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It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.
Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi [...]

Bookplate by Denis Kostromitin.
Following the recent postings of covers and illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, Will at A Journey Round My Skull posts the results of his Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest which encouraged illustrators to create an Orchideengarten-styled bookplate design. You can see the winner and many other splendid entries on his pages. I fully intended [...]

Irish writer J Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you’re most likely to find his work. His ghost stories are frequently superior to the more celebrated MR James (who edited a Le Fanu collection), they’re less [...]

Halloween approaches and as a precursor it’s a great pleasure to be able to post a selection of interior illustrations from Der Orchideengarten, courtesy of Will at A Journey Round My Skull. Der Orchideengarten was a German magazine of weird fiction which ran for 51 issues from 1919 to 1921 and whose existence [...]

The first action heroine | Ellen Ripley and Alien, 30 years on.

Impossible to avoid thoughts of either JG Ballard or various apocalyptic horror and science fiction scenarios when looking at these photos of Sydney, Australia, taken a few hours ago. A cloud of red dust passed over the city in the early morning and the depopulated views only add to the eerie atmosphere. These are from [...]

The Thing set on survival | Anne Billson on John Carpenter’s masterpiece.

Steampunk: Life in Our New Century!
I’m behind on work updates again. Still being very productive on a range of different fronts—mostly book and CD design as usual—but the workload means that site updates tend to suffer. Anyway…
This new Steampunk illustration was a quick piece done at the weekend to accompany an article Jeff VanderMeer is [...]

In Spaces Between from The Great Old Ones (1999).
Some noteworthy pieces of news as the month draws to a rain-sodden and dismal conclusion.
• Frank Woodward was in touch this week to let me know that his excellent HP Lovecraft documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, will at last be appearing on DVD in October. This [...]

The sweet sound of hell | Goblin and Dario Argento.

Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.
The sight of one of Picasso’s many versions of Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Velázquez earlier this week prompts this post. An endlessly fascinating painting whose influence runs through three hundred years of art history. That influence isn’t so surprising if you consider this as a painter’s painting; [...]

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2.
Rearranging the bookshelves this week had me looking again at this old Ace paperback of Robert [...]

L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).
Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the [...]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

Professor Pepper’s Ghosts, c. 1885.
From a page of old theatrical posters. A poster from the Egyptian Hall in London, home to regular performances by celebrated conjuror John Nevil Maskelyne, appears in the background of my Nyarlathotep picture.
For a contemporary explanation of Pepper’s Ghost, look here. Thanks to Thom for the tip!
Previously on { feuilleton }
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From HP Lovecraft to another writer of weird fiction, Gustav Meyrink. Das Haus zur letzten Latern is a tribute to Meyrink by Silence & Strength and the package I designed late last year for Horus CyclicDaemon has just been released. I’ve mentioned before that Horus make a particular effort with all their CD productions, choosing [...]

Unveiling another new piece of work, this is a T-shirt design for metal band Cyaegha whose Steps of Descent album I illustrated and designed last year. They asked for something based on HP Lovecraft’s god Nyarlathotep so I thought I’d take the opportunity to rework from scratch the version of this I created in 1999 [...]

Another work-related update. This HP Lovecraft collection is published by Barnes & Noble next month and features my colour rendering of the rising monstrosity on its cover. Nice to have something decorating an actual Lovecraft book, the second time this has happened (first time was for a French volume). B&N also sell my own book, [...]

I drew attention yesterday to the abraded look of the Taking Woodstock poster and mentioned a recent book design of mine which used a similar effect. This is that cover, created for a collection of Joe R. Lansdale’s horror novels coming soon from Underland Press. Lansdale is known mainly for being the writer of the [...]

Like the creations of the late Oliver Postgate, Edward Judd haunts my childhood imagination via the handful of very British science fiction and sf/horror movies he starred in during the 1960s. He did a great deal of acting before and after this—in the Seventies he was a very ubiquitous TV character actor—but it’s his run [...]