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Tales of the High Court

I thought I’d already written something about my cover for Megan Derr’s gay fantasy novel, The High King’s Golden Tongue, but it seems not. This appeared last year from Less Than Three Press, and the next volume in the Tales of the High Court series, Pirate of Fathoms Deep, has been published this week. My earlier omission allows me to show both covers together.

When working on the first volume I didn’t expect I’d also be working on a sequel so there was no need to consider whether the design could be carried over. The architectural frame is from a book about French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, taken from one of Viollet-le-Duc’s illustrations for a study of the architecture of old France. I added the windows and curtains before colouring the stones and providing shadows and highlights. This became a problem for the second cover because my Viollet-le-Duc book only had one example of this kind of stonework. After some lengthy searches at Gallica I was able to find enough scans of other pages from the books that Viollet-le-Duc illustrated to piece together a new frame. The Gothic window frames on both covers are from another French volume, and I’ve now exhausted all those examples so a third volume in this series will no doubt present further challenges.

Weekend links 314

Avebury Kite (2006) by David Alderslade.

• “Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, author of Mephisto, was one of the first in Germany to write gay novels and plays.” Walter Holland reviews Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann by Frederic Spotts.

• The Pale Brown Thing, a shorter/alternate version of Fritz Leiber’s supernatural masterwork, Our Lady of Darkness, is given a limited reprinting by Swan River Press next month.

• “Not only is metal not directly harmful to adolescent minds, as the thinking goes, it may actually be helpful.” Christine Ro on the reappraisal of a once-suspect musical genre.

Something of that tension between past and future is visible in Beardsley’s work. It is the art of a dying era peering, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, into the next. For all the prancing and bravado, Beardsley’s art was really about finding something in which to believe—and if Beardsley came to believe in anything it was the deep black line. Shading held little interest for Beardsley, and color fascinated him not at all. The black line and white space were all he needed.

Morgan Meis on Aubrey Beardsley

• More of my art for Bruce Sterling’s forthcoming Dieselpunk novella, Pirate Utopia, has been revealed. Tachyon will be publishing the book in November.

• “Secretly, though, I frequent junk shops because I am wishing for some kind of transcendence,” says Luc Sante.

• Mixes of the week: Gizehcast #28 by Christine Ott, and a mix for The Wire by Asher Levitas.

• “It took centuries, but we now know the size of the Universe.” Chris Baraniuk explains.

• Barnbrook Studios creates identity for Kubrick exhibition at Somerset House.

• Watch a haunting video from Subtext Recordings and Eric Holm.

• Folklore Tapes: A Rum Music Special by Joseph Burnett.

• Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine is on sale again.

• Rhys Chatham’s favourite albums.

• A Guide to Occult London

• Skulls and Bones

• Zero Time (1979) by Chrome | Zero-Gravity (1996) by Sidewinder | Zero Moment (2016) by Contact

Out of Tune: Book 2

Respawn, Reboot by Allison Pang.

Out of Tune: Book 2 is an anthology of original fiction edited by Jonathan Maberry that’s just been published by JournalStone. Last year I contributed six illustrations to JournalStone’s The Gods of HP Lovecraft, and would have done more if I hadn’t been busy with other work. For this new collection I’ve illustrated all the stories in a slightly sketchier style than usual (see larger views here), the brief being to provide something similar to the illustrations that appeared in the first volume.

The Knoxville Girl by Cherie M. Priest.

Both books in the Out of Tune series feature short stories based on folk songs or murder ballads, some of which are very familiar if you listen to folk, blues or country music. Almost all the songs are from an American perspective even though a number of them use songs that are derived from old English and Scottish folk songs. Each story ends with a commentary by Nancy Keim-Comley that reveals the song that the story was based on (some are more obvious than others), and also gives a brief history of the song. Not all the stories take an obvious route: Nik Vincent-Abnett’s piece based on The Two Corbies concerns people trying to survive in a near-future dystopia.

The Beams of the Sun by Dan Abnett.

As to the drawing style, all these illustrations are digital works produced with a collection of Photoshop brushes I’ve had lying around for a while. It’s taken me some time to get used to using brushes that do more than draw straight lines or imitate an airbrush but this book acted as a kind of crash course in their application. Once I’d finished the work I felt quite at home using them so I’m looking forward to doing more in this looser style.

The Ghost Rider by David Mack.

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More Things to Come

The organisers of the Things to Come exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel, sent me their photos of the show earlier this week. As with the other recent exhibitions that I haven’t managed to attend it’s good to see how everything looks in situ, and also see some of the other exhibits.

The art pieces are all related to science fiction old and new, with my airship illustration (as seen in The Steampunk Bible) and a couple of other works representing the old (or new-as-old) side of things. I’m not used to seeing my work enlarged to such a huge size so this was a treat. The only larger reproductions have been a window display for one of the Cradle of Filth album covers which filled a whole window of Tower Records, London, in 2001, and stage backdrops for Cradle of Filth and Melechesh. I can’t identify any of the other exhibits until the catalogue arrives but I really like the iridescent metal construction that’s lying on the gallery floor. All the photos are by Elad Sarig, and are shown courtesy of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. My thanks again to Doreet LeVitte Harten for selecting my work, and to Avshalom Suliman for dealing with the printing and other details.

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Leather Cthulhu unleashed

The beautiful leatherbound Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is officially published this Friday but the books are in Barnes & Noble stores already, and my complimentary copies arrived this week. Photos don’t do justice to the volumes in this series of classic reprints, you really need to hold one to see how well made they are. The leather is smooth and flawlessly printed—I was worried that I might have pushed the limits with some of the details in my cover design but every line and edge is where it should be. The pages of this particular volume are edged with gold, an effect applied to some of the books I’ve designed for Savoy but an uncommon thing in today’s book world.

As I mentioned earlier, this edition also features endpapers showing details of my R’lyeh spread from The Call of Cthulhu, plus a poster of my Cthulhu Rising piece from 2004. Which leads to an important note for purchasers: the temporary glue that fixes the poster to the back endpapers, and the ad sheet (see below) to the back cover was stronger than intended so care needs to be taken when detaching these items from the book. I’ve been told that a warning about this will be added to the next batch of books, and the glue (which is that clear stuff used to fix things to magazine covers) will also be changed.

A couple more photos and a list of contents follow below. I’ve worked on a lot of books over the years but this one is up there with the very best; Lovecraft’s finest fiction in a single gorgeous volume, and all for $20.

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