One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint of The Call of Cthulhu from Barnes & Noble.

While we’re on the subject—and book covers are never far away, as yesterday’s post demonstrates—I was asked to contribute to this week’s Mind Meld discussion at SF Signal, answering the question “Which are the most memorable book covers in science fiction and fantasy?” Some of the entries in my list have been discussed here in the past. Compared to the other responses I come across like I’m giving a lecture… And there was further sf cover discussion at io9 this week. Good to see older generations of artists and designers still receiving enthusiastic attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Science fiction and fantasy covers

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 way inevitably to Surrealism, especially in dream lithographs like the one below.

Vision from Dans le Rêve (1879).

I compounded that Symbolist/Surrealist association when I was drawing The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 by showing Ardois-Boonot’s Dream Landscape (which Lovecraft doesn’t describe beyond the word “blasphemous”) as being a Max Ernst-style frottage canvas with a Redon eye rising from the murk. Cthulhu’s presence reduced to a single ocular motif like the eye of Sauron.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

And while we’re on the subject there’s Guy Maddin’s typically phantasmic short, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity made for the BBC in 1995. Ostensibly based on the balloon picture above, this manages to reference a host of other Redon lithographs and charcoal drawings in the space of four-and-a-half minutes. Sublimely weird and weirdly sublime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours
• The Heart of the World

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, of course (with, er…the same cover pic).

And another shout-out, for a preview of Arik Roper’s new book, Mushroom Magick: A Visionary Field Guide, at Abrams. Read an extract from Erik Davis’s introduction here.

Via Further.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Arik Roper

“For all the world I was led like a dancing bear” by NC Wyeth (1911).

This year’s reading began with a desire to explore some of the Robert Louis Stevenson volumes in my collection which I’ve so far neglected. At the moment I’m thinking of maybe reading everything I have by RLS, having begun with a return journey to Treasure Island, a book which seems to improve every time I revisit it. Setting out with Stevenson’s pirate tale was partly a result of having watched all three Pirates of the Caribbean films over Christmas, a series I’m probably in the minority in enjoying wholeheartedly, flaws, preposterousness and all. Much as I’d like to see a fourth film (there’s a hint of a sequel at the end), I’d prefer the makers to leave things be. The three films taken together can be watched as a single nine-hour ramble across the high seas and the tidy conclusion would be better left as it is.

My pocket-sized copy of Treasure Island from the Tusitala edition of Stevenson’s collected works is fine apart from the very small and poorly-printed map, something to which the reader is compelled to refer as we follow Jim Hawkins on his journey around the island. Happily the web provides many examples which can be printed out for viewing while reading. The web is also a resource for some of the numerous illustrated editions of the novel. The version by American illustrator NC Wyeth is one of the more well-known and more successful and his Long John Silver is a suitably powerful figure. Wyeth’s depiction of Billy Bones waiting on the cliff top was featured in a set of US stamps in 2001. Archive.org has PDF copies of the Wyeth book (and a version with illustrations by Louis Rhead) although one of these, with better scans of Wyeth’s paintings, has some of the plates missing.

Long John Silver by Mervyn Peake (1949).

Far stranger—weirder, even—is Mervyn Peake’s Long John Silver, seen here on the cover of a more recent edition. Peake’s illustrations are probably my favourites but then I’m biased towards Peake as an author and illustrator so the preference is unavoidable. Even so, his depiction of Israel Hands brings to the fore the malevolent duplicity of that character in a way I’ve not seen any other illustrator attempt. It’s a shame the Peake site doesn’t have another of the artist’s renderings of Silver showing the sea cook posed on his single leg in an attitude more like a ballet dancer than a pirate. That drawing and his ogre-like Blind Pew show how original Peake could be as an illustrator. And lets not forget his own pirate creation, also his first book, Captain Slaughterboard.

It’s asking too much but it’s a shame that Walt Disney couldn’t have taken a look at Peake’s drawings instead of diluting Stevenson’s cunning buccaneer into the gurning caricature portrayed by Robert Newton in 1950. The less said about Byron Haskin’s film (and its sequels), the better. It has its moments visually but Newton’s portrayal has blighted all those that follow (Geoffrey Rush tips the hat in the Pirates films) and is single-handedly responsible for all subsequent pirate clichés.

Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean, on the other hand, could almost have been designed specifically to please me alone, looking like the offspring of some unwholesome ménage between Long John Silver and the Great God Cthulhu. For the time being Davy Jones is probably my favourite screen villain, his tentacled face—and the fishy caste of his crew—is a wonder to behold. God knows what Stevenson would have made of this transfiguring of his creation but it suits me fine.

More buccaneers tomorrow.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• Stevenson and the dynamiters
• Howard Pyle’s pirates
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

Lord Horror (1997).

Time for an end of year news round up.

• As mentioned earlier, issue 11 of US horror magazine Penny Blood features a look at Savoy Books and David Britton’s Lord Horror mythos. The magazine is now on sale and includes comments from Savoy’s Michael Butterworth and myself.

• I was interviewed last month by Creative Review, the UK’s leading design mag, as their January 2009 issue includes a feature on Barney Bubbles. This is also now on sale although I’ve yet to see a copy so I don’t know how much of what I was saying made the cut. I did finish by calling Barney B a “true pop artist” and I see they’ve used those words as their sub-heading so that may be one contribution.

• Back in the USA, book chain Barnes & Noble have licensed my 2004 Cthulhu Rising picture for an HP Lovecraft reprint. Not sure when that’s appearing yet. The same picture (which is also my most popular print) was licensed earlier by a Romanian publisher for (surprise) a Lovecraft collection. I’m told that volume will be published in May 2009.

• Finally, the recent Steampunk design which Modofly are now selling on their laser-etched Moleskin books will be appearing shortly in a surprise location. More about that later. I’ll probably be doing some prints and CafePress stuff with this picture eventually but for now Modofly has the monopoly.

Posting here may be rather sparse over the next couple of weeks since I’m very busy work-wise just now. So don’t be surprised if there’s a long run of picture-only posts. December and early January are often slack and moneyless so it’s good to be busy.

I’ve been a bit late with the new calendar this year but it’s finally available at CafePress. I’ve also been somewhat remiss in reusing last year’s pages rather than uploading new ones. Preparing 12 pages of art takes time even if you’re using old images—they have to be the right dimensions, after all—and I’ve been preoccupied this year with too many other things. So while the cover is new (based on this HP Lovecraft-derived picture), the pages are the same tinted versions of the art for The Great Old Ones from my Haunter of the Dark book. Considering the popularity of these pictures I’m guessing that some people will be quite happy with that; a selection from the series also appeared in the enormous Lovecraft Retrospective from Centipede Press earlier this year.

In other Lovecraft-related news, I’ve been slowly drawing a new Cthulhu portrait since demand for Cthulhoid work remains high. I’m not sure when this will be finished yet as other work takes precedence but this is where you’ll hear about it first.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The monstrous tome

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt.

…the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.

The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.

Thus wrote HP Lovecraft in 1927 as part of his lengthy overview of horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft was enthusiastic about many of Blackwood’s weird tales, rating him as one of the contemporary masters along with Arthur Machen. A year before his essay he prefaced The Call of Cthulhu with a Blackwood quote and regularly referred to The Willows as one of his favourite stories. Blackwood’s tale continues to find enthusiasts today, among them the Ghost Box music collective whose Belbury Poly CD titled after the story manages to reference in the space of 44 minutes Blackwood, Machen, CS Lewis and The Morning of the Magicians.

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued by this point, you can read the story online at Wikisource or Project Gutenberg. Or you can listen to a reading in a new posting at LibriVox. The perfect thing for autumn and the month of Halloween.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror in the shadows
• Wanna see something really scary?
• Ghost Box
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Frank H Woodward’s excellent documentary about the life and work of HP Lovecraft receives a screening in Los Angeles at Shriekfest 2008 on October 4th. As mentioned earlier, this is easily the best film to date about HPL and features several illustrations of mine.

Wyrd is proud to announce the
L.A. Premiere of the documentary
Lovecraft: Fear Of The Unknown

Presented by Shriekfest 2008

DATE:  Saturday, October 4th, 2008
TIME:  1:45 PM
PLACE:  Raleigh Studios, The Chaplin Theater
5300 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90038

Producer William Janczewski will be in attendance!

Admission is $8. To purchase tickets, you can visit the Shriekfest 2008 site.

H.P. Lovecraft was the forefather of modern horror having created the Cthulhu mythos. LOVECRAFT is a chronicle of the life, work and mind behind these weird tales.

• narrated by Robin Atkin Downes
• music by Mars of Dead House Music
• associate producer Andrew Migliore
• produced by William Janczewski, James B. Myers & Frank H. Woodward
• written & directed by Frank H. Woodward

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for July
• The monstrous tome
• New things for October

A recent conversation with Evan J Peterson touched on the subject of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Evan is currently working on something based on the novel and—in the interests of disclosure—he wrote a very flattering piece about these pages recently. In addition to this, Peter Ackroyd’s latest book works his familiar intertextual games with the same story, placing the monster creator in London where he meets various significant literary types. Andrew Motion reviewed the latter this week and wasn’t impressed.

Which preamble brings us to Bernie Wrightson’s treatment of the story and a work which was a major inspiration for my HP Lovecraft comics and illustrations. Wrightson’s illustrated edition of Shelley’s complete novel was published in 1983 with an introduction by Stephen King. I’d admired Wrightson’s technique for years but wasn’t always impressed by his subject matter which tended to revolve around the stock selection of favourite American horror characters—vampires, werewolves, zombies and so on—while much of his early art was indebted to the EC horror comics which never interested me at all. Jokey horror has always seemed to me a debased and neutered horror, horror-lite, and yes, that includes plush Cthulhus and the rest of that tat.

So the immediate attraction of the Frankenstein book was seeing Wrightson take the story back to its origins and treat it seriously. Frankenstein—creator, monster and myth—has been subject to as much degradation as Dracula over the past century which made Wrightson’s approach very welcome. Crucially, it also gave me the key to interpreting Lovecraft visually. It was very evident that his drawings owed a debt to a favourite illustrator of mine, Gustave Doré; two of the pieces were almost straight copies of Doré drawings from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In terms of overt influence, Wrightson’s book is dedicated to the great Roy G Krenkel, one of the finest fantasy illustrators of the early 20th century. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but Wrightson’s style here also owes much to American illustrator Franklin Booth (1874–1948), one of Krenkel’s own influences. If the monster in his drawings had a touch of the lumbering EC zombie about its features that was allowable given the other influences at work, and besides, his compositions are perfect. Once I started work on my Lovecraft drawings I quickly found an approach that suited my own obsessions with fine line and detail. But it was Wrightson’s example which pointed the way.

The only problem discussing this is that the copies available on various sites, including Wrightson’s own gallery pages, don’t do the drawings much justice at all. (There’s a large copy of one picture here.) Where the more detailed pieces are concerned you’ll have to try and find a copy of the book. This year is the 25th anniversary of the book’s publication so Dark Horse Comics will be publishing a hard cover edition in October 2008. In addition, Darkwoods Press have announced an “ultimate edition” which will reprint all the artwork (some drawings weren’t used) with quality reproduction. No further information about that, however, and given that they’ve having to source all of the original drawings it may be a while before it appears.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bernie Wrightson in The Mist
• The monstrous tome
• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).

Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.

My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with this Seventies’ version produced for a Charles Williams paperback cover by illustrator Jim Lamb. (And this copy is the only one I can find, reused on a recent audiobook of Williams’ novel. If anyone has a link to a larger copy of the paperback cover then please post it in the comments.) Yes, this is tenuous but when I eventually got to see Delville’s picture it made me think immediately of Lamb’s illustration. Many Dimensions is one of my favourite books by Williams and unusually for him it deals with Islamic rather than Christian mysticism; in that case if Lamb was borrowing from Parsifal then it’s a case of the right image for the wrong book.

Jim Lamb is another illustrator from this period who now works mainly as a landscape artist.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

In 1987 I plundered Delville myself for The Call of Cthulhu as a means of showing dreaming artist Henry Wilcox whose visions of R’lyeh are one of the key events in the story. The Symbolist reference also connects him to that school of art although the sole example I showed of his painting owed more to Max Ernst. This is just one of many examples of intertextuality (or outright thievery) in my Cthulhu adaptation. I suppose one day I ought to list the others.

25th Human Be-In by Stanley Mouse (1991).

The inevitable psychedelic appropriation comes rather late with this poster by Stanley Mouse which not only lifts the face but reworks the whole drawing. I noted earlier Mouse’s fondness for fin de siècle imagery so the use of Delville comes as no surprise; the psychedelic artists enjoyed borrowing Symbolist and Art Nouveau motifs. And I’m sure this isn’t the last word on the use of Delville’s Parsifal. If there are other examples out there, post a comment.

Update: Mike suggests the Barney Bubbles painting of Miss Stacia on the sleeve of Space Ritual by Hawkwind. Barney’s Hawkwind art of this period owed a great deal to Alphonse Mucha but, given his considerable knowledge of art history, there could well be some Delville in there as well. So here it is.

Space Ritual (detail) by Barney Bubbles (1973).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal
• William Rimmer’s Evening Swan Song
• San Francisco angels

Arriving in the post today was Steps of Descent, the new CD from American band Cyaegha featuring my design and illustration. The name Cyäegha (sic) belongs originally to a Cthulhu Mythos entity invented by Eddie C Bertin, author of The Whispering Horror, my favourite story from the Pan Book of Horror anthologies of the Seventies. The cover illustration is based on a scene from HP Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and the cover and inner pages feature some photographic material from one of my Paris trips. I was very pleased with the way this turned out and I believe the band are too. Steps of Descent is officially released by Canonical Hours on the 8th of August.

Another recent piece of work is this Steampunk design suggested by writer Jeff VanderMeer who wanted a suitable layout for his semi-serious Steampunk formula. Jeff and wife Ann edited the recent Steampunk anthology from Tachyon so he knows whereof he speaks. This was going to be a T-shirt design but it seems now it may have a different outlet; more about that if and when it happens. The growing popularity of Steampunk as a sub-culture has raised some hackles recently but I like it even though I’ve not read many of the latest literary contributions. Anything which puts more brass, dirigibles and florid Victoriana into the world gets my vote.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Wanna see something really scary?

This idling reminded me that I’ve yet to finish reworking the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm which I’ve been engaged with on and off for the past year. The handful of people actually waiting for this magnum opus should know that other work and new Savoy projects keep intervening at the moment. Anyone who saw the original comics will be aware that pastiching Picasso was a consistent theme from issue five onwards. For those who haven’t seen the comics (and few people have…) I’ve posted a couple of the original Picasso-esque Horrors below, beginning with a more representational view of his Lordship for those unfamiliar with the appearance of the man.

A 1997 portrait which owes much to the style of Burne Hogarth’s later Tarzan illustrations.

Reverbstorm 5

Many of the Horror portraits in Reverbstorm were less Picasso-esque than Expressionist or Vorticist. The latter style was very apt for a fascist character like Lord Horror since the Vorticists included among their number fascist apologist Ezra Pound, who gave the group their name, and Wyndham Lewis, who later recanted an early sympathy for Hitler. The figures in the background of this panel and the one below are from Picasso’s Guernica, a persistent reference in the series as a whole.

Reverbstorm 5

Reverbstorm 6

The face on the left above was probably the most Picasso-esque of the Horror faces. I think I applied more of a consistent Picasso style throughout the series to the characters of James Joyce and Jessie Matthews.

This is a vector rendering based on a small notebook sketch done after I’d finished most of the work on Reverbstorm. I’m not sure what style you’d class it as; it comes out of the Picasso extrapolations but what began as a process of copying with many of these drawings soon evolved into a style of its own. This piece and the big portrait above are available as designs on a range CafePress products.

As I’ve said before, any further news about the development of the book edition of Reverbstorm will be posted here. Reverbstorm is some 270 pages of my best artwork so I’m naturally keen to see it published in what will be a definitive edition.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finnegan begin again
• My pastiches
• Guernica, seventy years on
• Cubist Cthulhu

Les Chants de Maldoror by Corominas (2007).

There seems to be no escaping from HP Lovecraft just now, the illustration above having been created for a PDF publication entitled CTHULHU, Cómics y relatos de ficción oscura, produced by these people. The Cthulhu-zine seems to be unavailable but you can see more of these splendid illustrations, based on Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), at Dorian Gray BD. The artist, Corominas, has an additional blog showcasing more commercial work.

Les Chants de Maldoror by Jacques Houplain (1947).

Lautréamont’s delirious masterpiece isn’t exactly the easiest book to illustrate but the Corominas drawings certainly capture some of its ferocious energy. The Surrealists were big Maldoror fans, of course, and did much to establish Lautréamont’s current reputation. Salvador Dalí produced a series of engravings for a Skira edition in 1934 although his drawings look less like illustrations of the text than a rifling of the artist’s usual preoccupations. The picture above by Jacques Houplain is one of a series of twenty-seven engravings produced for a French edition in the 1940s. More recently, Jean Benoît created (among other things) a Maldororian dog and there’s even been an attempt at a comic-strip adaptation from Hernandez Palacios. On the whole I prefer the Corominas pictures but then I’m biased towards that style of drawing which owes something to all the comic artists and illustrators influenced by Franklin Booth.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Franklin Booth’s Flying Islands
• Carlos Schwabe’s Fleurs du Mal
• The art of Jean Benoît

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.) The photo above shows the scale beside an old Mountains of Madness paperback (Ian Miller’s cover art appears in full in the new book) and my own Haunter of the Dark collection. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, a detail from his wonderful 1981 HPL panoramas.

The Virgil Finlay section showing The Colour Out of Space and his definitive Lovecraft portrait.

The range of contributors past and present includes JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V. Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, Frank Frazetta, John Holmes, Harry O. Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, Thomas Ligotti and John Jude Palencar. The introduction is by Harlan Ellison and there’s an afterword by Thomas Ligotti. Many pages fold out to reveal spreads like the Giger ones below. Print quality is exceptional, of course, but then ladling the superlatives is pointless when it’s obvious this is a sui generis masterpiece of Lovecraftian art. Naturally I’m very happy indeed to be a part of it.

A pair of Necronoms by HR Giger.

I don’t have to photograph too much since other people have been doing the same with their copies. Matt Staggs has more pictures of the contents here and Jeff VanderMeer has made the book a feature of his latest art column for io9. Jeff talks to Centipede Press’s Jerad Walters about the book’s production and notes on his own blog what an important, landmark volume this is. Having done my fair share of book production I can imagine what an undertaking it was. Jerad should be very pleased he’s been able to put together a book which bests the productions of multinational publishers with their armies of staff. And we might even ask why it’s left to a small independent publisher to produce something of this quality at all.

Jeff asked me a few questions for his io9 piece which I’m reproducing in full here.

• Everyone knows what Lovecraft means to fantasy and horror. What do you think he meant for the idea of “cosmic SF”?

JC: The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,” as he says at the opening of The Call of Cthulhu.

His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn’t directly stated. That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us either because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings or (in the case of Cthulhu) they’re eager to take reclaim the earth for their own destructive ends. All of Lovecraft’s best fiction tends to be sf used for horror purposes; he’s telling the same old tales about what might lurk in the dark beyond the campfire, only the campfire is now the planet Earth and the dark is the interstellar void.

• What personally resonates with you re Lovecraft?

JC: I think initially it was that skilful blend of sf and horror. When I was a kid I always enjoyed reading ghosts stories as much as science fiction. The first story of Lovecraft’s I read was The Colour Out of Space, a tale of a meteorite which crashes near a farm and whose insidious infection slowly affects the farm and the surrounding countryside. That’s an incredibly chilling story—one of his very best—and yet there’s nothing supernatural in it. In his best work he builds a sinister atmosphere to a remarkable degree, something he’d learned by studying previous writers. Other writers of the period and even more recent writers often seem lightweight in comparison. Later on I got drawn into the tangled web of the Cthulhu Mythos which is a compelling attraction for new readers.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

• How did you put your personal stamp on your Lovecraft-influenced art?

JC: I wanted to take Lovecraft’s fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn’t happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I’ve always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft’s concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate; I explored that in a small way last year in a picture commissioned for a Swiss exhibition (below).

Detail from “Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city” (2007).

• Lovecraft clearly tapped into something hidden or buried in readers. What was it, as far as you’re concerned?

I’ve thought for years that the invented mythology is one of the things which really hits people, even if they don’t read many of the stories. It was this which powered the Call of Cthulhu role-playing games. People don’t have to be religious to feel the draw of a mythology or invented taxonomy, you can see that in other areas whether it’s Star Trek, Star Wars or Harry Potter. That’s probably the juvenile attraction; the more sophisticated one would be the attraction for people such as Michel Houellebecq who see Lovecraft as a kind of pulp Kafka or Camus. You can be drawn into his writing by something trivial like Hello Cthulhu then journey deeper to discover a great imagination at work and even a philosophical viewpoint; anything that works on all those levels we need to label “art”.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror comics
• The art of Ian Miller
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Witness my hand and official seal
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

“Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city.”

A couple pieces of news to catch up with here, both Lovecraft-related which is very apt for the month of Halloween. The first is the work I gave a teaser view of in August, a commission for Maison d’Ailleurs, the Museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland. The brief for An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book was to choose an entry from HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, his source of story ideas. The entry I chose implies some of the alien architecture which is a feature of At the Mountains of Madness although I’ll admit that the final result is debatable as architecture.

The exhibition details are as follows:

An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book
Opening on Saturday, October 27, 2007, 6 PM at Maison d’Ailleurs
Pl. Pestalozzi 14, 1400 Yverdon-les-Bains, Suisse
Ph: +41 24 425 64 38, www.ailleurs.ch

Original art by:
Albertine / Albin / Aeron Alfrey / Sylvain Amacher / Fred Bastide / Jose Antonio Bautista / Bénédicte / Noah Berlatsky / Stephan Bersier / Bertschy / Christian Bili / Enrique Bonet / Eric Braün / Benjamin Bron / Gabriel Br. / Giacomo Carmagnola / Paul Carrick / Caza / Daniel Ceni / Jean-Michel Cholette / Gilles Christinat / Cosey / John Coulthart / Marc Da Cunha Lopes / Brendan Danielsson / Guy Davis / Antoine Déprez / René Donais / Randy DuBurke / Antoine Duplan / Kevin Evans / Léonard Felix / Deak Ferrand / Grégoire Fontana / Mathias Forbach / Fufu Frauenwahl / Fritz & Ángel Olivera / Hugues Lapaire / Stephan Gaudin / Gess / H. R. Giger / Thomas Gilbert / Goomi / Gnot Guedin / Antoine Guex / Alban Guillemois / Gwabryel / Karen Ichters / Anna-Maria Jung / Julien Kaeser / Jean-Philippe Kalonji / Thomas Koenig / Körner Union / Krum / Muriel Liénard / Guillaume Long / Denis Martin / Guillaume Mayor / Laurent Mettraux / Berivan Meyer / Yves Milet-Desfougères / Monsieur Mishimoto / Mix & Remix / Fabian Moreillon / Sebastián Mulero / Jason Murphy / Julien Noirel / Johan Nowasad / Noyau / David Paleo / Fernando Pascual / Nancy Peña / Yann Perrelet / Stéphane Pichot / Nicolas Pitz / Plonk et Replonk / Alexandre Pointet / Mark Prent / Björn Quiring / Richard Raaphorst / Nadia Raviscioni / Jeff Remmer / Émile Roduit / François Rouiller / Jérémie Royer / David Saavedra / Patrick Saradar / Rick Sardinha / Irène Schoch / Andrés Soria / Laurence Suhner / Erwann Surcouf / Olivier Texier / Jason Thompson / Tom Tirabosco / Tito / Régis Tosetti / Walder / Anne Wilsdorf /

Catalogue (128 pages, 90 illustrations) with original fiction by:
Terry Bisson / David Collin / Paul Di Filippo / Eugène / Valerio Evangelisti /
Jacques Finné / Jeffrey Ford / Philippe Forêt / Pierre-Yves Lador / H. H. Løyche / James Morrow / Christopher Priest / Lucius Shepard / Norman Spinrad / Ian Watson

The exhibit will also present The Call of Cthulhu, a film by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, Le cas Lovecraft, a documentary by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, a radio listening station organized by Sonar/Espace 2, and a series of interactive fictions imagined by Jon Ingold (Dead Cities), Peter Nepstad (Ecdysis), David Whyld (The Cellar), Eric Forgeot, Hugo Labrande, JB, Samuel Verschelde and Jean-Luc Pontico (Lieux Communs), as well as Ruben Nieto, Juan Saldalgo, Santiago Eximeno, Javier Carrascosa and Pablo Martínez Merino (El Museo de las Consciencias).

Naturally I’m very pleased to be involved with this. My contribution is a lot larger than usual, the final work being a digital file (which has been printed and framed) measuring 116.79cm x 52.5cm (45.98ins x 20.67ins) at 300dpi. The process of creation involved doing a drawing on a large sheet of paper which was then scanned and “painted” over using Photoshop’s airbrush tool. I made screen grabs during each stage of this and I’m intending on putting together a page showing how the work developed from start to finish. For now you can see a couple of examples.

This was the finished drawing on an A2 sheet of paper. In the past I would have done this on board then painting over the outline with acrylics. The new working method is fairly similar but has a number of advantages and I much prefer doing this kind of very detailed work with Photoshop. It’s far less of a strain on my weak eyes, since you can zoom in on the area you happen to be working on; mistakes are easier to rectify (paint brushes don’t have an “undo” feature), there are more options for changing colours and contrast and—best of all—you can collage in bits of photographic or other material, which is something I did here. Much of the overall texture is created by using layers of my favourite photograph of a rusty bridge support and there’s some judicious use of organic weirdness from Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. I’m of the opinion now that Photoshop is superior to paints for the creation of this kind of art. Paints have other advantages, of course, but the surface texture of the material isn’t a concern for work intended to be a window on another world.

This was the final stage of the painting. Here’s a closer view of the detail at about 50% of the actual size:

What I did next was horizontally mirror the completed picture twice, dropping one of the versions into the background. I hadn’t planned on doing this originally but when I tried it the result was so impressive I realised it would look great for the final piece. Another advantage of digital art is that I still have a high-res copy of the pre-mirrored version. All that was required then was to fill out the central area a bit and the picture was done. Total work time was about five weeks which isn’t bad considering I was doing other work during the day then spending a couple of hours each evening on this.

Once the exhibition is over I’ll be making some prints of the picture and yet more CafePress products available for sale, details of which will be announced here.

The other news is that some of my Lovecraft illustrations from The Haunter of the Dark are to be featured in a new Lovecraft documentary by Frank Woodward. This looks like it’s going to be the best HPL documentary to date given the quality of the contributors—Ramsey Campbell, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Stuart Gordon, S.T. Joshi, Caitlin Kiernan, Robert Price, and Peter Straub—and with the whole thing being filmed in HD. Also among the contributors is Christian Matzke whose short film Dunwich used my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror as an inspiration. There’s an initial trailer for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown here which gives a taste of what’s in store. A DVD release is also planned; once again, any further details about that will be announced here.

Self-portrait by Austin Osman Spare (1907).

A late discovery but worth a mention, an Austin Spare exhibition that’s been running in Glasgow this month. From the press release:

An exhibition of 13 prints from this great artist and Occultist will run until 29th September 2007 at Mono, King’s Court, King Street Glasgow.

We have a diverse array of his styles to exhibit, and some of these have never been exhibited publicly before. We begin in 1921 with “The Magic Circle”, through his renowned “Ugly Ecstasy” drawings of 1924 (3 drawings & Grotesque), a demonic watercolour featuring a three headed demon?one of whose heads is Cthulhu, a postcard with drawing of his friend the bohemian writer Oswell Blakeston as Satyr and message about his art show on the reverse, “Self Portrait as Satyr” significantly signed ZOSAOS, a sidereal pastel entitled “Dire Awakening”, a watercolour which depicts a kind of celestial phallus endowing the receiver with “ecstasy” and a lambent woman, “Punch and Judy”, “The Return” and ending with “The Death Mask of Voltaire”—painted two years before the artist’s death, and being a meditation on death itself.

As our opening night of the exhibition show was so popular and created so much interest, we are thinking of having an end-of-exhibition get together to discuss Zos and the effect it’s had on people, so if Zos has inspired you, let me know or leave a message on our MySpace at myspace.com/23enigmashop and we’ll let you where and when.

We have produced a catalogue to mark this unique occasion in Scottish occulture and to honour the memory of AOS/ZOS. The catalogue is a folio containing a three page essay on Zos, specially written for us and kindly donated by Michael Staley. The 13 artworks from our exhibition have been expertly reproduced, and photographic quality prints made. These are all included in the catalogue, we also have a range of t-shirts, a set of 13 postcards of the prints from the exhibition and individual full scale prints for sale which are truly stunning.

Via Midian Books.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Andrey Avinoff, 1884–1949
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).

No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that women were depicted in late Victorian and Symbolist art, with one chapter, “Connoisseurs and Bestiality and Serpentine Delights”, being devoted to representations of women with animals, especially snakes. The story of Eve and the Serpent prompts many of these latter images, of course, while scenes with other creatures seem intended to demonstrate the Victorian attitude that woman was closer to the brute beasts than man and could often be found conspiring with them to bring down her masculine masters.

Needless to say, men have rarely been depicted so uncharitably; when men encounter animals in art the animals are usually being put to some use or roundly slaughtered. The sole exception seems to be when snakes are involved although these still tend to be scenes of conflict. This raises no end (as it were) of Freudian implications. Dragons have a lengthy history in art, from images of St Michael and St George to various legends, but snakes really came into their own in western art with the discovery of the Laocoön statue in 1506. This ancient sculpture, depicting Laocoön and his sons being attacked by serpents, had been acclaimed by Pliny as one of the greatest of all works of art, a judgement with which Renaissance artists agreed. Many of Michelangelo’s figures are inspired by the muscular dynamism of the statue and subsequent artists approaching this or similar subjects have acknowledged its influence and mastery of the form.

Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra by François Joseph Bosio (1824).

Most depictions of the Lernean Hydra show a kind of dragon creature with multiple heads. Bosio depicts something more like a regular snake, albeit a huge one.

An Athlete Wrestling with a Python by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1877).

The posture of Leighton’s athlete is reminiscent of Bosio’s Hercules but owes more to Michelangelo and the Laocoön. Speculation persists concerning Leighton’s sexuality, a speculation fuelled in part by this statue. He never married despite being extremely wealthy, was a friend of upper class gay men and yet his personal life remains veiled, which is no surprise considering he was President of the Royal Academy and the first (and only) artist to be made a Lord. Have a look at his Daedalus and Icarus and draw your own conclusions.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

I placed a rather poorly-rendered copy of Leighton’s statue into one of the panels of The Call of Cthulhu, among a number of other art references. The posture there is repeated at the end of the story when the sailors are attacked by a reawakened monster.

Conan by Margaret Brundage, Weird Tales, August 1934.

Twentieth century art has little room for the figures of myth and legend so it’s been left to genre fiction and the pulps to continue these themes. Margaret Brundage painted many covers for Weird Tales during the magazine’s peak in the Thirties but she was never very good with representations of men. Her depiction of Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian looks rather insipid next to the work of later Conan illustrators such as Roy Krenkel.

Hercules by George Quaintance (1957).

And so the erotic dimension declares itself at last with the work of one of the classic beefcake artists. Quaintance manages to combine elements of the Bosio and Leighton statues while placing them in the context of overtly gay erotica.

Chained by Frank Frazetta; cover to Conan the Usurper by Robert E Howard (1967).

No one ever called Frank Frazetta gay unless they wanted to risk a punch in the mouth. Frazetta is probably the snake attack artist par excellence. He’s also the definitive painter of Conan and the picture above was used on the cover of one of the Lancer reprints which introduced Robert E Howard’s books to a new generation of readers in the late Sixties.

Serpent by Frank Frazetta; cover to Ardor on Argos by Andrew Offutt (1973).

And still they come. This recent (1991) adventure concerning Lester Dent’s pulp hero was painted by Joe DeVito. Bringing things (almost) full circle, the artist has also created a bronze statue based on his picture which looks remarkably like Leighton’s struggling athlete.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My pastiches
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Philip Core and George Quaintance
• The Masks of Medusa
• The art of Giulio Artistide Sartorio, 1860–1932

One of my works graces the cover of an American institution this month with the appearance of my HP Lovecraft portrait on the August issue of FATE magazine (volume 60, number 8, issue 688, if you must know). This is for an article about Lovecraft’s occult connections and I believe they’ve also used one of my views of R’lyeh for the article itself although I can’t confirm this just now.

This is the third time my work has appeared in FATE (like TIME, the magazine prefers to see its name in caps). The first occasion was for another Lovecraft feature about Cthulhu in (I think) 1999. Then in 2000 I was commissioned to produce the illustration above for an article on “sky predators” which led me to plunder once again Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, a wonderful book I’ve frequently swiped from when in need of organic weirdness.

A couple of years later this picture was featured in a Fox TV documentary of all things, part of a post X-Files series called Conspiracy Theory. The subject was “flying rods”, one of the less convincing manifestations of cryptozoological phenomena, and the program needed some antique pictures to back up their thin veneer of evidence. They rather scurrilously used my picture to illustrate flying rod history as though this was a Victorian illustration, not a piece of Photoshop work. Fox documentaries, like their news channel, seem to have a flexible approach to the truth.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for June
• Le horreur cosmique

• Some of my Lovecraft art is to be featured in a lavish limited edition volume from Centipede Press.

Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft
Centipede Press is now accepting pre-orders.
A unique art book available in a cloth slipcase edition and leather deluxe edition.

• Cloth edition in slipcase—2,000 copies—400 pages, four color, sewn with cloth covers, enclosed in a cloth covered slipcase. Front cover image, black embossing, two ribbon markers, fold-outs, detail views.

• The first 300 orders will receive a numbered copy with a special slipcase and a hardcover folder with an extensive suite of unbound illustrations. $395 postpaid.

• Leather edition in traycase—50 copies—400 pages, four color, sewn with full leather binding, enclosed in a giant size traycase. Front cover image debossed on front, two ribbon markers, fold-outs, detail views, signed by most living contributors. $2,000 postpaid.

This huge tome features over forty artists including JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, John Coulthart, John Holmes, Harry O Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, and dozens of others.

The field has never seen an art book like this—indeed, it is an art anthology unlike anything ever published before. Many of these works have never before seen publication. Many are printed as special multi-page fold-outs, and several have detail views. The book is filled with four color artwork throughout, all of it printed full page on rich black backgrounds. A special thumbnail gallery allows you to overview the entire contents of this 400-page book at a glance, with notations on artist, work title, publication information, size, and location, when known.

HP Lovecraft fans will simply have to have this book. Because of its sheer size and scope, this book will never be reprinted and will sell out very quickly. Twenty years down the road people will be paying huge prices for this book because of its scope and the quality of reproductions. This is the HP Lovecraft fan’s dream come true. Don’t miss it!

Yes, it is indeed expensive but this is a book for serious collectors.

• Bryan Talbot’s new book, Alice in Sunderland, is finally out. Read a review of it here.

• Arthur Magazine is being summoned back from Avalon, which is excellent news. To celebrate, Jay Babcock has posted Alan Moore’s history of pornography in its entirety here.

left to right: Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger.

One of my favourite photographs of all time shows four directors at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, all dolled up in their wildest afghan-and-ascot, hairy-hippy finery, and all of them on the cusp of what should have been majestic, transformative, transgressive careers in cinema that by and large never came to fruition. It was not to be—if only it had been.

• John Patterson tell you why we need Jodorowsky as much as we ever did.

Update: And while we’re at it, Eddie Campbell also has a new book out, The Black Diamond Detective Agency. Great playbill cover design.

Well maybe it isn’t, but the phrase occurred to me a few days ago so I thought I’d try some sketching and see what emerged. In one interpretation of The Call of Cthulhu it’s conceivable that Lovecraft intended his abomination to look like this, given the description of R’lyeh in the story:

Without knowing what Futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

An alien monstrosity might be even more terrifying if it didn’t resemble anything organic or remotely earthly. For a more traditional impression of the Spawn from the Stars, my drawing from The Great Old Ones can be found here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• HP Lovecraft’s favourite artists
• The Haunter of the Dark

1920: the writer sits, at night, an old city asleep outside his window, dim light upon the empty page. He sits and waits for the words. When the words arrive he sets them down, hopelessly he often feels, a pointless task he submits to with resignation. Recurrent illness has been a rebuke against expectation, lack of acknowledgement equally rebukes his ambition. When illness prematurely claims him he dies with an assurance of extinction, certain that his words will be lost along with his breath.

But the words survive. Drawn from the ether of the new century, his sensitised intelligence has crafted a mythology for the time, giving shape to forces that his contemporaries perceive dimly, if at all. A mythology of those vast, impersonal yet manipulative powers coalescing in the air of the coming age, a mythology of conspiracy elevated to the level of metaphysics, a mythology of tyranny and mutation, paranoia and holocaust.

II

The writer is Franz Kafka. When he died in 1924, HP Lovecraft was unknown outside the pages of Weird Tales and of the handful of his stories already published there, none were those that would later make him famous. (’The Call of Cthulhu’ came in 1926.) Lovecraft is unlikely to have known Kafka’s works, even in the early translations of the 1930s, yet the similarities between the pair persist, not only in their powerful representations of dread and alienation?the one crafted in a spare and affectless style, the other in the baroque vernacular of the pulps?but also for the way they define a sense of their times, and of the world, that subsequent readers have come to regard as visionary.

Jorge Luis Borges (who dedicated his story ‘There Are More Things’ to Lovecraft) identifies in his essay ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ a phenomenon common to writers who possess this kind of singular vision. The writer that forges a new way of seeing, says Borges, creates his own precursors, also forging connections between disparate themes, other writers and so on, that were previously unconnected. When the vision is powerful enough, and its influence proves to be as adaptive as a successful virus, we look for words to describe that influence and the reach of that vision. “‘Kafkaesque’ is the only word in common English use which derives from German literature” writes JP Stern. “Its meanings range from ‘weird’, ‘mysterious’, ‘tortuously bureaucratic’ to ‘nightmarish’ and ‘horrible’, yet we do not associate it with the horror machines of science fiction or Edgar Allan Poe.” Equally, we now have the word ‘Lovecraftian’ which can mean many of the same things, with possibly ’squidlike and squalid’ (to borrow a phrase from the late John Balance) replacing ‘tortuously bureaucratic’. In Lovecraft’s case we can, of course, associate the word in part with Poe, if only to see where the designation has come from, and note how it builds upon foundations laid by Poe to touch the unique dreads of a new century.

III

When Lovecraft began to hit his peaks in the late 1920s a young William Burroughs was cultivating a lifetime hatred of authority during his tenure at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico. In August 1931, teenage Bill could have gone to a news-stand in Los Alamos town and picked up the latest issue of Weird Tales, there to read about “the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth” from Lovecraft’s ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. ‘Tam, Son of the Tiger’ by Otis Adelbert Kline received the cover treatment that month, with a mediocre painting by CC Senf. Lovecraft’s lack of faith in the enduring popularity of his works is perhaps easier to appreciate when you realise that none of his stories were deemed worthy of a cover illustration during his lifetime. Yet Kline and his contemporaries—many with names as baroque as the characters in their stories: Nictzin Dyalhis, Pearl Norton Swet, Ronal Kayser, the egregious Seabury Quinn—have been buried by the dust of their rotting magazines, while Lovecraft’s influence proliferates in subsequent books and films and digital media.

Ten years after ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, however, Lovecraft was dead, and—so he believed—his works forgotten. In 1941, as William Burroughs never tired of reminding people, Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists of the Manhattan Project came to the Los Alamos Ranch School to close it down, bulldoze its buildings and construct in their place a research facility where they could create a monstrous nuclear chaos of their own. The Trinity explosion in the Alamogordo desert in 1945 prompted Oppenheimer to recall some words from an ancient text, a pronouncement from the god Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

IV

“(The Necronomicon was) composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 AD. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written and of his final death or disappearance (738 AD) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen the fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.”

HP Lovecraft, ‘The History of the Necronomicon’.

“The Cities of Red Night were six in number: Tamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that time the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian Sea.”

William Burroughs, The Cities of the Red Night.

Burroughs’ cities are brothers to Lovecraft’s Nameless City, and to Irem, City of Pillars, described in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ as the rumoured home of the Cthulhu Cult. The Cities of the Red Night are invoked with a litany of Barbarous Names, a paean to the “nameless Gods of dispersal and emptiness” that includes the Sumerian dieties that Burroughs found catalogued in the ‘Urilia Text’ from the Avon Books Necronomicon, and which includes (how could it not?) “Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned.” In Burroughs work the ‘Lovecraftian’ is transmuted, the unspeakable becomes the spoken and the nameless is named at last, beneath the pitiless gaze of Burroughs’ own “mad Arab”, Hassan I Sabbah, Hashish Eater and Master of Assassins. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

V

2005: Nothing is true and everything is permitted but only in the space created by the latest architects of fear, the demagogues of the 21st century, our very own agents of the Control Virus. We see now that Irem, City of Pillars, is named in Sura 89 of the Qur’an (”Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad? With Iram of the columns? The like of which has not been created in the land?”) and that the Qur’an itself is presented to us by the architects of fear as the new Al Azif, a Necronomicon for an Age of Terror. In ‘The Dunwich Horror’, the Whateley brood, like misegenous backwoods Unabombers, pore over their ancient texts in the hope of invoking titanic forces that would “clear off the earth”. In ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ the cultists wait patiently for their god to return, when all the earth will blaze “in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom”. So Cthulhu reveals another face as Shaitan, “the Old Dragon” and “Lord of the Abyss”, named in Sura 25:29 of the Qur’an as “the forsaker” who will lead men away from the path of righteousness: “Mankind, Shaitan is al khadhulu.”

At the dawn of a new century, “mad Arabs” in mountain retreats pore over these ancient words before unleashing a new Manhattan Project on America’s City of Pillars, raising columns of smoke and human ash over the city described in ‘He’ and ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Hatred stalks the city streets as racist tabloid editors gibber and froth at the spectre of swarming immigrant hordes, while African witchdoctors are butchering boys and throwing their bodies into the River Thames. Nuclear chaos is but a breath away, the architects of fear assure us, it’s only a matter of time. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” So we turn for respite to another story from 1931, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and we read:

“Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.”

At the dawn of a new century, those with the Innsmouth look have found themselves in the penal colony, waiting for a trial that will never come. Can you feel the heat closing in? Welcome to the Witch House; these are your dreams.

John Coulthart,
Manchester,
Summer Solstice, 2005

Sam Leith is engrossed by a formidable essay on the father of ‘weird fiction’.

HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
by Michel Houellebecq
tr by Dorna Kazheni
intro by Stephen King
256pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
£10 (pbk)
Saturday, August 12, 2006
The Daily Telegraph

“I AM SO BEASTLY TIRED of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.” So wrote Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). His extraordinary body of work can be seen as a sustained effort to fill that prescription.

The founding father of what has become known as “weird fiction”, Lovecraft was not a congenial figure. Tall, ugly, misanthropic, snobbish, reclusive, he hated people in general, and people of other races in particular. More or less nothing happened in his life. He was 32 before he kissed a woman and his brief, unsuccessful and wholly unexpected marriage put paid to love for good. He died of intestinal cancer at 47.

His literary concerns were as follows: unkillable tentacled beings from beyond space worshipped by cannibal death cults; hideous prodigies of miscegenation; gibberings from the abyss; indecipherable languages of madness; insane architectural geometries; colours outside any nameable spectrum. Lovecraft has nothing in common with Anita Brookner.

On the surface, he has very little in common with Michel Houellebecq, either. What they seem to share, though, is an aggressive misanthropy. In this consistently engaging essay, an infatuated Houellebecq argues that Lovecraft’s work pioneered a sort of anti-literature: a great shout of “NO!” to human life.

Lovecraft was not just unrealistic, Houellebecq argues, but anti-realistic: the devotee of a sort of malevolent sublime. Religious writers see our animal lives as validated by the notion that beyond our perception lies something infinitely larger, more ancient and more benevolent. Lovecraft played with the opposite idea. If there’s something else, why should we imagine it would be benevolent? How much more likely that we have, here, a pretty disgusting animal existence; but that if we caught a whiff of what lies outside it, we’d go instantly mad—if we were lucky.

Very little of what Lovecraft wrote conforms to the conventional canons of what literature should be doing. His characters are more or less interchangeable: drab men with drab jobs, no pasts and no futures. They are there to bear witness, to have the living daylights frightened out of them and, if they are unlucky, to be “devoured by invisible monsters in broad daylight at the Damascus market square”. There’s no interest in human life, or money, or sex. The stories don’t start in the real world and amble into horror: they start midway through the screaming hab-dabs and turn up the volume from there producing what Houellebecq calls “an open slice of howling fear”. The involuted and clumsily baroque sentences disapproved of by Lovecraft’s detractors are serving, then, a singular purpose: to pile more on—to generate an intoxicating fever pitch of rhetoric.

Houellebecq’s essay is often perverse, sometimes jejune, more than occasionally downright silly. He attributes more consistency of philosophical purpose to Lovecraft than, I think, a sensible reading of the “great texts”—”The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), ‘The Colour Out of Space” (1927), ‘The Dunwich Horror” (1928), “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931), “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932), ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1932) and “The Shadow Out of Time” (1934)—will bear.

And he on more than one occasion dismisses Lovecraft’s critics, with Houellebecquian arrogance, as “idiots” and such like. But his essay is both a formidable literary performance in itself, a work of real imaginative sympathy, and a consistently engrossing intellectual workout. It bursts with new ideas, and new ways of thinking about this oddest of writers. Bolstered by an introduction by Stephen King, and a pair of first-rate Lovecraft stories, it’s worth anyone’s tenner.

Lovecraft, as Houellebecq observes, “writes for an audience of fanatics—readers he was finally to find only years after his death”. That his work at last found those readers is beyond question. The “Cthulhu Mythos”, like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, has become a place in which devotees live.

Ever since Lovecraft’s friend August Derleth completed some of his unfinished stories after his death, fantasy writers have done more than imitate Lovecraft’s approach: they have set their stories in his universe. The internet now throws up thousands of references to the mythos, allusions to the dread Necronomicon, and artists’ imaginings of Lovecraft’s monsters.

When I was a child, there was a Call of Cthuthu role-playing game. There’s even an internet cartoon series, “Hello Cthulhu“, that pits the Elder Gods against the overpowering cuteness of “Hello Kitty”. “Hi there! Would you like a cookie?!?” asks a fwuffy kitty with a ribbon in her hair. “No, actually. I would hate to have a cookie, you vapid waste of inedible flesh!” retorts Cthulhu. Lovecraft wouldn’t have liked it, I don’t think. But somewhere, sepulchrally, he might have been flattered.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le horreur cosmique

Michel Houellebecq’s HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (which I still haven’t read) has been in the news again recently, with a number of reviews appearing in UK newspapers and magazines, most of which present the by-now rather tired spectacle of reviewers who normally wouldn’t give any of this nasty pulp stuff a second thought having to take Lovecraft seriously because Houellebecq is a serious author. (”He’s a bad writer!” they bleat. And Lou Reed is a bad singer; you’re missing the point, you fools.) The Observer last week had one of the better ones. Last year the Guardian published an extract from Houellebecq’s book.

Curious how often it requires the French to make the Anglophone world look anew at marginalised elements of its own culture; Baudelaire championed Edgar Allan Poe, it was French film critics who gave us the term “film noir” when they identified a new strain of American cinema and the Nouvelle Vague writers and filmmakers were the first to treat Hitchcock as anything other than a superior entertainer. The French have always liked Lovecraft so it was no surprise to me at least when Houellebecq’s book appeared.

Oddly enough, the only association I’ve had so far with French publishing is the use of my 1999 picture of Cthulhu’s city, R’lyeh, on the cover of a reprint of HPL stories from Houellebecq’s publishing house (above). Something I’ll be looking for in Paris if I have the time will be more of Philippe Druillet’s Lovecraft-inflected work. Druillet has been working with the imagery of cosmic horror since the late 60s and even illustrated the work of William Hope Hodgson, one of HPL’s influences and an English writer the broadsheet critics have yet to hear about. Take a look at these pictures for stories written before the First World War then go and look at some stills from the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. What was once the preserve of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines is now mainstream culture.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Davy Jones
• Charles Méryon’s Paris

Another favourite painting for many years and Böcklin’s most well-known work.

Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) produced several different versions of the painting. All versions depict an oarsman and a standing white-clad figure in a small boat crossing an expanse of dark water towards a rocky island. In the boat is an object usually taken to be a coffin. The white-clad figure is often taken to be Charon, and the water analogous to the Acheron. Böcklin himself provided neither public explanation as to the meaning of the painting nor the title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883. The first version of the painting, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was created in 1880 on a request by Marie Berna, whose husband had recently died.

I—1880, oil on board, 29 x 48 in (74 x 122 cm) New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reisinger Fund, since 1926.

II—1880, oil on canvas, 111 x 115 cm Basel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, since 1920.

III—1883, oil on board, 80 x 150 cm, Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, since 1980.

IV—1884, oil on copper, 81 x 151 cm, Lugano, Sammlung Schloss Rohoncz; whereabouts unknown (destroyed during the Second World War?).

V—1886, 80 x 150 cm, Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste.

Böcklin’s picture proved to be influential as well as popular. Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote a symphonic poem of the same name based upon the painting in 1909. The haunting image also crept into the cinematic world when film producers and production designers began looking at paintings for inspiration. Some of the views of Skull Island in the original version of King Kong bear a striking resemblance to the rock formations in the Leipzig version. A few years later, producer Val Lewton (also at RKO where King Kong was made) developed something of an obsession with the picture, first putting the Leipzig painting in the background of scenes in I Walked With a Zombie then finally making a film of the same name that’s actually set on a Greek island resembling Böcklin’s.

There are other later influences, among them the third act of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film The Tales of Hoffman, set on a similarly-styled Greek island, and several homages by another Swiss artist, HR Giger. Bocklin’s name also lives on in the Art Nouveau typeface, Arnold Bocklin, designed by Otto Weisert in 1904.

Since this has been an obsession, I’ve paid homage myself, of course. Böcklin is quoted twice in my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu, the second time when the sailors approach R’lyeh.

Update: added a copy of the destroyed version.

• Toteninsel.net