{horror} – { feuilleton }

Quiet Apocalypse

More monochrome cosmic horror. Quiet Apocalypse is a short black-and-white film by “Insolitum”, a combination CGI with stock footage that nods to Cloverfield, Ishirō Honda’s monstrous menagerie, and the last few minutes of The Mist, if that particular film had continued beyond its abrupt ending. “Made using Blender, Zbrush, Substance Painter, After Effects and Davinci Resolve. Stock footage provided by Envato, Pexels and Pixabay,” says the YT note.

Most of the visuals are self-explanatory and could easily get by without the narration that enters later on. Sublime horror is seldom enhanced by excessive explanation. HP Lovecraft made the point succinctly in The Call of Cthulhu: “A mountain walked.” Sometimes that’s all you need to know.

(Another tip from Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You.)

The Father of Serpents

The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. — The Whisperer in Darkness

Another month, another Lovecraftian portrait. Yig was the last of the Photoshop melanges from 1999 that I felt a need to replace for the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark, which means that the whole of the Great Old Ones section of the book is now complete. Back in 1999 I wasn’t really sure what to do with Yig. The snake god described as “the Father of Serpents” was partly an invention of Zealia Bishop who paid HP Lovecraft to flesh out a trio of outlines which were subsequently sold as stories to Weird Tales.

Illustration by Hugh Rankin, 1929.

The first of these, The Curse of Yig, was published in November 1929, and credited to Zealia Brown Reed as Bishop was then known. The piece is essentially a revenge scenario in which a woman in the wilds of 19th-century Oklahoma has to suffer the supernatural consequences when she kills a nest of rattlesnakes, consequences which, as in The Dunwich Horror, result in monstrous births. The god that protects the snakes is described in Native American tellings as “an odd half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature”. Lovecraft typically expands the scope of the tale with suggestions that Yig is connected to the Aztec and Mayan myths of Quetzalcōātl and Kukulkan. The “Father of Serpents” is more corporeal than Lovecraft’s nebulous interdimensional entities but Yig was quickly added to the Mythos pantheon, being named along with Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath in another Bishop/Lovecraft story, The Mound.

My 2015 illustration for Rattled by Douglas Wynne.

For my 1999 portrait I used a number of old snake illustrations that I collaged and mutated until they formed an appropriate composition. As with some of the other portraits in this section of the book, the final piece looked okay for the time but my satisfaction with it didn’t last. The new version is based in part on an earlier portrait of Yig that I drew in 2015 for Rattled, a story by Douglas Wynne that was published in The Gods of HP Lovecraft. Wynne’s story is closer to The Curse of Yig than to Lovecraft’s more cosmic excursions, and required a suitably earthbound illustration.

The new portrait follows the form of several of the other Great Old Ones pieces by being hieratic and almost completely symmetrical. Our bodies are generally symmetrical but absolute symmetry is a rare thing in nature, which may explain why you see it so often in religious art. Perfect symmetry suggests a supernatural purity that can’t be achieved outside mathematics, thus an ideal quality for the depiction of supernatural entities.

The Sephiroth chart from the second edition of the book, 2006.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know by now that The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which Alan mapped the Mythos gods across the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, while also writing an occult evocation for each. Yig is placed at Tiphereth, the sphere of beauty, which occupies an important central position on the Kabbalistic Tree. I remember Alan being surprised and pleased when I sent him a print of the artwork which had a radiant halo of snake tails positioned at the top of the picture. I didn’t know that Yig was going to be assigned to Tiphereth but the snake halo is a fitting symbol for a sphere associated with the Sun, and whose corporeal symbol is a splendid king. My new portrait acknowledges these aspects while bearing in mind that the Great Old Ones are closer to the demonic entities of the Qliphoth than to the traditional god forms of the Kabbalah. The new Yig has a spiky crown and a multitude of arms that correspond with the position of Tiphereth at the intersection of multiple Kabbalistic paths. (The arms also refer to the multi-armed Christ-like figure that I drew for the Tiphereth page in the Bumper Book of Magic.) As for the wings, these may be taken as a nod to Quetzalcōātl, the Feathered Serpent who happens to be named in Alan’s accompanying text. It’s not necessary for a reader to catch any of these references to appreciate either the text or the artwork but the details add a layer of additional meaning for the initiated.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Black Goat
• Tsathoggua rising
• H.P.L.
• The return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos

The art of Helmut Wenske

A Tab in the Ocean (1972) by Nektar.

This is another post in which I refer to Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (Thames & Hudson, 1978) as a source of discovery. Rottensteiner is Austrian which no doubt explains why his study of fantasy and horror in art and fiction had a broader reach than you would have found in a similar study from a British or American editor. Some of the writers whose work he discusses—Stefan Grabiński, for example—hadn’t been translated into English at that time. Among the artists whose work appeared as illustration Helmut Wenske was one of several whose paintings were seldom seen in Anglophone publications, although a few album covers that featured Wenske art—those for Nektar in particular—were a common sight in British record shops in the 1970s.

Remember The Future (1973) by Nektar.

Wenske is a German artist with a penchant for Dalí-like Surrealism that might have been strained through a psychotropic filter. Most of his work in the 1970s was as an album cover designer for the Bellaphon label, and most of those covers are designs rather than paintings. There are a number of book covers, however, some of which are recycled from his album covers. From 1971 to 1975 Wenske painted the covers for a series from Insel Verlag, “Phantastische Wirklichkeit: Science Fiction der Welt”, a collection of reprints edited by Franz Rottensteiner. Wenske’s ISFDB credits list a few horror covers along with these, a small percentage of which are Lovecraft-related. In the past I’ve drawn attention to many different Lovecraft illustrators but Wenkse is one of a small number of these to have also written Lovecraftian fiction of his own (Die Krypta von Shaggay’h, 1974). He enjoys the work he’s being asked to illustrate, in other words, which isn’t something you can always expect from illustrators.

Electric Silence (1974) by Dzyan.

The covers below aren’t the best quality but better copies have proved hard to find. For those who’d like to see more Wenske art there’s at least one German catalogue that collects his work from the early 70s on.

Horizonte (1977) by PSI.

Continue reading “The art of Helmut Wenske”

Steal Me

Coming soon from Absinthe Books, the novella imprint of PS Publishing, is Steal Me by Helen Grant, a book for which I created the wraparound cover art:

Rowan Byrne hasn’t stolen anything for ages—not since she started to straighten her life out after a personal tragedy. But the volume she’s just picked up in the new bookshop in town seems to want her to steal it. The text is very persuasive. There’s a book for everyone in Legends—a book that will encourage their worst impulses. Steal. Fear. Burn. Kill. It’s not long before Rowan’s small town, isolated from the outside world, is descending into mayhem. Assailed by her own demons, Rowan could try to cut and run. Or she could make a stand, and try to save the community she loves…

This was a good book to work on. I’d not worked for PS for a while, and very much enjoyed Helen’s collection of stories for Swan River Press, Atmospheric Disturbances, whose cover and boards I also designed. “Legends”, the mysterious shop with the darkened windows, is staffed by a pair of elderly women who seem vaguely unreal—pleasant and helpful but not quite human, and with an undefined aura of menace. By coincidence, the previous book I worked on for PS Publishing was a fully illustrated edition of Needful Things by Stephen King, a much longer novel about a mysterious shop in a small town whose sinister/unreal proprietor and wares cause mayhem among the populace. Helen says she wasn’t imitating the King novel, and the similarities are superficial in any case. I feel she did more with the concept, and with greater economy, than the world’s most popular horror novelist (and I say this after the world’s most popular horror novelist sent his compliments for my work on his book); but then I’ve never been keen on the tendency favoured by King and others to fill out hundreds of pages with background detail and character biographies at the expense of the horror. In the past I’ve thrown the occasional barb at Mies van der Rohe’s overused quote, but sometimes less really does mean more.

Steal Me will be published in June. Don’t steal it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atmospheric Disturbances
• The Needful Thing
• All the Things
• Needful Things

The Black Goat

I found time recently to finish another picture for the revised edition of my Lovecraft book, a picture which I almost completed several months ago then had to set aside. Last year’s steady progress on the book’s production was brought to a halt in December as a result of a substantial and time-consuming illustration commission. I can’t complain—the new work was welcome after a rather fallow year—but it left me with none of the spare time I usually try and allot to personal projects.

The latest piece is yet another addition to the Great Old Ones section, a collaboration with Alan Moore for which Alan wrote a series of short text pieces that mapped Lovecraftian gods and locations across the spheres of the Kabbalah. If you’ve heard of Shub-Niggurath then you’ll doubtless know the additional title given to the entity: “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”. For the Kabbalistic scheme Alan identified Shub-Niggurath with Binah, the third sphere on the Tree of Life which represents the point at which the descent of energies from the higher spheres to the lower are infused with female qualities. In Kabbalistic terms the assignation works well, Binah being a sphere where gravid entities are preparing to give birth. For the artist, Shub-Niggurath is another Lovecraftian god that’s little more than a suggestive name; the “Black Goat” is never described in Lovecraft’s own writings, and we never learn what the “Thousand Young” may be. This gives considerable latitude to an illustrator, although most of the depictions tend to incorporate goatish features of some kind. I remain undecided about this. On the one hand the creation of a goat god is a rare example of Lovecraft carrying over attributes from pagan iconography into the unearthly realm of the Great Old Ones; Pan is the obvious forerunner here even though Pan was a male deity. On the other hand there’s the question of the degree to which we should acknowledge any physical goatishness when—as with Tsathoggua and Cthulhu—the resemblance to a terrestrial organism may be a result of a mind at the end of its tether straining for a visual description: “It looked like a…goat/toad/squid-faced dragon…!”

The Sephiroth chart from the second edition of the book, 2006.

As I say, I’m undecided but for this piece I opted for a compromise, a goat-like head supported by a monstrous body presiding over an even more monstrous progeny. My earlier depiction was another Photoshop melange, something that looked novel in 1999 but wouldn’t pass muster today. The new version is a further evolution of a form of digital drawing I’ve been developing, a process in which you draw a portion of the picture then copy and paste it to a new layer, distort it slightly using one of Photoshop’s Distort filters, then draw over and around the new section until it blends seamlessly with the rest. This has the effect of creating unpredictable forms that underly the work as a whole, rather like the Surrealist techniques of frottage, grattage, decalcomania and so on. The Surrealist processes were all the product of physical materials but the impulse is the same whatever technique you may use: the introduction of a random element that might evade the conscious input of the artist and the habitual strokes made by the drawing hand.

This leaves me now with one last god-form to be reworked, Yig the serpent deity. I’ve no idea at the moment what to do for this but something will emerge once I start playing around. I’ll also be chipping away at the new pages for The Dunwich Horror. Progress on this has been slower than I hoped but I’m still determined to finish the story. Stay tuned for further updates.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tsathoggua rising
• H.P.L.
• The return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos