It’s that man again, or some of his progeny, infecting the world with their nightmares. Lovecraft’s Brood is a story collection edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of follow-up to Lovecraft’s Monsters, although the new book is a more expansive take on the Lovecraftian weird tale. As with the earlier collection, I designed and illustrated this one throughout. The illustrations were more of a challenge this time since the stories weren’t always focused on explicitly physical threats; or if they were, the threats remained either unseen or inexplicable. That can be good sometimes—there’s a tendency in horror illustration to always go for monster portraits or spoilerish scenes from the end of the story—but it doesn’t make the artist’s task an easy one. For a few of the pictures I used a minor detail; in the case of Mister Ainsley, for example, there’s a mention of taxidermy experiments which is what I chose to focus on. What “Mister Ainsley” looks like (or actually is) is never described as such, the reader’s imagination is left to fill the gaps in the story.
Among the other pictures there’s my first ever drawing of the real church that gave Lovecraft his model for the home of The Starry Wisdom cult in The Haunter of the Dark. This church, or its fictional counterpart, has haunted my imagination for a long time, being the subject of my first Lovecraft illustration in 1979 and (of course) the subject of my first Lovecraft comic strip in 1986. In Lovecraft’s Brood the church appears in The Beholder’s Share, another fine riff on Lovecraft’s fiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan in which the Starry Wisdom cult actually existed, with the old Catholic church on Federal Hill being the centre of their operations. The real church was demolished in 1992 but the location is still easy to find since the grounds have been turned into a small recreational area which retains the walls that surrounded the building. When I was in Providence in 2015 I walked over to Federal Hill to see a concert performance in a converted cinema but I didn’t manage to visit the site of the church, something I now regret.
On the technical side, this set of illustrations is the first where I’ve used Glitch Lab in the creation of some of the artwork. Glitch Lab is one of several tablet-based image-processing apps made by Ilixa that function like Photoshop’s filters but with many more options. Photoshop hasn’t done much with its basic suite of filters since the 1990s, something that doesn’t bother me most of the time but every so often you find yourself wanting to imitate a technical effect that can’t easily be achieved without a lot of work. For two of these illustrations I wanted views seen through different kinds of monitors, the first a low-quality TV screen of a type you’d see in a supermarket, then a distorted image from a malfunctioning camera whose output is being viewed on a computer monitor. Glitch Lab specialises in this kind of technical distortion, and can imitate a wide range of visual glitches of a type generated by old TV sets. The Note is the story with the security camera for which I painted a relatively minimal greyscale scene. This wouldn’t have worked on its own but running it through the filters gave it the required appearance. Wind Come Down the Mountain is much more heavily processed, and could have been pushed a lot further but I’d already destroyed a lot of the detail I’d put into the picture.
Lovecraft’s Brood is out now in print and digital from Tachyon and all the usual outlets.
Once Seen by Conrad Williams.
Mister Ainsley by Steve Rasnic Tem.
