The Monstrous

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One of the books I was working on over the summer is officially published this week. The Monstrous is a horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, and the third Datlow collection that I’ve designed for Tachyon Publications after Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014) and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror (2010).

My work on this new collection isn’t as full-on as for the Lovecraft volume: I designed the interior, and also illustrated each story but this time many of the illustrations are details or vignettes rather than full-page pictures. There are still 20 stories and over 20 illustrations, however, illustrating pieces by Jeffrey Ford, Peter Straub, Dale Bailey, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Gemma Files, Livia, Adam-Troy Castro, Kim Newman, Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, Carole Johnstone, Brian Hodge, Stephen Graham Jones, Adam L. G. Nevill, Sofia Samatar, Terry Dowling, Glen Hirshberg, A. C. Wise, Steve Rasnic Tem, Christopher Fowler, and John Langan. Not everything here is a monster in the common sense of that word, the collection explores monstrousness in many different forms, from Sumerian demons and Japanese ghosts to Peter Straub’s disturbing portrait of a psychotic school teacher.

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Missing from this selection of pages is additional pictorial material from Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris (1665). The capitals on the contents pages are the collaged letterforms by Roman Cieslewicz taken from Dover’s book of bizarre and ornamental alphabets.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Lovecraft’s Monsters unleashed
Liceti’s monsters
New work: Two forms of darkness

5 thoughts on “The Monstrous”

  1. Wow! Stark vignettes indeed! Scrolling down brought on a narrative of its own.. A non sequitur dream sequence that had my detective mind trying to link them to figure out what… WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Haha! Excellent as always, John!

  2. Thanks, everyone!

    Skinner: Yeah, that didn’t occur to me but seeing them away from the stories has that effect of a pictorial narrative. Some of the other illos that aren’t shown here would add to that, especially the one of footprints on a beach.

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