I won’t say this is by popular demand but after persistent requests for posters of my cover art for Jeff VanderMeer’s latest novel, Finch, I’ve opened a new CafePress shop selling exactly that. The largest of these is 58.38cm x 82.55 (22.984″ x 32.5″) which should be big enough for most appetites. There’s also a smaller size 35.03cm x 49.53 (13.7904″ x 19.5″) and I’ve added some cards and postcards.

In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

Jeff is currently promoting Finch on his latest book tour, details of which can be found here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch

Yet another of the titles I’ve been working on this year—yes, it’s been a very busy time—Booklife took several months of back and forth on the part of author, editor and designer before we had something that everyone was happy with.

Offering timely advice in an era when the burden of production and publicity frequently falls on authors, this essential reference reflects on methods for being focused, productive, and savvy in the craft of writing. Discussing a wide range of essential topics for self-promoting authors, this important guide explores questions such as How can authors use social media and the internet? How does the new online paradigm affect authors, readers, and the book industry? How can authors find the time to both create and promote their work? and What should never be done? Through good-humored encouragement, practical tips of the trade culled from 25 years of experience as a writer, reviewer, editor, publisher, agent, and blogger are shared. Including topics such as personal space versus public space, deadlines, and networking, the benefits of interacting with readers through new technologies is revealed.

After all the work it’s been good to see the book receiving such a positive reception this week, with a feature spot on Boing Boing and a high placing in Amazon’s book listing. Back in February I wrote a lengthy post about the evolution of the cover design, and that post has been reproduced at the Booklifenow site which serves as an online extension of the book itself. Web designer Luís Rodrigues did a great job of matching the site design to the cover.

Update: The cover at unaccountably large size on Wired.com

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Designing Booklife

Continuing a rather psychedelic week, Eyecandy is another of those groovy web toys, this time putting you inside a kaleidoscopic sphere of coloured circles whose parameters you can change with sliding controls. Fun to mess with when the right music is playing.

And while we’re on the subject, my new calendar has been selling very well thanks to some generous linkage from Arthur Magazine, Jeff VanderMeer, Boing Boing, Trendhunter, and others. Thanks to everyone who’s bought one, I’ll definitely be following this with something similar, not least a set of illustrations for Through the Looking-Glass. And Jabberwocky, yes, have to do something special for that…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Kaleidoplex
• Colorscreen

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 writing. The collage came out better than expected considering it was pretty much slammed together in an afternoon. Coincidentally, the same weekend there was a request from Modofly for new designs to adorn their range of bespoke notebooks. The last Modofly design I produced was also a Steampunk one (depicting Jeff’s Steampunk formula) so I quickly worked this up into a new book design. I’ve also slightly reworked the Nyarlathotep design done earlier this year so it fits Modofly’s book format. When I get the time I’ll be making some Cafepress products from these designs; I’d like to see both of them as posters for a start.

Update: Jeff’s article, which includes two of my illustrations, is now posted here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
• Steampunk Redux
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

Shared Worlds is a fantasy writing-oriented summer camp for teenagers created by Jeremy Jones and Jeff VanderMeer, and hosted at Wofford College, South Carolina. Jeff asked me to design a small booklet to be printed at the end of this year’s activities as a means of showcasing examples of the writings produced during the various events. He’s posted photos of the printed booklets, including pictures of the young authors autographing pages for each other, and should be writing more about Shared Worlds later.

The first of the books I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications appears this month. Two more are due to follow and I’m working on another at the moment; more about those titles later.

The Best of Michael Moorcock was a pleasure to be involved with not only because I’ve been reading Moorcock’s fiction for a very long time but I’ve also been fortunate during that time to get to know the writer and Linda Moorcock, his wife. Mike likes the work I’ve done in the past for Savoy Books and we did have an anthology of his favourite pieces by other writers planned for Constable & Robinson back in 2005. That book didn’t work out so this makes up for its cancellation. This is an excellent anthology, put together initially as a private enterprise by editor John Davey who managed the difficult task of compiling a collection which ranges over forty years of writing. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer came aboard as co-editors for the Tachyon edition.

I’ve been working mainly on the interior design of the Tachyon volumes (although I’ve also done the cover for Jeff VanderMeer’s forthcoming Booklife) and for this title I took a cue from Ann Morn’s cover design which features a pair of gates emblazoned with large letter Ms. The title spread above takes the letter M from the typeface used for the author’s name and multiplies that to create an equivalent set of gates for the reader to pass through. I try to play down the pyrotechnics for fiction—the words are the important thing, not the graphic design—but since this was a story collection I thought I’d try illustrating each piece using the title typography alone. Most of these are done by using a suitable typeface but for a few pieces I managed to create an arrangement that reflected the story. Behold the Man (below) is the Nebula Award-winning story of a journey back in time to find the historical Jesus. The cross shape not only relates to the Biblical theme but also implies the crossed time streams and Moorcock’s layered, cross-cut narrative.

The Best of Michael Moorcock is available now from the usual sources and received a glowing review in the Guardian. Later this month, and other work permitting, I’m hoping to make a start on what will effectively be a companion volume, Savoy’s long-delayed Into the Media Web, another collection by John Davey which this time collects the best of Moorcock’s copious essays, reviews and other non-fiction.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Designing Booklife
• The Sonic Assassins
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• An announcement redux

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.

If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any other writer on the sf, fantasy and horror shelves. I know that when I started to read the New Wave sf writers his work immediately stood out, not only for its originality but also for the numerous references to Surrealist painting which litter his early fiction, references which meant a great deal to this Surrealism-obsessed youth. Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with repaintings by Brigid Marlin of two lost Paul Delvaux pictures prominent in one of his rooms (often featured in photo portraits). I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí’s excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters.

Once I’d encountered the New Worlds writers—Ballard, Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Brian Aldiss and company—and their American counterparts, especially Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany and Norman Spinrad, there was no returning to the meagre thrills of hard sf with its techno-nerdery and bad writing. Ballard and Moorcock were the gateway drug to William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges and countless others, and I thought enough of his work in 1984 to attempt a series of unsuccessful illustrations based on The Atrocity Exhibition. It’s been an axiom during the twenty years I’ve worked at Savoy Books that Ballard, Moorcock and Harrison were (to borrow a phrase from Julian Cope) the Crucial Three of British letters, not Rushdie, Amis and McEwan. One of the books I designed for Savoy, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, was a Ballard and Moorcock favourite, and included appreciations of Richardson by both writers. I wish Ballard could have seen the new (and still delayed) edition of Engelbrecht but he got a copy of the earlier book. Sometimes once in a lifetime is more than enough.

• Ballardian.com
• Pages of obits and MM comment at Moorock’s Miscellany
• Ballard interview by V Vale at Arthur with an special intro by Moorcock
• Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious
• Guardian | Times | Independent | Telegraph

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers

The Steampunk design I created last year for Modofly (based on a formula by writer Jeff VanderMeer) is given a new lease of life with this colour version. Modofly produce decorated Moleskin books with a range of designs from some very talented artists. Previous graphics were laser-etched onto the boards but they’re now able to print in full colour which is obviously to everyone’s advantage. This is available now in two different book formats. And while we’re on the subject, a reminder of Dana Mattock’s incredible Steampunk Frankenstein casemod at Flickr. His photos of my Steampunk print are now posted.

I’m planning more designs for Modofly and would have had some ready now had the past few months not been so hectic. In a similar mode (as it were), I’m also planning some T-shirt designs for Kingstrike. More about these later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk framed
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

I created a cover design recently for Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Finch, and shortly after completing that Jeff asked if I could put together some cover ideas for his forthcoming writer’s guide, Booklife, which Tachyon will be publishing later this year. Jeff is known as a fantasy writer but this book was intended to have a general appeal for any would-be or working writer. It also needed to look suitably contemporary and (possibly) reflect the discussion within which concerns the modern writer’s use of computers, the internet and social networks. Lastly, several lines of text needed to be placed on the cover without it looking confused or messy.

I agreed to this whilst busy with several other projects so the initial drafts were rather haphazard. (That’s my excuse, anyway.) The first version (above) came out of an idea to apply a kind of trompe l’oeil effect to the cover with a torn dustjacket and handwritten amendments. The red call-out/roundel highlights an important sub-section of the book. This was knocked up very quickly and, as well as not looking very contemporary, the title doesn’t look enough like gold blocking to be convincing. Jeff requested something more up-to-date.

Version 2 was a hasty attempt to get contemporary although this looks too bland and sterile, like a business primer or a university press book. We’d talked about trying to convey the nature of electronic networks without resorting to the internet clichés of the Nineties, hence the connected books in the background. I was thinking of the kind of clear-line illustration you get in some European comics but this turned out to be one of those ideas which seem good in the abstract yet trying to get it to work turns out to be a) difficult and b) not such a good idea after all. The background quickly became crowded and confused when trying to convey any kind of depth. This cover has the first appearance of one of my sunbursts, a habitual motif I’m guilty of using in places where it doesn’t always belong. I blame a Catholic upbringing which left me with a halo obsession.

Jeff wasn’t keen on this either so he suggested I go back to the first version but show an old Victorian book design ripped away to reveal something contemporary underneath. He mentioned William Morris designs but I didn’t think they would be suitable; Morris’s books have beautiful elaborate borders but their layout follows the medieval page grid which is asymmetrical. I wanted something equally elaborate but with suitable symmetry.

A bit of web searching turned up this Jean Lorrain cover by Léon Rudnicki which I have in a book of art nouveau design but at a size too small to be usable. It took a fair amount of work to refashion a medium-res jpeg into the vector version below.

Some additional work in Photoshop and we had something which looked like an old cover blocked in gold.

Which was then ripped away to reveal a new version of the earlier bland cover. A globe has been introduced as a new feature although I warned about globes being too closely associated with travel books.

An unfinished draft. Jeff suggested changing the green cover to blue and he wasn’t keen on the diagonal tear so this was made horizontal. By this point I’d decided to get rid of the networked books and replace them with symbols that convey the digital world. Ideally you’d want to spend some time creating symbols like this yourself but I still had too many other things on the go so these are taken from a Linotype set of office dingbats. Some of these are now distinctly dated, there’s a floppy disc (which I didn’t use) and the computer monitor has a curved edge to the screen like an old TV. The sunburst is still hanging in there but has turned blue. In design terms blue often signifies the future (in a cold electronic sense) in the same way that sepia signifies the past.

Another unfinished draft which attempted to combine the symbols with the globe. Jeff liked this but I didn’t, I felt that attempting to combine two very different covers had led us astray. Jeff was still eager to convey a sense of modernity or even the future and I thought this would be difficult. In the 1990s there was a well-defined sense of futurity attached to anything cybernetic or computer-oriented. That idea and its attendant imagery is now thoroughly outmoded, computer technology is so embedded in our lives that we barely notice it. Our phones are as powerful as home computers were a decade ago. In graphic design terms there’s currently no shorthand (apart from vague blue tones) that says “the future”, not least because people aren’t sure what the future will be or if there’ll be one that anyone actually wants to live in.

So the torn book was scrapped but I kept the globe and some of the office symbols. The roundel still persists. I picked out a distinctive typeface for the title although if we’d have gone with this as the final cover I would have removed the filler elements from the O and the D.

Jeff thought this was okay but asked to see the globe brought back so here it is along with the returning sunburst.

I think this was the one which Jeff liked most of all but I didn’t although the colours at least blend together. I felt we were still at the cold business end of things and suggested scrapping all of these approaches and trying something new.

Which is what I did. Jeff had earlier suggested growing roots although I couldn’t see how that could be easily reconciled with the digital networks aspect. USB cables as roots? Hmm… Whilst pondering this one of those flashes of inspiration occurred which I immediately sketched and emailed. I knew this would look good if it was done as a very clean vector layout—a cross-section of earth with the title putting out roots and books blooming from a plant stem. Jeff liked it so I set to work.

First thing to do was to get the title right which involved printing out the type at large size then drawing the roots with a pencil.

Next I needed a suitably stylised plant and came across this very tiny motif in one of my design source books. This was from an art nouveau border design so a trace element of older book styles would still be present. All that was required now was to put the various elements together.

And here’s the result which finally pleased everyone. Slightly different to the sketch since I decided to borrow a trick from designer Barney Bubbles and make the book flowers and the title lettering form a face which gives an additional, subliminal quality to the title. I managed to get the sunburst in there with some justification at last—it adds depth and colour as well as being…the sun—and there was enough space for a quote at the top. All the type ended up as different weights of Helvetica. Watching the Brian Eno documentary last night I was struck by his comment that instruments today give you a vast array of sounds when all you really need are a handful of very good ones. The same applies to typefaces. I love typography, and enjoy seeing new designs appear, but despite the thousands of available typefaces you often come back to a small selection which do the job better than anything else. Helvetica is one of these.

This cover is a good example of how much the design process is about narrowing your range of options. Some of the blind alleys would have been avoided if we’d discussed ideas at length beforehand but we were both very busy and some of the intermediate stages only came together after playing around in Illustrator. This isn’t the first time I’ve had the flash of inspiration occur way down the line, sometimes all you can do is thrash around waiting for lightning to strike. I’m happy to say it usually strikes for me a lot earlier than this but as long as it keeps striking I don’t mind. As always, reaching the destination is the important thing, not how you get there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• A cover for Mr. VanderMeer
• Pasticheur’s Addiction
• Fungal observations
• Shriek: The Movie
• Jeff on Bldgblog
• An announcement redux
• City of Saints and Madmen

A new book cover design which I’m posting slightly ahead of time—it still needs a suitable blurb adding—since Jeff VanderMeer was eager to show it to his readers. You can see it bigger size here.

Finch is the third book in Jeff’s cycle of unique fantasy novels and stories about the city of Ambergris. This book shifts emphasis from the previous ones with a tone borrowed from crime/thriller fiction (but still set in the fungus- and squid-infested city) hence the gun outline and blood spatters. I keep being drawn back to Ambergris, having provided designs for the first volume, City of Saints and Madmen, and recently designed a new edition of Shriek: An Afterword.

Publisher: Underland Press, October 31, 2009, trade paper

Description: A noir thriller/visionary fantasy set in the failed state of Ambergris, 100 years after Shriek: An Afterword. The gray caps, mysterious underground inhabitants, have re-conquered Ambergris and put the city under martial law, disbanding House Hoegbotton, and controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels.

Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

The cat and the lizard watch intently. Something is about to happen. And they both want to know: who is Finch, really?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• A cover for Mr. VanderMeer
• Pasticheur’s Addiction
• Fungal observations
• Shriek: The Movie
• Jeff on Bldgblog
• An announcement redux
• City of Saints and Madmen

Arthur #32 is now out with a great cover. As usual you can download it from the Arthur site. Unfortunately that’s the only way you’ll be able to get hold of this issue since the paper copy won’t be printing. Arthur still needs your support, however, via subscriptions, donations and/or advertising if you haven’t wasted all your money helping investment bankers hang on to their bonuses.

On the upside, Jeff VanderMeer notified me that Shriek: An Afterword, the novel of his which I designed earlier this year, has arrived from the printer and should be shipping forthwith. Read more about that (and order a copy) here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fungal observations

Time again for some work updates and other news. I mentioned in August that this Steampunk design—created to illustrate a formula definition of the genre by Jeff VanderMeer—was originally going to be a T-shirt. That idea fell by the wayside when an opportunity arose to submit it to Modofly who were asking for Steampunk-related work for a new line of their laser-etched Molekin books.

I’m pleased to announce that the books are now done and on sale at the Modofly store. These are available in two sizes, large (5.25ins x 8.25ins; 13.3cm x 20.9cm) and small (3.5ins x 5.5ins; 8.9cm x 13.9cm), $36 USD and $22 USD respectively.

Next up is issue 11 of Penny Blood, an American horror magazine due out shortly which includes a feature on David Britton’s Lord Horror character and runs through the often tormented history of Savoy Books. Savoy’s Mike Butterworth and I were both interviewed and the piece should also include some comments from Keith Seward whose Savoy title, Horror Panegyric, examines the Lord Horror mythos. They don’t say yet when the magazine is out but it’s available for pre-order now.

While we’re on the subject of his lordship, I recently updated my pages for the Reverbstorm comics with a lot more samples taken from the re-scanned and re-lettered artwork. Work is still progressing on assembling the definitive single-volume edition of Reverbstorm as time permits. I’ve finished work on all seven published issues and am now engaged with the eighth and final section. More about that, and Reverbstorm itself, at a later date.

Finally, there’s another new CD design out, my fourth this year and there are more on the way; I’m starting to feel prolific. As can be seen from the cover, this was a very minimal job. A Made Up Sound is a pseudonym of Dave Huismans, aka 2562, whose excellent Aerial album I also designed. Shorctuts is a collection of electronic sketches and Dave took the moodily anonymous photographs himself.

Thomas Paul’s melamine plates parallel Laura Zindel’s ceramics in their borrowing of natural history engravings. Anything which brings tentacles into home furnishing gets a vote here and the octopus design at the top right can also be found on Paul’s cushion designs. Jeff VanderMeer would probably bemoan the absence of the squid but I took care of that department last year.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Rune Olsen
• Laura Zindel’s ceramics
• Octopulps
• New things for April II
• Darwin Day
• The glass menagerie

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?

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

From the Hollywood Gothic series (1984).

Jeff VanderMeer has a great post about artist/illustrator Ian Miller at io9 which prompts me to write a few words about his work myself, something I’ve intended for a while.

Miller is indelibly linked for me with HP Lovecraft on account of his covers for the Panther Horror editions of the 1970s, the first Lovecraft volumes I bought. His sinister and minutely detailed ink drawings were a big inspiration when I started to draw seriously myself, unsurprisingly when my own drawings possessed a similar quantity of detail and macabre atmosphere. I still think his cover for William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (below) is one of the most successful anyone has produced for that novel. His Mountains of Madness cover, while not being a direct illustration, perfectly encapsulates the feel of much of Lovecraft’s later fiction.

Jeff’s post has a wide range of work which I’ve avoided duplicating. The items shown here are all scans from my own library. More of Miller’s Lovecraft illustration will appear in the forthcoming Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press, along with several pieces by yours truly.

The House on the Borderland (1972).

The Haunter of the Dark (1972).

This much-abused paperback (scribbled on by my younger brother) looks like it was rescued from the catacombs depicted on the cover. This was the copy I used whilst adapting the Lovecraft comic strips which appear in my own Haunter of the Dark.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1973).

At the Mountains of Madness (1974).

Beetle Helm (1976).

From several works featured in a collection of science fiction and fantasy art, Visions of the Future, a repackaging of illustrations from Science Fiction Monthly.

Green Dog Trumpet (1978).

One of the later art books produced by Dragon’s Dream before that company became the more commercial (and less adventurous) Paper Tiger. This was a collection of five wordless comic strips by Miller, crammed with inventive scenes and detail. This book and similar strips running in Heavy Metal magazine made a big impression on me at the time.

The Triwag Chronicles from Green Dog Trumpet (1978).

The Luck in the Head (1991).

Gollancz made a doomed foray into the world of comics in the early Nineties with a series of what they called graphic novels although all the books were only long comic stories with glossy production. The best two of these were A Small Killing by Alan Moore & Oscar Zarate and The Luck in the Head which Ian Miller illustrated from one of M John Harrison’s peerless Viriconium stories. Miller had illustrated Harrison before and was a perfect choice for this even though Harrison himself insists that Viriconium should only ever be regarded as a world of words, not visuals. I agree with that up to a point, some of the scenes in the book lost their power by being illustrated but Miller does a splendid job at capturing the seediness and decay of Harrison’s Pastel City and its inhabitants.

For more of Ian Miller’s work in a variety of media, see his website. There’s more Panther Horror here.

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

Previously on { feuilleton }
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers
• Witness my hand and official seal
• Druillet meets Hodgson

The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)

A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance Eakins. A Flickr pool has been established for newly-discovered Eakins volumes and you can read more about the mysterious writer here.

This flourishing of pasticheury encourages me to post some of the cover designs I created for the various editions of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Invented and Discredited Diseases, a fake disease guide published in 2003 and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The anthology featured a host of notable contributors and was great fun to work on. Although these were done in colour, they were all printed in black & white inside the book, with a shrunken glimpse of the colour versions on the rear of the dust jacket. My jacket design wasn’t used on subsequent printings so this is the first many people will have seen of these.

The first edition (1921).

I’d forgotten about this until I went back through the working files, the original version of the first edition…

…which was then simplified to look like a collection of stapled typewritten sheets.

An early bound edition; 1920s?

The Trimble Fisheries edition (1932).

Title page of the “Coronation Edition” (1953).

The Jolly Boy (India) edition (1975).
(Birdman illo supplied by Jeff VanderMeer.)

The Spanish language edition compiled by Jorge Luis Borges (1977).

A paperback reprint of the Borges edition (1979).

And so to my dust jacket from 2003.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The CD cover meme
• My pastiches

Seeing as Jeff VanderMeer and his publisher have made the cover for the new edition of Shriek: An Afterword public, I may as well do the same. The design is mine, the cover painting is by comic artist Ben Templesmith. The design and its integration with the book contents are more evident when you see the complete dust jacket, and the rest of the book, of course. Since these are still being proofed I’ll probably post them after publication. Meanwhile, the book has a reduction of 25% if you order a copy now.

Limited Edition: 500 signed numbered hardcovers
Expected Publication Date: Second quarter 2008

“Like some delicious mashup of H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, and L. Frank Baum, but with his own verbal dexterity and perverse ingenuity…An affecting narrative about love, art, sibling rivalry, commerce, history, and some really nasty ’shrooms.” The Washington Post Book World

A year’s best selection of The San Francisco Chronicle, The Austin Chronicle, and SF Site, World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword is a triumphant return to the author’s imaginary city of Ambergris—the setting of his critically acclaimed, best-selling City of Saints & Madmen.

Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies. Narrated with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions by ex-society figure Janice Shriek, this afterword presents a vivid gallery of characters and events, emphasizing the adventures of Janice’s brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a secret that may kill or transform him; a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever; and the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies who have been waiting underground for their chance to mold the future of the city.

Experience the beautifully strange novel that received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was praised by, among others, Elizabeth Hand, Gene Wolfe, Zoran Zivkovic, Hal Duncan, and Jeffrey Ford.

“Shriek: An Afterword further established Jeff VanderMeer as the finest fantasist of his generation.” The Austin Chronicle

“Five stars! A stunning and very different fantasy novel.” BBC Focus Magazine

“In the telling, Shriek: An Afterword is an exceptional novel, a tapestry of fine writing, deep psychological insight, and acute narrative excitement…. a dark fantasy of tremendous distinction.” Locus

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Shriek: The Movie
• New things for April II
• Jeff on Bldgblog
• An announcement redux
• City of Saints and Madmen

I’m surfacing this week from a busy couple of months having finished (more or less) two substantial book designs. I mentioned the redesign of The Exploits of Engelbrecht a couple of weeks ago and it’s been a pleasure to have another bash at this. The original design wasn’t bad as such, especially compared to the rudimentary first edition from 1950, it’s more that the production standards were raised so much by the Savoy titles which followed that I frequently felt dissatisfied with it. You can see the new cover above and I’ll post some additional examples nearer publication (ETA for that is still vague).

Maurice Richardson’s tales of the dwarf surrealist sportsman are classics of eccentric comedy and it’s been a privilege having the opportunity to reintroduce them to a new audience. I intended the new dust jacket to be reminiscent of an old theatre or boxing poster and the brown and red design will be printed on uncoated textured paper to augment that effect. In addition to this volume I’ve also designed an edition of Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris novel Shriek: An Afterword for Wyrm Publishing. Once again, I’ll post more details of that closer to release.

So now I take a deep breath and see what’s next. There’s another book project imminent but I’ve been asked not to say anything about that for the time being (don’t you love a mystery?). In spare moments such as these I’ve been trying to keep working on the collected edition of the Reverbstorm comics I created with Dave Britton for Savoy. That series has always been an important part of my work, more important in many ways than The Haunter of the Dark, and it’s frustrating to have over 250 pages of some of my best artwork sitting around virtually unseen. I was supposed to have the book finished off last year but other projects kept intervening. One of the resolutions for this year has been to at least complete the scanning and re-lettering, then we’ll see where it fits into Savoy’s schedule. Watch this space.

Not to be confused with animated junk that’s long outstayed its welcome, this is a short film based on Jeff VanderMeer’s fantasy novel Shriek: An Afterword. I helped design Jeff’s City of Saints and Madmen, his first book concerning the city of Ambergris. Shriek is set in the same city and is just as sophisticated a piece of fiction as its predecessor and with a similarly unique flavour. Shriek: The Movie is more than a promotional device, it’s a self-contained narrative that does a great job of introducing some of the atmosphere of Ambergris without spoiling things by being too literal.

A city at war with itself. A night beyond imagining. And… aftermath. A short indie film about memory and transformation by Finnish director J.T. Lindroos, from a screenplay by Jeff VanderMeer, with an original soundtrack by the legendary art-rock band The Church. The film opens with Janice Shriek typing up her memoirs from the backroom of a bar, and being interrupted by bar patrons (played by Steve Kilbey and Tim Powles from The Church!). Influenced by early surrealist films. Set in Jeff VanderMeer’s fantastical city of Ambergris.

Voice cast includes Kathleen Martin as Janice Shriek and Steve Kilbey & Tim Powles from The Church. With character images by Elizabeth Hand and Rick Wallace, and art by Scott Eagle, Steve Kilbey, and others.

By an odd coincidence my work manifests in two different forms in Finland this month. Above is the Finnish reprint of ‘King Squid’ by Jeff VanderMeer, part of his City of Saints and Madmen fantasy novel which I designed as a self-contained work. SF magazine Tähtivaeltaja has produced this as a supplement to their latest issue and done a great job of maintaining the look of the original printing.

And in the music world there’s a new CD design for Finnish metal band Turisas. This is their second album, The Varangian Way, a concept affair that describes the journey taken by Viking explorers from the Gulf of Finland to Byzantium via the rivers of Russia. Very bombastic stuff, with choir and orchestra backing the band so it’s probably fitting that I again referenced (ie: swiped) the bloated sun from Bob Peak’s Apocalypse Now poster for the cover.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• New things for April
• City of Saints and Madmen

Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer (Book design for Tachyon Publications).

Steampunk: Life in Our New Century! (Moleskin design for Modofly).

Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy 3 (Cover design for Underland).

Medicine Road by Charles de Lint (Book design for Tachyon Publications).

Plates: Volume 2 (CD design for Tectonic).

The Best of Michael Moorcock (Book design for Tachyon Publications).

Ropetackle Golden Ale (Beer label design for the Adur Brewery).

Das Haus zur letzten Latern (CD package for Horus CyclicDaemon).

Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos (T-shirt design for Cyaegha).

The Complete Drive-In (Cover design for Underland).

Steampunk Redux (Moleskin design for Modofly).

A decade after his death, with all his books back in print, Edward Whittemore remains pretty much off the literary radar.

Whittemore was an ex-CIA agent who made the people, history and landscapes of the Middle East the subject matter of a series of remarkable novels. His books aren’t always fantasy (although they were often marketed as such) yet they contain fantastical elements; they’re frequently comic yet contain moments of pure horror; they’re witty, sexy, incredibly inventive and quite unique. They also provide another example of genre readers and writers nurturing the memory and reputation of an author the wider literary world has never heard of. Michael Moorcock and Jeff VanderMeer have both spoken highly of Whittemore in recent years and with the republication of his books in 2002 he now has access to a new generation of readers.

Anne Sydenham’s Whittemore site, Jerusalem Dreaming, has just moved to a new location and is an excellent source of information about the man and his work.

Ambergris by Scott Eagle.

Jeff VanderMeer is interviewed by the excellent Bldgblog, discussing “English cathedrals, ‘fungal technologies’ and architectural infections, the Sydney opera house, Vladimir Nabokov, ‘The Library of Babel,’ Monsanto, giant squids and geological deposits, nighttime walks through Prague, and even urban security after the attacks of 9/11”. The interview includes some of my designs for City of Saints and Madmen and provides a great insight into Jeff’s work, avoiding the usual discussions about contemporary fantasy writing for something far more interesting and thought-provoking.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• An announcement redux

The 2006 Jack Trevor Story Grand Prix was decided on Friday afternoon at L’Horizon, rue St Placide in Paris. The sans precedent prize can be seen above. After much deliberation the judges decided that Mr Steve Aylett was a worthy recipient of this most ingenuous of literary awards. Mr Aylett now has to spend the prize money within two weeks of its receipt and have nothing to show for it at the end of those two weeks.

In attendance (l to r): Mr Jeff VanderMeer, Mr John Coulthart, Mr Michael Moorcock, Mr Neil Williamson and Ms Emma Taylor. Behind the camera, Mr Eric Schaller who may be seen below on the left.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• An announcement

Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderful and award-winning fantasy tales of the sinister city of Ambergris are now back in print in the US from a major publisher. This is good to see, not only because the book is well worth your attention but also because I helped design the interior, providing title pages for the stories and designing and illustrating the whole of the ‘King Squid’ section. Fantasy is a meagre description for this book, it’s far more inventive and intelligent than the mass of works that labour under that description in the shops. Ditch your doorstop dragon sagas and give yourself a treat!

On these pages:

• Stanley Kubrick 1928–1999
• Another Green World: The Codex Seraphinianus
• Architects of Fear

Elsewhere:

• An Invitation to the Electric Seance at Yahoo Music’s Arthur blog.
• 30 film reviews and 4 essays for Horror: the Definitive Guide to the Cinema of Fear (Andre Deutsch), edited by James Marriott and Kim Newman.
• Sandoz in the Rain: the Life and Art of Wilfried Sätty, Strange Attractor 2.
• Germany Calling, A Serious Life by DM Mitchell.
• Printer’s Evil, fiction for The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts.

• Archives: easy access to some recurrent { feuilleton } themes.

• Recent work: a continually updated list of what John’s been working on.

• Writings: a selection of John’s published writings here and elsewhere.

JOHN COULTHART’s first illustration work was for the Hawkwind album Church of Hawkwind in 1982. Since then his designs and illustrations have appeared on record sleeves, CD and DVD packages for artists such as Cradle of Filth, Alan Moore & Tim Perkins, Steven Severin, Fourth World music pioneer Jon Hassell and many others. John is a regular contributor to Arthur magazine.

As a comic artist John produced the Lord Horror series Reverbstorm with David Britton for Savoy Books, and received the dubious accolade of having an earlier Savoy title, Hard Core Horror 5, declared obscene in a British court of law. A new graphic work, The Soul, is being planned with Alan Moore (From Hell, V for Vendetta). His collection of HP Lovecraft adaptations and illustrations, The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, was republished in 2006 by Creation Oneiros.

As a book designer and illustrator John continues to work for Savoy Books, and in 2003 designed the acclaimed Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts.

John’s work has been showcased via Rapid Eye, Critical Vision, Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, EsoTerra, CNN.com and the Channel 4 television series Banned in the UK. He lives and works in Manchester, England.

• See John’s work on the main site.

• Contact details.

• “Why Feuilleton?”