HPLinks #82 – review of the Smith letters, Derleth re-written, German Lovecraft comics, Lovecraft’s birds, and more…

24 Friday Apr 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

* Sprague de Camp Fan reviews the two-volume Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

* The latest Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature is now freely available online. Mostly Tolkien and his circle/era, but note also the book reviews for…

   – William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark.
   – Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature.
   – Raven and Crow: The Mythology, Art and Science of Our Favorite Black Birds.

* In Space: A Student Journal for Public Audiences (University of Alabama), “On Lovecraft and The End”. The idea of cosmic indifference, it is suggested…

frees us to define our own values of what is important and what is not. It examines suffering, not as some divine trial, but as a shared human experience that connects us.

* New on Amazon, Tales of the Derleth Mythos (April 2026), seemingly an anthology newly collected by Robert M. Price. A collection of writers responding to, and in two cases freely re-writing, Derleth’s post-Lovecraft Mythos tales…

Two stories presume to improve on a pair of Derleth’s own tales. “The Round Tower” is both a compliment on and a criticism of “The Lurker at the Threshold”. The trouble is that the third part of Lurker ‘jumps the tracks’ laid down by the preceding two. “The Round Tower” attempt to set things right with a new substitute part three. “Footsteps Far Below” reproduces most of Derleth’s “The Return of Hastur”, but incorporates revisions which were suggested by Clark Ashton Smith but ignored by Derleth.

* Dark Worlds digs up “More Early Plant Monsters” from Victorian and Edwardian fiction.

* New at LibriVox, a public domain reading of “Marooned in Andromeda” by Clark Ashton Smith.

* Due in September 2026, a third edition of Wiley’s table-trembling survey volume American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft.

* The new Eurocomics BD Die Katzen von Ulthar und weitere Geschichten offers four Lovecraft tales, adapted for comics by Giuseppe Congendo and Antonio Montano.

The tales adapted are “The Terrible Old Man”, “The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Hound” and “The Outsider”. The cover appeals, but the German review at Warp Core (here translated) is not encouraging…

It becomes clear from the very beginning that this book is anything but easy to read and digest. The artwork, is anything but standard and indeed the illustrations are extreme. Extremely minimalist, extremely stylized, and extremely abstract. The drawings are limited to two colours per page, with speech bubbles adding a third. At times, it’s hard to know what to make of what you’re looking at. The narratives themselves are advanced almost exclusively through dialogue.

* New on Archive.org, the fanzine Infinity #2 (1973). A Berni Wrightson special-issue, but it also has a Frazetta interview.

* Also new on Archive.org, Xero #10 (1963). Has a useful long survey of Sax Rhomer’s output, followed by a Rhomer bibliography to circa 1962.

* The latest Journal of Inklings Studies has a book review of Phantastes: A Graphic Novel Adapted from George MacDonald’s Classic. The issue’s reviews are freely available online.

* Talking of comics, the UK’s 2000 A.D. comics magazine has a new comic-book take on Lovecraft’s pigeons (you’ll recall his Yuggoth sonnet on “The Pigeon-Flyers” of Hell’s Kitchen, NYC)… Lovecraftian pigeon monster.

* The quality of book covers matter to half of your potential Generation Z readers, it appears. A new UK survey from the reputable YouGov survey agency, using a somewhat reliable methodology which surveyed 2,097 UK book-buying adults, in March 2026. They… “found that 49% of 18-24 year-olds consider a book’s cover an important factor when buying, compared to just 27% of over-55s.” At a time when many people’s disposable income is being very significantly reduced, I’d suggest that having a quality cover may tip the balance towards success. There are many options for the self-publisher: a young designer/typographer who wants to burnish their portfolio; a small commission via DeviantArt; public domain images; and even AI generation if one knows what one’s doing with it and can combine it with Photoshop skills.

* Possibly of use for writers, the unique free offline utility Paragraph Tripler / Paragraph Expander. Paste in your text, and get all paragraphs tripled. So you can potentially see three somewhat different versions at a time, and then pick the best. Or keep track of first / second / final draft, at the paragraph level.

* And finally, an amusing guide to installing H.P. Lovecraft Air Conditioning. One of the nicest combinations of AI writing and niche marketing I’ve yet come across…

Color Palette: Deep blues, charcoal grays, and muted emeralds mirror the night ocean and shadowed chapters of Lovecraft’s fiction. Neutral walls allow accents to pop and prevent the space from feeling oppressive.

Textural Layers: Stone veneer, weathered wood, and aged metals resemble ancient structures like the fictional R’lyeh or the forgotten libraries described by Lovecraft. Textures influence perceived room temperature and comfort.

Ambient Lighting: Low-intensity LEDs, programmable strips, and candles with flicker can mimic the eerie glow of otherworldly luminance. Lighting should be controllable to maintain comfort while preserving mood.

Scent And Sound: Subtle sea-air aromas or resinous scents and a curated soundscape of distant surf, creaking timbers, and whispered chorales enhance immersion without overwhelming the senses.

Furnishings And Symbolism: Classic leather seating, vintage shelving, and arcane-looking artifacts evoke Lovecraft’s era while keeping seating comfort and airflow top priorities.

— End-quotes —

“I recall how he [Everett McNeil] shewed Sonny and me Hell’s Kitchen — the first time either the Child or I ever saw it. Chasms of Hogarthian nightmare and odorous abomination — Baudelairian Satanism and cosmic terror-twisted, fantastic Nordic faces leering and grimacing beside night-lapping beacon-fires set to signal unholy planets — death brooding and gibbering in crypts and oozing out of the windows and cracks of unending bulging brick walls — sinister pigeon-breeders on filth-choked roofs sending birds of space out into black unknown gulfs with unrepeatable messages to the obscene, amorphous serpent-gods thereof.” — Lovecraft to Morton, December 1929, recalling visiting Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. Unlike Red Hook, the roofs in Hell’s Kitchen were accessible and thus used as youth-gang headquarters, where pigeon breeding in rooftop coops was rife. The birds aided in gambling, crime communications, and stealing.

“Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafeningly above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which human priests do not often give. […] Then [he] turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to house the archaic father of all the rumoured shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the curious. […] the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it being indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of shantaks in the king’s dome is fed in the dark).” — Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

“I saw the ruinous, deserted old Randolph Beebe house where the whippoorwills cluster abnormally, and learned that these birds are feared by the rustics as evil psychopomps. It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves. If the soul eludes them, they disperse in quiet disappointment; but sometimes they set up a chorused clamour of excited, triumphant chattering which makes the watchers turn pale and mutter — with that air of hushed, awestruck portentousness which only a backwoods Yankee can assume — “They got ’im!” […] I saw the haunted pasture bars in the spectral dusk, and one evening was thrilled and amazed by a monstrous saraband of fireflies over marsh and meadow. It was as if some strange, sinister constellation had taken on an uncanny life and descended to hang low above the lush grasses. And one day Mrs. Miniter shewed me a deep, mute ravine beyond the Randolph Beebe house, along whose far-off wooded floor an unseen stream trickles in eternal shadow. Here, I am told, the whippoorwills gather on certain nights for no good purpose.” — Lovecraft visits Wilbraham, scene of “The Dunwich Horror”, July 1928.

“Whippoorwills? I’ll say we have ’em down here! Exotic ones too with a liquid rolling note apparently more complex than that their northern kinsfolk … I first heard them in the mystical dawn outside my window, and half imagined that they were voices calling across the ultimate void from Beyond.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, from Dunedin, Florida, June 1931.

HPLinks #81 – Lovecraft and the posthuman, Lovecraft and geology, a century of Cthulhu, letter from Red Hook, and more…

17 Friday Apr 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #81.

* A new £150 academic book from Brill / Walter de Gruyter, H.P. Lovecraft and Posthumanism (2026). No sign of it yet on Amazon UK, but the ebook version is apparently published. Here are the contents…

* This week a geodynamics scientist looks closely at the geology in “At The Mountains of Madness”. Lovecraft’s…

geology is not decoration — it is the engine of the plot. The story advances through stratigraphy, fossils, field observations, and the slow realization that rocks are not simply background scenery, but records of worlds vastly older than humanity. In that sense, the horror is profoundly geological: it emerges from time, burial, preservation, and the idea that the Earth has existed far longer than we would like. From a geological perspective, one of Lovecraft’s sharpest intuitions was to present Antarctica as (geo)dynamic rather than static […] Lovecraft understood, instinctively, that the rock record is unsettling. A cliff is never just a cliff; it is a stack of vanished environments. A fossil is never just a shape in stone; it is evidence that the world used to be structured differently.

* HorrorBabble has a free six-hour audio reading of The Complete Hyperborean Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith: Audiovisual Edition on YouTube.

* The REH Foundation Press has issued a special fundraiser book for the Howard house repairs, First Passage: Early Drafts of Beloved Yarns (2026).

* Now officially free and online, the four-volume Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes (2017).

* Forthcoming from the University of Wales Press, Coasts and the Gothic (2027), including a chapter on “Weird Tales of the China Coast”…

The weird tales of the treaty ports and coastal waters of China, written in the early years of the twentieth century, provide an evocative and understudied examination of life in the harbours and coasting vessels of […] urban port cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yangtai.

* S.T. Joshi has issued a new edited collection of lesser-known vintage horror tales, One of Cleopatra’s Nights: Tales and Poems of Egyptian Horror (2026). Available as a budget ebook, and it also includes some modern horror poems on the topic of Ancient Egypt.

* New from Italy, an Italian-language book Il secolo di Cthulhu: Omaggio misterioso a Lovecraft (‘The Century of Cthulhu: Writings in Honor of the Centennial’).

Apparently it opens with essays on the history of the famous tale, followed by stories. The lead essay… “reconstructs the birth of The Call of Cthulhu as a web of influences — from Margaret Murray to Lord Dunsany to Arthur Machen”. The fiction authors appear to have been asked to take as their departure point the real-life mysterious disappearance of an iconic early Italian fan-painting… “Karel Thole’s original painting for the cover of Monsters on the Street Corner“.

* Up for auction, The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy. A two-part auction, in May and then December 2026. Including an August 1925 Lovecraft letter sent from Red Hook to Clark Ashton Smith…

* In a new interview, the manga creator Junji Ito talks Lovecraft, Osamu Dazai, and his latest vinyl-exclusive audio drama. The latter being his audio tale of…

an old melody on an unmarked vinyl record becomes an inexplicable source of terror, [and which] is now a vinyl-exclusive audio drama named In Old Records.

* An interesting Python-based attempt to make local software that automatically generates an OldTimeRadio show, which may interest some. Feed it real weird-science news, and from this it auto-writes a script, adds narration and voice-acting, then adds music and SFX. Sadly the narrator’s voice is generated via the Kokoro AI model, so… good luck getting it working on Windows. I must have tried to install/run a dozen different packages that claimed to offer Kokoro, and all failed or were stymied (each in a different way). The only working Kokoro TTS I have is included in the NovelForge 4.0 novel-writing software, which is straightforward Windows software with a no-hassle install.

* Talking of audio production tools which may interest Lovecraftian creatives, there’s now a 6Gb ‘fine-tune’ of the worthy Stable Audio sound-effects generator, called Stable Audio X and it works in ComfyUI. Stable Audio was trained on the vast Freesound.org archive of free sound-effect recordings. Apparently the X fine-tune of Stable Audio can not only do prompt-to-SFX-audio, but can also auto-create an accompanying foley soundtrack for a video (if you feed it a video).

* Talking of AI tools, yes… we can now re-style images so they more-or-less evoke Providence at night in Lovecraft’s time. Here’s ‘Lovecraft returns home up College Street at night, in the late 1920s’. Made with two Nano Banana day-to-night re-styles of a vintage public-domain image, plus my Photoshop-addition of HPL and the black bag he often carried.

Three short extracts from “Aletheia Phrikodes” (1916) by H.P. Lovecraft, seem to fit the picture…

Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes
From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air
That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees
[…]
I was afraid when through the vaulted space
Of the old tow’r, the clock-ticks died away
Into a silence so profound and chill
That my teeth chatter’d — giving yet no sound.
[…]
Methought a fire-mist drap’d with lucent fold
The well-remember’d features of the grove,
Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams
The hot, unfinish’d stuff of nascent worlds

— End-quotes —

“By 1901 or thereabouts I had a fair knowledge of the principles of chemistry […] Then my fickle fancy turned away to the intensive study of geography, geology” — Lovecraft to Galpin, August 1918.

[As a boy] “Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived & studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments & stratifications get crystallised & upheaved into granite peaks? […] I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn’t know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere.” — Lovecraft to Vernon Shea, February 1934.

“an old-fashioned but not seriously misleading introduction to geology still unsurpassed for beginners is Geikie’s old Geology Primer. Another peculiarly congenial veteran is Winchell’s Walks and Talks in the Geological Field” — Lovecraft’s ghost-written Suggestions for a Reading Guide, probably indicating the key geology books he knew as a boy.

“I am not insensible of the importance of mineralogy in science; being well aware that the history of the planet and the details of many of its most vivid catastrophes lye hid in the chemical constitution and physical environment of its various sorts of rock. The science of geology, that primary branch of learning of which mineralogy is a division, is indeed something in which I might with ease become interested under the proper set of chance conditions; insomuch as it is directly concern’d with that main stream of cosmick pageantry which begins in blank aether and free electrons and ends in the perfection of Nordick man and Georgian architecture. Where mineralogy fails to get a grip on me is in the fact that it is a secondary science; an affair mainly of classification, with relatively slight direct linkage to the dramatick stream of pageantry of elemental conflict and mutation which appeals to the cosmic curiosity or interest-sense of the incurable layman.” — Lovecraft to his mineralogist friend Morton, October 1930.

“There is material for ineffable phantasy in the rocks & inner abysses of Mother Earth.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, March 1933, in a letter headed as written at the “Hour of the Opening of the Under Burrows”.

HPLinks #80 – Golems, REH news, book reviews, comic adaptations, new Burleson book, librarians and more…

09 Thursday Apr 2026

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HPLinks #80.

* An English abstract for a new conference paper from the city in Brno in the Czech Republic, “The Discipline of the Eye: Lovecraft’s Visual Epistemology, Atmospheric Proof, and the Horror of Display” (2026). Through “refusal and display”, Lovecraft…

disciplines the eye to treat atmosphere as evidence […] outline, surface, hue, and scene operate as atmospheric proof—signals of an alien order […] Indeterminacy, shared by narrator and reader, forces imaginative substitution, making the reader complicit in producing what cannot be stably seen.

* The latest (37.1) members-only Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts has a review of David Goudsward’s book Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida. Not online.

* From Russia in Russian and open-access, an essay that translates as ‘The Fantastic Chronotope and the Image of the City in the works of G. Meyrink and H.P. Lovecraft’…

Meyrink’s Prague (The Golem and The Angel of the Western Window) and H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”) each offer a fantastic space with distinctive features [… I also suggest] that certain details of the descriptions of the fictional city of Innsmouth were most likely borrowed by H.P. Lovecraft from The Golem.

However, one can note that “Innsmouth” was written at the end of 1931 and yet Lovecraft didn’t finally read The Golem until several years later when Barlow was able to send him a copy… “I had seen the cinema version, and thought it was faithful to the original — but when I came to read the book only a year ago [i.e. April 1935]” …. Holy Yuggoth! The film had nothing of the novel save the mere title and the Prague ghetto setting — indeed, in the book the Golem-monster never appeared at all, but merely lurked in the background as a shadowy symbol.” (Lovecraft, in Selected Letters V, p.138). If there was any inspiration, it would have been from the movie. But Lovecraft was personally well acquainted with decrepit seafronts of all sorts.

* Also from Russia and in open-access, a new journal article which translates as “‘Lovecraftian Magic’ as a Form of Fictional Religion” (2026). In Russian, but easily auto-translated.

* A new philosophy article on the Medium platform on “H.P. Lovecraft’s Takedown of Islam” (a short free sample, then $ paywall).

* DMR notes the passing of “Lee Breakiron: A Gentleman and a (Howardian) Scholar”…

While Lee was all-around a gifted scholar of [R.E.] Howardiana, he was the undisputed king — by his own hand — when it came to scholarship regarding the history of Howardian fandom and literary criticism. He’d read and collected all of it during the decades before he strode into the REH scholarship arena.

* A review of Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.

* The REH Foundation podcast has a new chat surveying and discussing Robert E. Howard’s Pirate Stories.

* A new review of the Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith.

* On Kickstarter… Deep Space Lovecraft: 2 Cthulhu Mythos Horror Adaptations. Being… two “Mythos tales reimagined & visualized as hard science fiction” and done as comics. It’s heavily over-funded already. “The Haunter of the Dark” is imagined as a visit to a giant cathedral-like space station, and “The Hound” seemingly as a visit to another space station / museum? Despite the obviously AI-generated images, which by the looks of them were probably generated some years ago with now-primitive AI and then partly overpainted, the images have been carefully cohered into appealing pages. The pages are offered on the Kickstarter page as free samples. Looks to me like the Inverse Press / Flatline Comics could be a way to publish your AI generated comic in paper, without having to encounter the anti-AI hysteria currently being whipped up elsewhere.

* AI has moved on since then, and if you want a taster of that then have a look at this curious weird experiment. Simply feed the entire text of the seminal science-fiction novel The Time Machine into an AI, and have it make an apparently un-aided script and then generate a 17 minute movie version by itself… “this is the raw unrefined result with a single take, no cherry picking” says the experimenter.

* The new French Metal Hurlant 18 (Lovecraft special, 2026) magazine is now available.

* Amazon UK is listing Donald R. Burleson’s new book Seed of the Gods: Lovecraft-Inspired Tales and Others as published in April 2026… “his first collection of short stories in more than a decade, [in which] Burleson gathers tales written over the past fifteen years”.

* A new free ebook, “Overworked, Undernourished, and Weak in the Eyes”: The Portrayal of Librarians in Comics. An assiduous annotated and seemingly completist survey in 365 pages, offered by the author. Freely available to download as a PDF. It’s under Creative Commons Non-Commercial, so one could have an AI extract all the references which refer in some way to supernatural/horror librarians and thus make a more compact themed survey.

* Taskerland has a short essay “On “The Man of Stone” by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft”. He finds this collaboration is…

not a great story, but it is an instructive one. In its mixture of cosmic suggestion and theatrical excess, it shows how readily Lovecraft’s ideas can be broken apart and made to function elsewhere. What emerges is not simply a change in tone, but a loosening of ownership, the same anxieties set loose from their original form and already beginning to move beyond the control of their author. This process is usually dated to Lovecraft’s afterlife, to obscurity, Derlethian appropriation, copyright murkiness, and the long slide into cultural ubiquity, but its beginnings may be earlier.

* Dark Worlds surveys “The Arkham Sampler Fiction”. Scans of Derleth’s Sampler issues can now be found at the Internet Archive.

* Up for auction at Heritage Auctions, a complete run of Arkham House books.

* Browsing eBay for scans, I’d not seen this one before. A pleasing and unwatermarked map of the highway system in Rhode Island, 1925. Could be upscaled to become a good RPG game prop?

* And finally, a rare street-level view of the Market Square, Providence, as Lovecraft would have encountered it. Many other postcard views are elevated or bridge-views. The view here is north towards the State House dome. The city’s market was held around the railings on the left of the picture. One can almost imagine the fellow alighting from the tram car, holding a black bag, to be the young Lovecraft.

— End-quotes —

“My aunt is well acquainted with Mr. Champlin Burrage, an Oxford man, who is librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown. (I hope to meet him very soon.)” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, April 1917. Brown University in Providence.

“Like you I am absolutely devoid of actual friends outside of correspondence. Those whom I knew in youth are all active and successful now, […] one a librarian of the R.I. Historical Society” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, circa 1918.

“My other guest [in Providence], Carl Ferdinand Strauch — poet and Asst. Librarian of Muhlenberg University (a friend of Brobst’s) — was also highly interesting, and very appreciative of the local antiquities and and-wheres.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1932.

“Only the other day a correspondent of mine — a librarian who sees all the magazines — was remarking what a fixture of the small & select publications you [i.e. Derleth] are getting to be!” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1933.

“… some timid reader has torn out the pages [from the Necronomicon] where the Episode of the Vault under the Mosque comes to a climax — the deletion being curiously uniform in the copies at Harvard & at Miskatonic University. When I wrote to the University of Paris for information about the missing text, a polite sub-librarian, M. Lean de Vercheres, wrote me that be would make me a photostatic copy as soon as he could comply with the formalities attendant upon access to the dreaded volume. Unfortunately it was not long afterward that I learned of M. de Vercheres’ sudden insanity & incarceration, & of his attempt to burn the hideous book which he had just secured & consulted. Thereafter my requests met with scant notice.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.

HPLinks #79 – Lovecraft’s father, Lovecraft and urbanism, Herbert West BD, Claude Mythos, Lovecraft and machines, and more…

31 Tuesday Mar 2026

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

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HPLinks #79.

* A new book, The Father’s Silence: H.P. Lovecraft and the Shadow of the Father (2026). Being a 100-page collection of “John L. McInnis III’s long unpublished scholarly work on Lovecraft”, newly published by his son. The book examines the long shadow that can be seen to have been cast by Lovecraft’s father, in relation to Lovecraft’s… “themes of inheritance, decay, forbidden knowledge, and unseen influence”.

* Deep Cuts considers “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974) by R.A. Everts.

* New on Archive.org, to borrow, a scan of Barton Levi St. Armand’s The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (1977).

* Also new on Archive.org, a scan of Zealia Bishop’s “H.P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s Review” (1953).

* On Reddit, a long article on “Italian Cinema and Lovecraft”. In English.

* New in Italian, “Il mito di Lovecraft. H.P.L. come personaggio nel fumetto”, a journal article on Lovecraft as a character in two graphic novels (Alan Moore, Breccia). Freely available online.

* New in the latest edition of the journal Studies in the Fantastic, “Biophilia, New Urbanism, and “He”: H.P. Lovecraft’s Contribution to Environmental Thought” ($ paywall)…

Lovecraft presents readers with a compelling and original critique of twentieth-century American urbanism, one that bears little resemblance to either E.O. Wilson’s influential theory of biophilia or the environmental movement in general.

* New on YouTube, the R.E. Howard Foundation in a podcast conversation with the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

* Heroic Fantasy Quarterly has news of the forthcoming Howard Days S&S Workshop for writers.

* Talking of writers, the $50 Windows desktop PC software NovelForge is now at version 4.0. At the end of last summer I made and released a free Lovecraft style module for it. In the new v4.0 this worthy script and novel-writing software adds “over 50 local neural voices” for text-to-speech, plus Word export and more. The voices are the excellent real-time Kokoro voices, in a ONNX wrapper (thus, no Python wrestling or $800 graphics-card is required). The installer size has increased accordingly, but is a reasonable 260Mb. The free-trial version doesn’t expire, has nearly all features working, and is only very lightly crippled. The third-party $20 WindowTop Pro would be required to give the software’s UI a full Dark Mode (tested and working), though NovelForge’s native ‘Distraction Free’ simple page now has a new dark option.

* ThePulp.Net has a handy new directory-page with fresh links to Doc Savage websites and more.

* Rue Morgue positively reviews the new Welsh anthology of Lovecraftian Mythos tales.

* On Archive.org, a good scan of the underground Skull Comics #4: Special Issue Lovecraft (1972), which was so popular they immediately followed it with Skull Comics #5 (1972) which was also a Lovecraft issue. #5 includes Corben and also an adaptation of the Lovecraft poem “To a Dreamer”.

* New to me, a French BD comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Herbert West”. 136 pages, published in April 2025. The characters become cartoon animals.

* Hokusai’s famous “Mount Fuji” series of prints gets a Lovecraftian monster-makeover, in a new 126-page artbook from Japan. Could be a quick AI makeover, I’ve not sure. Buyer beware.

* A McFarland book I missed noticing around Christmas time last year, Fantastic Adventures in the Comics: Rockets, Genies, and Bug-Eyed Monsters, 1940s-1980s (December 2025). Only covers American comics, and in just 120 pages. So it sounds like it’s aimed at newbie readers/collectors looking for an authoritative survey?

* Ghost Clinic reports that Mike Lyddon’s new screen documentary Lovecraft In Florida: DeLand and the Barlow House won ‘Best Short Documentary’ at A Night of Horror Film Festival and will be released on Blu-ray later in 2026, along with…

his 2022 documantary Haunted Thrills which had tremendous success on the film festival circuit. The film explores the pre-code science fiction and horror comic book era of the late 1940’s to mid 1950’s. It features commentary by three living pre-code comic book artists – Joe Sinnott, Everett Raymond Kinstler, and Victor Carrabotta, all of whom have sadly passed away. The Blu-ray will be a special signed and numbered limited edition release, so please bookmark this website as we near the release date, probably in October of 2026.

* And finally, the leading mega-AI Claude has its latest hottest version. It’s named ‘Claude Mythos’. Nope, the name is not an April Fool, apparently. Said by official leaked documents to be the secret next-gen Claude that is already built, and which in the words of the developers is… “by far the most powerful AI model we’ve ever developed”. The name was apparently given because it’s so scary.

— End-quotes —

“I am, I hope, now a complete machine without a disturbing and biassing volition; a machine for the reception and classification of ideas and the construction of theories.” — Lovecraft to Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 1921.

“About Brown [University students] rioting — yes, I did take a genuine pride in the virile energy and healthy antinomianism displayed [by the boys] on Memorial Day. […] It makes me sad to reflect that I’ve grown too old and grey to mix into inspiring rough-and-tumbles like this. I’d love to crack skulls in the name of free individualism, and smash office-appliance-shop windows as a symbolic nose-thumbing at the age of commerce, machines, time-tables…” — Lovecraft to Morton, July 1929.

“Anybody who thinks that men […] are able consciously to mould the effect and influences of the devices they create, is behind the times psychologically. Men can use machines for a while, but after a while the psychology of machine-habituation and machine-dependence becomes such that the machines will be using the men — modelling them to their essentially efficient and absolutely valueless precision of action and thought …… perfect functioning, without any reason or reward for functioning at all. [We will] no longer measure men as human beings, but as effective fractions of a vast mathematical machine which has no goal or purpose save to increase the precision and economy of its own useless and rewardless motions.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.

“Just read the new Astounding [pulp magazine]. Essentially mediocre & conventional — machine-made stories with no distinction in style or atmosphere.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, September 1933.

HPLinks #78 – F.B. Long letters published, new early discoveries, Providence swamps and ponds, and more…

23 Monday Mar 2026

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, HPLinks, Scholarly works

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HPLinks #78.

* The long-awaited limited-edition hardcover of the Lovecraft-Long letters has been released. As the $85 A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. Shipping now.

This volume brings to a conclusion the massive effort to publish the totality of Lovecraft’s extant correspondence. In each of these twenty volumes, editors David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi have consulted original manuscripts and have exhaustively annotated the letters to provide readers with a full understanding of the biographical and literary background of every document.

Congratulations to all involved with this triumph of research, scholarship and endurance. Now all we need is the cumulative index volume. And, to save Tentaclii readers from looking, I should add that there’s no sign yet of a release of the scans of these new letters at the Brown University repository. At least, not when sorting by date. Possibly these are there, but the system dated them a few years back, when they were ingested-but-embargoed? Just a guess, for now.

* S.T. Joshi reports on a newly-found ‘first mention of Lovecraft in print’. Donovan K. Loucks has unearthed a Providence Evening News item from early April 1903, which reported that the boy Lovecraft had his $4 “small express waggon” stolen from in front of the Hope Reservoir Pumping Station. An express waggon was a basic multi-purpose toy cart with a long handle for pulling and no brakes. The one seen below is made of wood, but they were also made of sheet metal by the early 1900s.

Yes, that sloping path looks perfect for boys and waggon-rides.

* An abstract for a paper presented at the Design Research Society Conference 2026, “User centred dread: a Lovecraftian critique of design”… “The concept of ‘user-centered dread’ emerges as a central provocation, highlighting how users are led into states of incomprehension and even terror through supposedly benign design work”. The authors are from Glasgow in Scotland, a city notorious for its urban design horrors.

* A new open-access article in the journal Modern American History, “Where the Dumps that Used to Be Ponds Used to Be: Urbanization and Waste in Providence, Rhode Island” provides detailed deep historical background on the changing aqueous landscapes of Providence.

from the 1880s until the 1950s, officials encouraged the conversion of inner-city ponds and lakes into landfills, with each filling more quickly than the last. This trend continued until virtually all low, wet places had been filled, along with significant stretches of the urban coastline.

For Lovecraft, such places were Cat Swamp; along the banks of the Seekonk; York Pond and the ravines back of it. From places such as York Pond and the Seekonk arose his earliest literary combinations of landscape and nightmare.

* The Fossil: Official Publication of The Fossils has its January 2026 issue freely available. Including an item from Lovecraft’s wife… “Monica Wasserman writes about a recently discovered early piece by Sonia Green, published in 1921” and the snappily-written piece is also printed. Though it takes some decoding, as its written in the amateur convention-report style of the time.

* Back in July I noted the Argentinian philosophy book H.P. Lovecraft. La Anti-vida y el destino cosmico (2025), and now I see an “English Edition” is newly available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon. Get the 10% free sample to determine if the translation is up to the job.

* At the University of Verona, Italy, there was a campus-wide… “day of studies to explore the role of materials and resources in science-fiction worlds, between theoretical reflections and the analysis of Lovecraft”.

* In open-access, what appears to be a February 2026 special edition of Lingua Italiana magazine (?) on the topic of The New Italian Weird. In Italian. Freely available online.

* DMR considers Lovecraft’s Shout-Outs to Robert E. Howard, rather than the other way around…

Lovecraft told REH that he would name-check some of Howard’s creations in his future tales and he fulfilled that promise. The earliest mentions can be found in “The Whisperer in Darkness”, which was finished in September of 1930.

* Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys “Shoggothian Terror in Sword & Sorcery Comics”.

* The Save the Robert E. Howard Museum campaign is now more than half-way there.

* American Hero Press have a very sumptuous-looking Frazetta TERROR large-format artbook at 15″, with pull-out prints on heavy paper stock.

* Finnish publisher Jalava has long done good work in translating Lovecraft, R.E. Howard and others into Finnish. I see that in 2025 they produced a handsome edited volume of the best stories by Lovecraft in Finnish.

* Now released, the new book Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995. 140 pages of essays on the otherworldly in the British landscape, as seen on British broadcast television in its prime.

* Talking of British spooks, the final ‘farewell’ issue of the scholarly M.R. James journal Ghosts & Scholars has been published.

* From Germany, a YouTube gallery of various Mythos Creatures, visualised as five-second ‘animated pictures’.

* On Kickstarter and already funded, a Dreamlands playing-card pack.

* The Gates of Imagination reads Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”, free on YouTube.

* On Librivox and public domain, Short Science Fiction Collection 106. Includes free audio readings of Frank Belknap Long’s “Young Man With a Trumpet” and Hannes Bok’s “Return from Death”.

* And finally, on Reddit one Grandpa Theobaldus (u/GrandpaTheobaldus) is newly fascinated by Lovecraft and film-going, and is regularly digging up Lovecraft quotes in which the master talks about movies he has seen.

— End-quotes —

“My home was not far from what was then the edge of the settled residence district, so that I was just as used to the rolling fields, stone walls, giant elms, squat farmhouses, and deep woods of rural New England as to the ancient urban scene. This brooding, primitive landscape seemed to me to hold some vast but unknown significance, and certain dark wooded hollows near the Seekonk River took on an aura of strangeness not unmixed with vague horror. They figured in my dreams — especially those nightmares containing the black, winged rubbery entities which I called “night-gaunts” — Lovecraft, from “Some Notes on a Nonentity”.

“Remembering that I had no map & knew nothing of the country, [I went] trusting with chance with a very agreeable sense of adventure into the unknown; just as I used to enjoy getting “lost” on walks around Cat Swamp [as a boy]” — Letters to Family, page 421. The northern part of Cat Swamp became the Brown University Baseball Field of the 1920s/30s.

“[the old wild and farmland area of Providence is now] built up with residential streets; although a small strip of it — the high wooded bluff along the Seekonk River & an adjacent series of ravines — has been preserved in its primitive state as a park reservation.”, Selected Letters IV, p.348. The high wooded bluff is the southern one at York Pond, likely relatively pristine throughout Lovecraft’s life (although the northern bluff was ground down and graded for a road). Note however that in Lovecraft’s boyhood this strip along the Seekonk had evidently been a wild and unregulated place, as… “By 1908, Blackstone Park had fallen into almost complete disuse” (Providence Journal) and was being used as a dumping ground. One suspects the city authorities were deliberately neglecting it, in the hope of waterfront development. The city however eventually preserved the tidal Seekonk waterfront for the long term, with…

“the preservation of a splendidly rural series of river-bluffs, wooded ravines, and meadows for a space of at least two miles along the shore, and extending considerably inland. Its ownership and conditions are [legally] fixed, hence it has been the same throughout my life and is always likely to stay so. I can shed the years uncannily by getting into some of my favourite childhood haunts here. In spots where nothing has changed, there is little to remind me that the date is not still 1900 or 1901, and that I am not still a boy of 10 or 11.” — Lovecraft to Derleth, October 1930, written outdoors from “Open fields near the River”.

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

14 Saturday Mar 2026

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HPLinks #77.

* 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.

* 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

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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

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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.