932.

“the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome […] has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” — Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

Isle of the Ghost Panthers

31 Saturday Jan 2026

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A little late, a 120th Birthday post for the spirit of Robert E. Howard.

“Isle of the Ghost Panthers”.

The salt-stained air of Illmort was thick with a miasma that clung to sea-wracked stone and bone. Ragnar stood on that desolate strand, his great leathern boots sinking firmly down into the sands. He hefted the Axe of the Shining One above his tousled head, its haft worn smooth by generations of his warriors’ hands, its metal crafted of an unyielding steel that now drank in the meager moonlight. The relentless tide seemed a living thing, a monster with a thousand mouths that gurgled and hissed as it slithered up the beach, devouring all before it.

Ragnar recalled the incantation, learned from his grandfather while still a boy. Then the words flowed from him like poison from a fang, each syllable dripping with ancient authority. Slowly, coalescing from the air and sea-spray, the incantation’s ghost panthers took shape before him, phantoms woven from an ancient nightmare and despair, their bodies impossibly sleek and muscular, rippling with an otherworldly energy. Their eyes sprang as if into life, and burned as they turned their fearsome heads to fix on him.

Then, one by one, the panthers slowly lowered their eyes, and seemed to promise him absolute obedience. The beasts were his now, so the incantation said, extensions of his own will while it held. They would not fail him, for he was Ragnar of the Iron Hand and the Shattered Chains and his will was strong.

As the black tide surged in with terrifying speed, its roaring voice became a stark counterpoint to the sighing winds. His goal was ahead, across the water — the Tower of the Invisible Moon, a dark and sea-worn spike carved not from sea-basalt but from solidified nightmare. Perched atop it, sometimes lost in swirling fog and shadow, waited whatever eldritch thing that had called him to fulfill his ancestral destiny.

With a mingled roar of human and beasts that echoed across the sea-waste, Ragnar and his gliding ghost-beasts raced toward a narrow raised causeway of black rock. The tide was rapidly flooding it. The sinews in the phantom limbs strained with impossible speed, but Ragnar’s mighty limbs outpaced them. Through the flooding waves they surged into the dark, toward the promise that lay ahead — the pinnacle where his axe might finally meet its destined purpose.

HPLinks #71 – Ramsey Campbell evening, planning Arkham, REH’s 120th, Conan and Lovecraft, Lovecraft and Ponape, and more…

29 Thursday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #71.

* At the city of York Literature Festival in northern England, “An Evening with Ramsey Campbell” on 21st March 2026. Booking now.

* New on Substack, the long essay “The Planner’s Guide to Arkham: H.P. Lovecraft’s Fictional City Through the Lens of Urban Development”. “How Street Patterns, Zoning, and Colonial Architecture Shape Horror in Lovecraft’s New England”. Readers get a substantial free chunk, and then the $ paywall slams down.

* Dancing Light of Grace finds a certain irony in the aftermath of the amateur journalism interaction between H.P. Lovecraft and Walter John Held.

* Released back in last summer, and sounding like it’s worth a mention here, The Country Under Heaven is a serious novel billed as “Louis L’Amour meets H.P. Lovecraft”. A novel that’s a “thrilling western epic”, and thus not to be confused with a yuk-yuk spoof mashup. Despite the ‘cowboy meets tentacles’ cover.

* Quite a bit of R.E. Howard this week, for R.E. Howard’s 120th birthday. A number of posts have marked the occasion. Such as Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance remembering “The Last Days of Robert E. Howard”, and DMR offering “Robert E. Howard: In Praise of His Nativity”.

* In the latest Spanish journal Barataria, the article “Relectura de Conan el Barbaro desde las coordenadas de la era postheroica”. In Spanish, freely available in open-access and Creative Commons. Conan is discussed…

as a response to the cosmicism of H.P. Lovecraft and the trope of the contemporary antihero. Using hermeneutic-dialectics, we examine how Howard incorporates elements of cosmic horror, but offers an alternative in the figure of Conan, who faces chaos and cosmic forces with violence and pragmatism. While Lovecraftian characters succumb to the indifference of the universe, Conan acts with existential vitality, giving meaning to life through radical freedom and individual choice, even in a fictional universe lacking ultimate purpose. It is concluded that, although they share a pessimistic worldview, the narrative leitmotif differs radically: Lovecraft emphasizes ‘madness’ and human insignificance in the face of the primal cosmos, while Howard proposes a dark antiheroic trope with gray morality that offers resistance, resilience and brutality in the face of ineffable gods.

* A new English article in the French journal Transatlantica, “‘The Ultimate Barbarian’: Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and the Pulp Fantasy of Prehistory”. Focusses on the later iconic Frazetta paintings of Conan. Illustrated and freely available in open-access.

* Also from France, a new book of R.E. Howard’s poems. The blurb translated to English…

Always Comes Evening: The Poetic Art of Robert E. Howard, Creator of Conan the Barbarian. On 22nd January 2026, we released the first complete bilingual edition of the poems of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) […] his poems are translated by Francois Truchaud and Patrice Louinet. [The book has a] bold design, enhanced by the illustrations of Antoine Leisure.

* SpraguedeCampFan has part two of his review of Fred Blosser’s work on Robert E. Howard.

* PulpFest calls for contributions to the 2026 edition of the event’s Pulpster publication.

* The newly released Comics Research Bibliography 2025 & Addenda combined e-book edition (30th Anniversary Edition). Officially free on Archive.org.

* A newly discovered open journal on ‘marvelous tales’ such as fairy tales and fantastical adventures. The French scholarly journal Feeries: Etudes sur le conte merveilleux, XVIIe-XIXe siecle… “is dedicated to tales of the marvelous, mainly in French, from the 17th to the 19th century”. Freely available online in open-access, with issues back to 2004.

* Grognardia digs up “The Family Tree of the Gods”, being… “a transcript of part of a letter sent by CAS [C.A. Smith] to Robert H. Barlow”.

* Deep Cuts looks at the Universal horror movies Lovecraft saw and his comments on them.

* More Lovecraftian theatre. A search snippet alerted me to this Wisconsin event… “Two Crows Theatre explores the icy tundra in “Before the Mountains of Madness”, running through Feb. 1 at Slowpoke Lounge & Cabaret in Spring Green.” The Two Crows website has a few more details.

* And finally, The Armchair Traveller visits the very remote island archipelago of Nan Madol, which to Lovecraft was ‘Nan-Matal’ and ‘Ponape’. The Traveller mistakenly has it that the place was the inspiration for R’lyeh. Though the location was an early suggestion in the article “Expedition to R’lyeh” (1972). Also, A. Merritt’s seminal The Moon Pool (1918) is set on and around Ponape, and the door in that book has been noted as resembling the one in R’lyeh. We can be rather more sure that the island instead inspired the deep back-story for “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”…

“Obed Marsh in Polynesia discovers temple of evil knowledge & learns of undersea people & their ways. Gets jewellery from priests. Learns hideous price — forgotten history of Ponape.” — Lovecraft’s outline of the tale, from his ‘Notes to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”‘.

From a vintage Australian card-set.

— End-quotes —

“The vanished Pacific world symbolised by Ponape & Easter Island has always been of the greastest fascination to me” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

“As for sunken continents — the one real probability is that a great deal of land once existed in the Pacific which exists no longer (whether a large continuous area or separate islands we can’t say), & that it supported a much more advanced culture (as witness the Easter Island images & the cyclopean masonry on Ponape & Nan-Matal) than any of the Polynesian groups now possess.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, March 1933.

“The Cyclopean ruins on Ponape & Nan-Matal, & the titanick eikons of Easter Island, are probably reliques of a culture which was archipelogick rather than continental, but which may have been instrumental in transmitting certain art forms & folkways from Indo-China to Central America in prehistorick times”. — Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933.

“I appreciate very strongly the force of the dramatic contrast formed by those occasional contacts of the classical & northern worlds which history records […] I think of [Ancient] Roman navigators in strange & distant parts [such as in] lost [i.e. sunken beneath naturally rising seas] Polynesian lands of which there remain today only the vine-grown megaliths of Ponape & the cryptic eidola of Easter Island” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, Jr., December 1936.

“[all over the world]… there are hellish stony secrets filtering down from the forgotten elder world — think of the Eye of Tsathoggua, hinted at in the Livre d’Eibon, & of the carved primal monstrosity in lavender pyrojadeite caught in a Kanaka fisherman’s net off the coast of Ponape!” — Lovecraft to Morton, March 1934.

“Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic of an elder, forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the institution’s seclusion and quiet policy prevented it from becoming a popular sensation […] Theories of a bygone Pacific civilisation, of which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and Nan-Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students, and learned journals carried varied and often conflicting speculations on a possible former continent whose peaks survive as the myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. The diversity in dates assigned to the hypothetical vanished culture — or continent — was at once bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisingly relevant allusions were found in certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.” — Lovecraft ghostwriting for Hazel Heald, “Out of the Aeons” (1933).

HPLinks #70 – full PhD, reviews, Spectral Realms, CAS conference,

22 Thursday Jan 2026

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HPLinks #70.

* The PhD thesis Eldritch Theology: A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologian (2025) is now available for full download. Previously there was only a long abstract.

* Hippocampus Press has newly listed Spectral Realms No. 24. Full of new poems, plus the new S.T. Joshi article “Clark Ashton Smith: Before The Star-Treader”.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post has his report on the recent Clark Ashton Smith conference…

All in all, the conference was a rousing success. The panels were videotaped, and I imagine they will be uploaded onto YouTube or some other such platform in due course of time. We hope to reprise the event — and make it span two days rather than just one — in two years’ time.

* The contents list of the new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida.

* The Pulp Super-Fan reviews the book The Man Who Collected Lovecraft: How R.H. Barlow Built His Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, and also usefully describes the appendices.

* SpraguedeCampFan reviews Fred Blosser on Robert E. Howard, in part one of a series of posts.

* The Robert E. Howard Days organisers note “Only Five Months until Howard Days!”.

* More scans of the old fanzine Dagon have arrived on Archive.org. Mostly gaming and Mythos tales, but note that Dagon No. 15 (1986) has Robert M. Price on “Mythos Names and How to Say Them”.

* The Bayou Film Festival (Lafayette, USA) will premiere Dreams of a Dead God on 24th January 2026. The new 36-minute movie tells of the events in Louisiana after the events of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Part one-shack drama and part ‘found-footage’, it seems.

* The Humble Bundle website has a Chaosium RPG bundle, with proceeds to the World Wildlife Fund. Valid for the next two weeks. Talking of wildlife, note the the full bundle also includes the books Petersen’s Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors and Malleus Monstrorum Vol. 1 Monsters of the Mythos.

* An announcement for Lovecraftian Days 2026, set for the city of Prague from 9th-16th April 2026. This will be a…

week-long celebration dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror legacy and its influence on gaming. The festival will bring together dozens of publishers and developers worldwide for a week of new game announcements and releases, exclusive demos and early access opportunities, special discounts, developer interviews, and community events.

* And finally, “a bizarre [theme-park] attraction very much inspired by the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. It was located in a park called Mirapolis”. That was the first theme-park in France and it was based around attractions inspired by imaginative literature. Parts of the Lovecraft section’s mechanicals were later re-used in a U.S. dinosaur attraction in 1994. On YouTube, theme park historian Poseidon Entertainment goes in search of “The Lost Lovecraftian Horror Ride”.

— End-quotes —

“… he [Lovecraft] tried all the soporific stunts at Revere” [… we went] “to Revere Beach, where Mr. Lovecraft dropped eighty-five feet and was all over.” (Mrs. Miniter, recalling Lovecraft on a roller coaster / water-drop ride at the Boston Revere Beach, in Lovecraft Remembered, page 83).

“Lovecraft and Albert Sandusky did the eighty-five-foot-drop switchback three times in succession [at Revere] and complained bitterly of the tameness of it all […] Picture, if you will, the philosophical form of one Henry Padget-Lowe, Edward Softly, Theobald Jr., H.P.L. [i.e. Lovecraft and his psuedonyms], popping out and coming bouncing toward us. It was a screaming scream.” — George Houtain, recalling the same day at Revere Beach.

As well as riding all the rides, according to Randy Everts Lovecraft also had his palm read by a palmist and answered a ‘psychological questionnaire’ in the sideshows at Revere.

He also passed by Revere Beach on his way to Salem a little later, on a more sedate set of rails…

“I set out for my favourite antique Salem region. This time I went on the electrick coaches [electric tram-cars], twice having to change (at Revere Beach and at Lynn) before attaining Salem. ‘Tis a ride of extream attractiveness, and must have form’d a diversion of prime magnitude in the days when open cars ran direct from Boston to Salem. But all things decay, and nothing more so than the rural tramways of New-England.” — Lovecraft to Galpin and Long, 1st May 1923.

HPLinks #69 – Derleth at the Weird Tales offices, CAS conference report, Lovecraft’s personal museum, and more

14 Wednesday Jan 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #69.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog for 31st December 2025 has a long free extract from the newly-published August Derleth Sac Prairie Journal for 1939. A diary in which we get vivid glimpses of… “Derleth’s preparation of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others” and an account of a visit to the Weird Tales offices under Farnsworth Wright.

* The Catholic subscription-only podcast Reconquest (Episode 498) this week considers “Lovecraft’s Lore and Catholicity: A Stark Contrast”.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has it that there’s a Truth Seeker “podcast on Lovecraft and religion” on Vimeo. Yes, Vimeo still exists it seems. Sadly I couldn’t get past Vimeo’s blocker-bot, but perhaps you can.

* From Mexico in Spanish, in the latest edition of the open-access journal Revista de Filosofia, “Los cuentos del gusano. Verdad, evolucion y antinatalismo en la ficcion de lo extrano de H.P. Lovecraft y Thomas Ligotti” (‘Truth, evolution and antinatalism in the strange fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti’). Freely available online, and these days easily auto-translated from the PDF.

* There’s a new £140(!) academic book in the Palgrave Gothic series, Uncanny Doubles: Doppelgangers, Twins, Clones and the Gothic (2026). One of the chapters is “Lovecraftian Dualities and Nonhuman Bodies: The Case of the Whateley Twins in “The Dunwich Horror”.

* Kalimac’s Corner blog reports from the recent U.S. conference on Clark Ashton Smith.

* New on Archive.org, an early work-in-progress PDF of Clark Ashton Smith In Early Fiction Magazines, with covers where possible.

* Deep Cuts considers “Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner and “A Glimpse of H.P.L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana. The latter post also digs up the drawings by…

“Betty Wells Halladay from [Lovecraft’s shelf collection of] objects [, as later] owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library. Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945”

* The same drawings are also new on Archive.org, found in good scans of the booklet of memoirs Rhode Island On Lovecraft (1945) (first and second edition).

* The new documentary film Lovecraft in Florida (no relation to the new book, it seems) is to have its world premiere at the Pensacon convention (Pensacola, Florida) in February 2026.

* New Pulp Tales has a new interview with author Ramsey Campbell. The short text-only interview is… “the first in our series of author interviews celebrating Cosmic Horror and Cthulhu Mythos Month”.

* SFcrowsnest reviews the magazine Cryptology #4 (July 2025) and notes that…

“Writer Will Murray’s second part of his look at Charlton horror comics is a demonstration of creators being given freedom to do what they liked because the company couldn’t care less – as long as their printing presses could be kept running continually. It also allowed new talent to learn their craft before moving onto the more profitable companies.”

* TDT podcast blog has a quick review in Spanish of the new Spanish book Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft: La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1 (‘We will always have Lovecraft: The influence of his cosmic horror on popular culture. Vol. 1.’). I also found what looks like a video from the book’s author at a university repository, talking about the new book in Spanish.

* The major new biography The Buried Man: A Life of H. Rider Haggard (2025).

* Les Heliocrates podcast examines the broad themes of Lovecraft & R.E. Howard: a correspondence beyond its time. In French, but YouTube autodubs it into English. Skip to three minutes in, to get to the start of talking about the letters.

* A new print magazine, RevERBerate: A Magazine of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The third issue moves to the print format, and apparently includes a survey of… “the early African explorers whose feats influenced Burroughs’ writing”.

* E. Hoffmann Price’s “Satan’s Garden” is a new free public-domain audiobook on LibriVox. 158 minutes.

* From Poland, the undergraduate final dissertation, Arabowie oczami Ameryki. Jak ukazywano swiat arabski w amerykaaskich magazynach pulpowych dwudziestego wieku (2025) (‘Arabs through the eyes of America: How the arab world was portrayed in American pulp magazines of the twentieth century’). Not online, but there is a cogent English abstract. Looks like the author takes a balanced view as a historian, and I’m guessing that (if an editor asked) it might become a trimmed English translation in a pulp history ‘zine?

* Everything you need to know about Selling at PulpFest 2026.

* And finally, Francois Baranger is lining up further editions of his richly illustrated large-format Lovecraft books. His “The Haunter of the Dark” will be hovering over the bookshops in the late autumn of 2026 in French, while his “Shadow over Innsmouth” is apparently due in English later in 2026.

— End-quotes —

Lovecraft was fond of small sculpture and bas-relief tiles, and at the end of his life the shelves of his small bedroom area was adorned with gifts of small figurative sculptures made by Robert Barlow, C.A. Smith, ancient artefacts given to him by Loveman, and curious items picked up on his travels.

“My generous host [Loveman, in New York City] presented me with two fine museum objects (don’t get envious, O Fellow-Curator! [i.e. Morton]) — to wit, a prehistorick stone eikon from Mexico, and an African flint implement, with primitively graven ivory handle” — Lovecraft to Morton in January 1933, Selected Letters IV.

“I saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s […] Loveman quite overwhelmed me by giving me several objects for my collection of antiquities — a real Egyptian ushabti (small funerary statuette) 5000 years old, a Mayan stone idol of almost equal antiquity, & a carved wooden monkey from the East Indian island of Bali.” — Lovecraft to Miss Toldridge, January 1934.

“As for my newly-acquired Bird of Space … he looks something like this — standing about a foot tall. He is carved out of a piece of horn — I don’t know of what animal, though the colour is black — & highly polished & lacquered on the exterior. Wings & feathers — as well as eyes — are suggested through some very delicate engraving. The posture of the bird — as if looking into the sky preparatory to a hop-off for unknown trans-galactic reaches — combined with its generally weird aspect to suggest the title Bird of Space. […] Loveman was amazingly generous to give me this object. I had admired it for years in his home, but never thought of hinting for it. On the last night of my visit we fell to talking about it, & as I left he pressed it into my hands as a final thunderbolt surprise. That’s just like him! I’ve put the Bird on the top of a new low bookcase in company with a Japanese idol & a Kim Ling vase. Some time I mean to take a photograph of this & other objects in my ‘museum’ — and when I do I’ll send you prints. I have an Egyptian ushabti, Mayan images, & other odd & curious things …” — Lovecraft to F. Lee Baldwin, August 1934.

HPLinks #68 – Lovecraft in Florida, Borges reconsidered, DOOM, the London Lovecraft Festival, and more…

30 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, New books

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HPLinks #68.

* Just released, the long-awaited new book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Available in hardback or paperback, and I see the book is already on Amazon UK.

* New on Archive.org, a scan of the British fanzine Dagon 17 (April 1987). Among other items, there’s an article by Robert M. Price on Lovecraft’s uses of Theosophy, and another by Will Murray asking “Was there a real Brown Jenkin?”.

* In the latest edition of the journal Revista Helice, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 2025-2026), “Que opinaba Borges de Lovecraft?: nueva revision de argumentos” (‘What did Borges think of Lovecraft?: A new review of the arguments’). Freely available online.

* Feuilleton has a long article on “Illustrating Hyperborea”, which surveys the illustrations for the tales of Clark Ashton Smith.

* Grognardia considers Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” (1922).

* An unusual self-published pamphlet in Italian, newly published on Amazon, Tolkien vs Lovecraft: Confronto sul concetto di Morte (‘Tolkien vs Lovecraft: A comparison of their concepts of death’).

* The 2026 Robert E. Howard Awards are open for nominations.

* The Thorgal artist is to have a major new exhibition, opening in France in June 2026. Thorgal is a long-running Norse adventurer character who stars in a series of Belgian BD’s (short graphic-novels in the form of finely-produced oversized books).

* “The Magic Lantern Call Of Cthulhu”, to be presented at the Drayton Arms Theatre in February 2026. On other dates in that month, also a staging of “From Beyond”, and a new “Dunwich Horror Opera”. All part of the London Lovecraft Festival, 6th-22nd February 2026 in London, UK. Tickets on sale 1st January.

* And finally, new on YouTube is All the Lovecraftian references in DOOM: The Dark Ages. Which is the latest blockbuster entry into the DOOM series of videogames, and a game which is said to be very indebted to Lovecraft.

— End-quote —

from “BELLS” (Lovecraft, December 1919).

I hear the bells from yon imposing tower;
The bells of Yuletide o’er a troubled night;
Pealing with mock’ry in a dismal hour
Upon a world upheav’d with greed and fright.
[…]
In fancy yet I view the modest spire;
The peaked roof, cast dark against the moon;
The Gothic windows, glowing with a fire
That lent enchantment to the brazen tune.
Lovely each snow-drap’d hedge beneath the beams
That added silver to the silver there;
Graceful each cot, each lane, and all the streams,
And glad the spirit of the pine-ting’d air.
[…]
But on the scene a hideous blight intrudes;
A lurid nimbus hovers o’er the land;
Demoniac shapes low’r black above the woods,
And by each door malignant shadows stand.
The jester Time stalks darkly thro’ the mead;
Beneath his tread contentment dies away.
Hearts that were light with causeless anguish bleed,
And restless souls proclaim his evil sway.
Conflict and change beset the tott’ring world;
Wild thoughts and fancies fill the common mind;
Confusion on a senile race is hurl’d,
And crime and folly wander unconfin’d.

mead = a field of thick moist meadow-grass

HPLinks #67 – Lovecraft’s artists, “Zann” in China, Icons catalogue, Lovecraft’s arms, and more…

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, New books

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HPLinks #67.

* In the new 2025 edition of the journal Synergies, “”There’s something those fellows catch — beyond life”: Visual Suggestions in Lovecraft’s Narrative” ($ paywall). From Italy, in English, the article is on Lovecraft and fine art and…

highlight[s] the visual roots of Lovecraftian aesthetics, [defining] its main characteristics, tracing them in the works of artists explicitly referenced by Lovecraft, such as Johann Heinrich Fussli, Francisco Goya, Anthony Angarola, Sidney Sime, Gustave Dore, John Martin, his friend Clark Ashton Smith and Nikolaj Roerich. Furthermore, by adopting a reversed perspective, the essay also aims to suggest that Lovecraft’s literary universe can influence the interpretation of the artworks he admired.

Yes, that can be true. When one looks at what happened to the people of the region Roerich so ably painted, it’s a real-life horror-story on a vast scale.

* An interesting obscurity I discovered via Archive.org. Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” as published in the China Mail newspaper (English-language, Hong Kong under British rule), in time for Christmas 1932.

* It’s reported that South America’s 7th H.P. Literary Festival (2025) has been successfully held simultanously in Mexico and in Argentina. The organisers have a Linktree page at Avalon Club de Rol, but unfortunately it appears their Festival information is only online at Instagram. Though perhaps the Argentine wing of the event is that mentioned by S.T. Joshi in his latest blog post (9th December 2025).

* Now available, the contents-list for the sumptuous new ‘Icons of the Fantastic’ exhibition catalogue…

Plate 1. is Hannes Bok’s “Pickman’s Model” (1950). The font and formatting of the online contents-list does not reflect the fine design of the book’s interior.

* From Spain’s Diabolo Ediciones, what looks like a fan-book titled Siempre nos quedara Lovecraft. La influencia del horror cosmico en la cultura popular. Volumen 1. (2025)…

In this first volume of We Will Always Have Lovecraft, Fernando Lopez Guisado explores the magnitude of his influence on popular culture, from music to board-games.

* S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post reveals he has collected the work of a regular British contributor to the early Weird Tales magazine, which will appear in early 2026 as The Nameless Mummy and Others.

Arlton Eadie (1886–1935) was one of the relatively few English writers to appear regularly in the American pulp magazines. Some of the stories in my volume first appeared in Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine in Great Britain. Many of his stories have a distinctively English feel to them (one of them, “The Immortal Hand,” involves the resurrection of the hand of William Shakespeare) — which makes me wonder why the devout Anglophile H.P. Lovecraft didn’t find them worthy of note. But I find almost no mentions of Eadie in his surviving correspondence.

I see Eadie’s Weird Tales stories are also available in French translation in three volumes. A little searching just now reveals some outlines of his biography. Real name, Leopold Leonard Eady. Born in the military barracks town of Woolich, Kent, he came of age at the height of the British Empire in 1904. Found working as a men’s tailor in the city of Newcastle, Northumberland in 1914 (Kelly’s Directory of Northumberland, 1914), then Army records show he served in the Northumberland Fusiliers during the First World War. Married an Anna Frances [Eady]. He was a mystery novelist published in hardbacks, as well as a short-story writer. He died in the English seaside resort of Lancing, Sussex in 1935, leaving a modest estate valued at approx. £15,000 (in today’s money), and presumably also his book rights.

* Also due soon is S.T. Joshi’s collection of August Derleth on writing, titled When Imagination Ends: Essays on Speculative Fiction. This will include… “My Twenty Years with Ghosts” (1959), an [unpublished] essay dealing with his publication of weird writers with Arkham House”. Joshi also notes, from a French writer, a forthcoming “profound monograph on R.H. Barlow”.

* Geoliminal has a long illustrated article on “The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales”, with many clippings.

* New on Archive.org, H.P. Lovecraft’s coat of arms & bookplate as good scans.

* And finally, Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys the “Idols of the Cthulhu Mythos” to 1948.

— End-quotes —

“With the insatiable curiosity of early childhood, I used to spend hours poring over the pictures in the back of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary — absorbing a miscellaneous variety of ideas. After familiarising myself with antiquities, mediaeval dress and armour, birds, animals, reptiles, fishes, flags of all nations, heraldry, etc. etc., I lit upon the section devoted to ‘Philosophical and Scientific Instruments’, and was veritably hypnotised with it.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

“Wilfred Blanch Talman of Spring Valley, New-Netherlands. He blowed in Friday morning, & has since been engaged in the noble task of getting Grandpa interested in heraldry. Never before was I so conscious of my humiliating ignorance of a subject of which every armigerous gentleman ought to possess at least a smattering; & I have now resolved to make a study of the subject, employing the famous & standard treatise of Fox-Davies. Friday afternoon Talman took me to the genealogical department of the publick library & shewed me how to look up the arms of various lines which converge in me, & he also was kind enough to draw several different coats of which I have possessed verbal descriptions only. This is a late date at which to rectify my ignorance, but better late than never. […] I’ve always had the [family] description, which I was too ignorant to interpret”. — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1927 (?).

“These damn things [family heraldic shields] seem to vary so much that a guy can never be sure of what’s right. Suppose one had one’s coach-panels and silver plate all fixed up one way, and then along came some evidence that it ought to be t’other way ! It’s a tense and exacting game, kid!” — Lovecraft to Talman, June 1928.

It was indeed an amusing game, and one which in 1927/28 no doubt helped him to recover from the trauma of New York City. But he would later rail against…

“The utter ignorance & sappiness of the snivelling, myth-swallowing, church-going stuffed shirts who go about cackling dead slogans & spreading the heraldic tail-feathers that proclaim them self-conscious members of a close corporation of “best people”! Not that they’re necessarily any more stupid & irrational than the rabble they hate, but that they add to an equal stupidity & irrationality the intolerable assumption of some mystical superiority unbased on personal merit.” — Lovecraft to Catherine L. Moore, October 1936.