{horror} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Tsathoggua rising

I said last week that I’d almost finished reworking my portrait of Tsathoggua for the Lovecraft book, and here it is. Tsathoggua first came into the world in a Hyperborea story by Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, before being incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by HP Lovecraft who refers to the god-creature in several of his stories. Where Smith describes a hideous toad-like being, Lovecraft avoids being too closely bound by material specifics, referring to an “amorphous” entity which suggests a range of possibilities for illustration. To be fair to Smith, there is an amorphous and very deadly creature lurking in the temple of Tsathoggua in The Tale of Satampra Zeiros but we never learn whether this is Tsathoggua itself or some other being.

The amorphousness of Lovecraftian entities is a factor which is too often ignored in the world of weird illustration. Cosmic horror thrives on the fluidity of physics and physical matter but many illustrators seem content to copy one another instead of inventing new teratisms, a process that results in the accretion of stereotypes. Cthulhu, as I’m always reminding people, explodes into pieces after being struck by a ship at the end of The Call of Cthulhu, the remnants then recombining when the ship sails away from the scene. Lovecraft never intended his “spawn from the stars” to resemble the accreted stereotype we see today, a kind of Jolly Green Giant with squid mask and bat wings, reaching a brawny and very human arm towards the viewer. The ultimate expression of cosmic amorphousness may be found in the Shoggoths, those alien entities whose default condition is a mass of shapeless, iridescent protoplasm.

It was the amorphous nature of Tsathoggua that I wanted to honour with my original Photoshop creation in 1999. The starting point was a photograph of a cephalopod (I forget now whether it was an octopus or a squid) torn from an old issue of National Geographic. My initial experiments with the picture weren’t intended to develop into Tsathoggua; I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started but at some point during the production of The Great Old Ones I decided to turn the picture into Smith’s entity with the addition of a toad-like head. Rather than mould the rest of the picture into more recognisable organic shapes it was left in a largely amorphous state. The eye-like shape at the top is a complete mystery to me now, I can’t say why it was there but it felt right so there it stayed. Alan Moore’s text for Tsathoggua identifies the creature with the Kabbalistic sphere of Geburah, “Strength”, a zone imbued with the martial qualities of the planet Mars. This is one of the more arbitrary assignations in The Great Old Ones—there’s nothing especially warlike about the toad-god—but something had to occupy the space, and I’d already finished the picture before Alan started writing his pieces. For the new version I’ve redrawn some areas of the original, but most of the work has been a case of sharpening edges and improving the contrast and modelling. The spiky, crown-like upper half has been emphasised a little in order to complement the martial aspect. And the bulging, convex appearance of the original has been slightly enhanced, giving the impression that the creature’s gravitational mass is of a sufficient density to bend the light around it. None of this should be taken as a negation of Smith’s description of a squatting, pot-bellied toad-god. The icons of the Great Old Ones created by human beings are exactly this: human attempts to represent alien monstrosity. Some acolyte who happens to envision the real Tsathoggua might stammer that “It looked like…a giant toad!” thereby giving a form to the subsequent iconography. But the map is not the territory. Cthulhu doesn’t, and shouldn’t look like the statues either. The Jolly Green Giant needs to ditch the mask and wings and get back to selling canned vegetables.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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

H.P.L.

It’s that man again. Presenting the latest reworked page from the ongoing reconstruction/improvement of my Haunter of the Dark book. The picture will illustrate “Abdul Alhazred”, the final section of Alan Moore’s text for The Great Old Ones in which HP Lovecraft is positioned at Malkuth, the “Kingdom” in Alan’s eldritch Kabbalah. This makes Lovecraft himself the receptive vessel of the energies descending from the spheres above, while paradoxically being the source of those energies. Or some of them at least… The Great Old Ones is a Mythos Kabbalah which features Dagon, Hastur, Tsathoggua and Yig as well as Cthulhu and the rest. Alan doesn’t subscribe to Kenneth Grant’s baseless theory that Lovecraft really was a receptacle for transmissions from interdimensional entities, but the incorporation of the writer into his own pantheon isn’t unprecedented. Abdul Alhazred was a childhood persona of Lovecraft’s before he assigned the name to the author of Al Azif, or the Necronomicon; further personas may be found in Through the Gates of the Silver Key (“Ward Phillips”), Robert Bloch’s The Suicide in the Study (“Luveh-Keraph, priest of Bast”), and other fictions.

HPL (1937) by Virgil Finlay.

Whether this literary sport warrants the apparently limitless production of Lovecraftian art featuring the man himself, usually sprouting or festooned with tentacles, is a debatable matter. Virgil Finlay began the fantastic portrait trend in 1937 with his memorial depiction of the author writing with a quill pen while dressed in 18th-century garb. The earliest example that I can think of showing Lovecraft paired with the ubiquitous tentacles was the Moebius cover for Lettres d’Arkham in 1975, although there may well be other drawings prior to this. I’ve often wondered what Lovecraft would have made of the deluge of publications and images derived from his work, especially those that place him inside the products of his imagination.

Cover art by Moebius, 1975.

And speaking of which… I was at a loss at first with how to approach a new Lovecraft portrait, all I knew was that one was necessary. The original Malkuth picture from 1999 is another poor Photoshop job which has nevertheless been reused elsewhere on a few occasions, even appearing in 2007 on the cover of an issue of FATE magazine. For the new version I started with the portrait itself, using white lines on black to copy the same portrait photograph that formed the centre of the older picture. This was then duplicated and flipped horizontally to create a kind of Janus head which gives the portrait a suitably weird quality without wreathing it in tentacles. The mirrored head harks back to a sequence of treated photos by JK Potter which I first saw in the Heavy Metal Lovecraft special in 1979. Potter had used the same portrait photo to create effects that were somewhat compromised by poor reproduction, leading me to be believe that I’d created something slightly different to the first panel in his sequence. While researching this post I turned up an earlier version of the artwork which appeared on the back of the first issue of a US fanzine, Fantasy Mongers, also in 1979. The clearer reproduction revealed that the first head in Potter’s sequence is almost identical to my own. Ah well…

Photo art by JK Potter from the back cover of Fantasy Mongers #1, 1979.

The rest of the picture was improvised around this central image. Having drawn the portrait in white-on-black I decided to use a similar technique for the other elements. The Cthulhoid pillars are based on those in my Red-Night Rites painting from 1997, one of which appeared in the 1999 picture. The smaller figure on the right is from one of the photos that Wilfred Talman took while wandering the streets of New York with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long. This also appeared in the 1999 picture but for the new version I’ve emphasised what appears to be a book that Lovecraft is carrying in his right hand. Searching around for a complementary figure that might represent Abdul Alhazred turned up a 19th-century photo of a character who not only looked the part but is also standing in a manner similar to the Talman Lovecraft. If you look closely he’s also carrying a book, an addition of my own which turns him into the author of Al Azif. The polyhedra supporting the pair aren’t as arbitrary as they may seem. The spheres serve a dual purpose, preventing the figures from floating in space (or standing in water) while also relating to the Sephiroth of Malkuth which is identified with the Earth in the Kabbalistic scheme of planetary associations.

The next reworked picture will be Tsathoggua which is being polished rather than completely overhauled. I’m hoping I might have this done by the end of the month but I’m still chipping away at The Dunwich Horror while doing all this, as well as working on things which pay the bills. (I’ve just finished designing and illustrating another book.) Further progress will be announced in due course.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth

Carnacki’s first manifestation

Visual manifestation, that is. The first Carnacki story to see print was The Thing Invisible, published in 1909 as a part of The Ghost Pirates, A Chaunty, and Another Story. The book wasn’t illustrated, nor was the Carnacki collection published by Eveleigh Nash in 1913. The five stories that ran in The Idler, however, were all decorated with sketchy illustrations by Florence Briscoe, all of which may be seen in this collection of extracted pages from the issues for 1910. (For the complete magazines, look here.)

The House Among the Laurels.

Miss Briscoe (and she does appear to have been a Miss at this point) has the distinction of being one of the first illustrators (possibly the first) of any of Hodgson’s fiction. She was also a friend of the author and may well have used him as a model for many of her illustrations. James Bojaciuk suggests as much in this piece of biographical research that I’d managed to miss when it was posted at Greydogtales. I think we can take Hodgson as a definite model for the portrait of Carnacki that illustrates the magazine header, the similarity between the drawing and one of the author’s photos is beyond doubt even if some of the other Carnacki drawings show less of a resemblance. Carnacki also seems to be quite tall, or at least of average male height, something that the diminutive Hodgson was not.

The Whistling Room.

Portraiture aside, Florence Briscoe’s illustrations tend to be of a type that I refer to as “people standing about in rooms”, a common form in the world of magazine illustration. Sidney Paget’s famous drawings of Sherlock Holmes are almost all of this type, stories of cerebral industry and ratiocination being rewarding for the reader, less so for the jobbing illustrator. (The Hound of the Baskervilles is a notable exception, with its dramatic locations and spectral atmosphere.) The most obvious difference between Carnacki and Holmes is that Carnacki encounters genuine manifestations of eldritch horror which he manages to keep at bay with his incantations and electrical devices. Miss Briscoe shows us none of this, unfortunately. But her figures are well-drawn, and as general illustration her work is of a higher standard than the often amateurish renderings you find in the early pulp magazines of the 1920s. The growing sphere of Hodgsonian illustration begins with these few stories.

The Horse of the Invisible.

The Searcher of the End House.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Whistling Room, 1952
• The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet
• Suspicion: The Voice in the Night
• Hodgsonian vibrations
• The Horse of the Invisible
• Tentacles #2: The Lost Continent
• Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’
• Hodgson versus Houdini
• Weekend links: Hodgson edition
• Druillet meets Hodgson

The Whistling Room, 1952

Coincidence time again: this ancient TV drama was posted to YouTube a few days ago just as I was finishing Timothy S. Murphy’s very commendable study of William Hope Hodgson’s fiction, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark. As drama or even basic entertainment, The Whistling Room is the opposite of commendable but it is notable for being the first screen adaptation of a Hodgson story. Hodgson’s fiction has never been popular with film or television dramatists. His two major weird novels, The Night Land and The House on the Borderland, would require lavish expenditure and special effects to do them justice, while the latter has a narrative shape and a lack of characterisation that would either repel any interest or incur considerable mangling of the story.

More appealing for screen adapters are Hodgson’s tales of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, a collection of short mysteries with a supernatural atmosphere and neat resolutions. The Whistling Room, a US production for Chevron Theatre in 1952, is the first of two Carnacki adaptations, the other appearing almost 20 years later when Thames TV included The Horse of the Invisible in their first series of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The Carnacki character was Hodgson’s take on the occult detective or psychic investigator, a short-lived offshoot of the post-Sherlock Holmes detection boom of the 1890s, and the concurrent interest in Spiritualism (or “Spiritism”, as Aleister Crowley always insisted it should be called). Carnacki is as resourceful and energetic as Hodgson’s other protagonists, and as an investigator he’s happy to use modern technology (electricity, cameras, vacuum tubes) to combat incursions from other dimensions. Hodgson’s descriptions of these encounters are freighted with all the capitalised terminology that recurs throughout The Night Land: “Outer Monstrosities”, “a Force from Outside”, “the Ab-human”. Carnacki’s exploits, however, have often been dismissed as hack-work when compared to the author’s novels or his tales of the Sargasso Sea. (The one Carnacki story that even detractors favour, The Hog, was a longer piece that only turned up many years after Hodgson’s death.) The stories are at their best when the mystery is an authentically supernatural menace, instead of another Scooby-Doo-like fraud being perpetrated by a disgruntled minor character.

The Whistling Room was the third Carnacki tale from an early series of five that ran in The Idler in 1910. The story is one of those that concern genuinely supernatural events, and is essentially a repetition of the first of the Idler episodes, The Gateway of the Monster, in which a room in an old house is haunted by an antique curse that plagues the present owners. The room in question isn’t as deadly as the menace in the first story, the mysterious whistling (or “hooning”) being more of a threat to the nerves of the household than to life or limb. But the whistling soon resolves into a more material manifestation.

Whatever power the original story may possess is thoroughly absent from the TV adaptation, a mere sketch of a narrative that wasn’t very substantial to begin with. Alan Napier—Alfred the butler in the Batman TV series—is hopelessly miscast as Carnacki, being more of a bungling buffoon than any kind of serious investigator. There’s no mention here of Carnacki’s favourite occult tools, the “Saaamaaa Ritual” and the Sigsand Manuscript, while the closest we get to his Electric Pentacle is a ridiculous “Day-Ray”, a raygun-like emitter of captured sunlight that has no effect at all on the cursed room. The room itself and its mysterious whistling is more comical than frightening, with dancing furniture that wouldn’t be out of place in Pee-wee’s Playhouse, while the Irish setting of the story is signalled by terrible attempts at Irish accents from two of the actors. Nobody actually says “begorrah” or mentions leprechauns but much of the dialogue is pure stereotype. The adaptation by Howard J. Green even shunts the resolution into Scooby-Doo territory when one of the local lads is found to be partially responsible for the whistling noises, an explanation that Hodgson’s Carnacki goes to some trouble to rule from his investigation.

I wouldn’t usually write so much about something that scarcely deserves the attention but this film is such an obscure item we’re fortunate to be able to see it at all. I’ve been wondering what prompted the producers to choose this particular story. The Whistling Room was first published in the US in 1947, in the expanded Carnacki collection from Myecroft and Moran, an imprint of Arkham House. If Howard J. Green (or whoever) had taken the story from there then we have to wonder why he favoured this one over the others. I think it’s more likely that Dennis Wheatley’s A Century of Horror Stories (1935) was the source, a British anthology but one which would have had wider distribution than an Arkham House limited edition. The only other option listed at ISFDB is a US magazine, the final (?) issue of The Mysterious Traveler Mystery Reader. But this was published in 1952 which puts it too close to the TV production given the time required to commission and schedule an adaptation, even a poor one such as this. Whatever the answer, I feel that thanks are due to the uploader for making The Whistling Room available. Now that my curiosity has been assuaged I’ll return to hoping that someone eventually gives us a better copy of The Voice in the Night.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet
• Suspicion: The Voice in the Night
• Hodgsonian vibrations
• The Horse of the Invisible
• Tentacles #2: The Lost Continent
• Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’
• Hodgson versus Houdini
• Weekend links: Hodgson edition
• Druillet meets Hodgson

The Return of the Crawling Chaos

Behold Nyarlathotep, v. 3.0, this being yet another revision of an old illustration. Some readers may recognise the imagery from version 2.0 (2009) or even the original that appeared in my Haunter of the Dark book in 1999. Earlier this month the work I’ve been doing for the new edition of the book reached the end of another stage with the completion of all the necessary redrawing of The Dunwich Horror. I’ve also just finished drawing page 24 of the story, the page I’d left half-done when the strip was abandoned in 1989. Everything I do from now on will be new material.

Having got this far I decided to pay a little more attention to the upgrading of the book’s fourth section, The Great Old Ones, by finishing Nyarlathotep, something I began this time last year then set aside when I got involved in rescanning all the old comics pages. As I’ve mentioned before, several of the pieces for this section of the book were some of my earliest digital illustrations, created a few months after I’d bought a secondhand and very underpowered Macintosh computer. Nyarlathotep was an attempt to depict the hybrid nature of a Mythos entity which combines elements of an Egyptian pharaoh, the diabolic “Black Man” of European witch cults, a sinister stage magician or scientist, and the winged abomination that Robert Blake finds lurking in the steeple of the Starry Wisdom church. Version 1 was one of my very first digital collages which suffered as a result of my inexperience with the new medium, hence my eagerness to rework the design in 2009 when Cyaegha, a metal band I’d been working with, requested a Nyarlathotep-themed T-shirt. The first version had been aimed more at the theatrical/scientific aspect of the character, with a poster in the background from John Nevil Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall in London. For version 2 I added a number of organic elements to bolster the “Haunter of the Dark” side of the character. Version 3 keeps all the details from version 2 while replacing some of the collaged elements with similar ones taken from better sources. The new design is also slightly taller to account for the enlarged page size of the new book.

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

The most notable additions to the new piece are the names of the character in Latin letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs (𓋔𓇋𓄿𓂋𓈌𓊵), the latter being a suggestion from this Reddit post. The Egyptian spelling is conjectural but I have a guidebook to the hieroglyphic language which confirms that most of the letters are the ones they should be. The words aren’t included solely as decoration. The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which Alan wrote eleven texts or invocations which position each god or entity on one of the spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Alan was heavily involved with the Kabbalah at this time, being also engaged with the first few issues of Promethea, a story which involves a physical (or metaphysical) journey from Malkuth to Kether. The Great Old Ones takes the same journey in reverse, and from a much darker perspective, like a Lovecraftian equivalent of the Qliphoth, the “nightside” of the Kabbalistic spheres. In Alan’s scheme, Nyarlathotep is positioned at sphere 8, Hod (or “Splendour”), a sphere associated with gods of magic and language like Thoth, Hermes and Mercury. I imagine most Mythos-acquainted occultists would agree with adding Nyarlathotep to this pantheon. In addition to being gods of magic and language, Thoth, Hermes and Mercury also serve as celestial messengers, a function which Lovecraft assigns to Nyarlathotep in The Whisperer in Darkness when one of the Mi-Go declares “To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told.”

As for the rest of The Great Old Ones, I have four more of them still to be reworked, one of which, Abdul Alhazred (or Lovecraft himself) is almost finished. Further progress will be posted here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos