{ feuilleton }

In the Mad Mountains

Cover design by Elizabeth Story. Cover art by Mike Mignola.

The subtitle tells you everything you need to know about this new collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories from Tachyon. I designed the interior of the book, less floridly than some of my previous designs for Tachyon, and a little more abstractly than I’d usually do for a title such as this. All of the stories have been published before, and since I’d illustrated one of them (for Lovecraft’s Monsters) I had vague hopes of incorporating my earlier illustration while providing new ones for the rest of the stories. This proved impossible, however; I was working on the layout while still finishing the design for The Bumper Book of Magic so didn’t have the time to do seven more drawings. I’ll post the illustration here anyway.

The Bleeding Shadow is a great story, a low-rent detective tale set in the 1920s in which the predicament from The Music of Erich Zann—violinist has to keep playing his instrument in order to keep something terrible at bay—is recast with shellac 78s and a blues guitarist. Among the other pieces there’s a story that manages to successfully contrive a meeting between Huckleberry Finn, Brer Rabbit and the Cthulhu Mythos; and the final story which gives the collection its name, wherein the setting of Lovecraft’s Antarctic epic becomes a Sargasso-like landscape of shipwrecks, lost planes and horrors great and small. I especially enjoyed The Crawling Sky, a story of the Old Weird West featuring a Solomon Kane-like itinerant preacher, the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer. Lansdale’s grotesque humour is to the fore in this one. I’d like to see the Reverend given a collection of his own someday.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Things Get Ugly
• Lovecraft’s Monsters

Weekend links 746

Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

• The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

• Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

• Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

In Carcosa

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2

It’s been a while since I posted anything here which has been created solely for myself rather than a commission. This new piece is a portrait of the King in Yellow, the sinister regent whose supernatural presence pervades the four weird tales that open Robert W. Chambers story collection of the same name. The drawing is a big one, big enough to fill an A2 sheet which I was intending to make available in print form at Etsy. Not having looked at my Etsy shops for a while I didn’t know that they’d changed the shipping section to such an extent that I’d be having to guess what the shipping rates were for different regions. The printer I use has rough guidelines for setting shipping costs on external sales sites but not in the detail that Etsy requires. Prints of this picture may still be ordered direct from me, however. A2 or A3 giclée on Hahnemühle Pearl paper; send me an email if you’re interested.

To return to the artwork… Prior to this my sole drawing of Chambers’ King was for one of the illustrations in Lovecraft’s Monsters, but that depiction is only a reflection in a pub mirror. The new piece was the result of a number of impulses which coalesced after I’d finished work on the forthcoming Bumper Book of Magic. I’d been doing a lot of drawing for the book—there’s a 20-page section, for example, which is all full-page, colour illustrations—and I wanted to keep my hand in while working on the current round of design-related projects. I’d also been wanting to try a proper depiction of the King in Yellow for some time, the previous attempt being unsatisfying even when detached from its pub scene. I’d reworked the earlier drawing a while ago after a Chinese publisher asked for a couple of illustrations for a Chinese edition of Chambers’ book. They paid me for the drawing, and for an old painting which I’d titled The King in Yellow but I still don’t know if the pictures were used anywhere.

A promotional poster by Robert W. Chambers, circa 1895.

A more general impulse has been the urge to get back to doing things for myself when I have the time. Time is always the problem when you’re engaged in commercial work. This new piece has been worked on over a series of months, chipping away at weekends and the ends of the working day. I had the idea at first of following Chambers’ own drawing of the King fairly closely, wings and all, but I’ve never been sure whether the wings are meant to be real appendages or symbolic shapes like the halo that Chambers also draws. The same goes for the guttering torch which the figure holds upside down, and which was used as a decoration on the spine of the third printing of the book.

Among the other details, the Art Nouveau border is intended to connect the drawing to the 1890s, the decade in which the stories were written, but for the architecture I wanted something more severe and less earthbound. Most of the architectural design is my own but the arches are a variation on the vestibule that Peter Behrens designed for the German pavilion at the 1902 Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna in Turin. Behrens started out working in the Jugendstil mode but soon evolved a style of his own which prefigures the stylings of Art Deco. The inscription on the steps is Cassilda’s Song, a page of verse which opens the first story in Chambers’ book, The Repairer of Reputations. The words have been set in the Lingua ignota alphabet devised by Hildegard von Bingen. In the past I might have used the alphabet from The Voynich Manuscript but I like the appearance of Hildegard’s lettering even though I doubt she’d approve of this usage.

• The King in Yellow at Standard Ebooks

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eldritch idols
• In the Key of Yellow
• Lovecraft’s Monsters
• The Court of the Dragon
• The King in Yellow

Robert Lawson’s House of Usher

Spook Month starts tomorrow so it no longer feels too early to post this marvellous (undated) etching of the opening scene from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Robert Lawson (1892–1957) was an American author and illustrator whose early etchings were featured here some years ago after I turned up another wonderfully atmospheric piece depicting galleons rotting in the weed-tangled waste of the Sargasso Sea. I’m pleased that this gallery page which shows many more Lawson prints is still active over a decade later; they don’t have the Poe etching, however. A few copies may be found on the big auction sites but the best ones are blighted with a watermark.

Preparatory pencil drawing.

The title of Poe’s story refers to two separate falls, the dissolution of the Usher family line, and the physical collapse of the house in which Roderick and Madeline Usher pass their days, a calamity augured by the crack in the masonry which the narrator sees when he arrives at the shore of the black tarn. Lawson pays close attention to all the relevant details which Poe’s narrator is unable to regard as offering a sublime spectacle, something that film-makers and other illustrators (when they depict the house at all) don’t always honour:

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

Unless there’s more like this from Lawson the only other print of his that approaches horror is the Sargasso one; everything else is historical scenes or the light fantasy he continued to draw in his subsequent career as an illustrator of children’s books.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edmund Dulac’s illustrated Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928
• The Purloined Eidolon
• Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
• Mask of the Red Death, 1969
• Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
• Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
• The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
• Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
• Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
• Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
• Poe at 200
• The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Weekend links 745

Eros (1905) by Julius Kronberg.

• At the Internet Archive (for a change): All 15 episodes (with English subs) of Návštevníci (The Visitors, 1983/84), a Czech comedy TV serial about time travellers visiting the present day. Directed by Jindrich Polák, better known for the serious science fiction of Ikarie XB-1 and another time-travelling comedy, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea. The main interest for this viewer is the involvement of Jan Svankmajer who creates collage animation for the first episode while animating food and other objects in later episodes. This was the period when Svankmajer was mainly working as an effects man at the Barrandov Studios after the Communist authorities had put a stop to his film-making. Even with Svankmajer’s involvement I’m not sure I can endure 450 minutes of Czech wackiness but it’s good to keep finding these things.

• “…for the melomaniac who wasn’t in and around Bristol in the 1980s or 90s, the term [trip hop] simply opens the door to a whole universe of music that blurs the lines between so many styles in a way that is still compelling three decades on.” Vanessa Okoth-Obbo on the 30th anniversary of Protection by Massive Attack.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Moon’s Milk: Images By Jhonn Balance, compiled by Peter Christopherson & Andrew Lahman.

For some in Ireland, [The Outcasts] is a dim but impressive memory, glimpsed on late-night television during its only broadcast in 1984. The Outcasts over the decades became a piece of Irish cinema legend, less seen and more peppered into conversations revolving around obscure celluloid. The Irish Film Institute describes this film as “folk horror”, a phrase I find too liberally applied these days to just about anything featuring sticks, rocks, and goats or set in the countryside. The Outcasts does not necessarily strive for the ultimate unified effect of horror. Instead, this film is of a rarer breed, more akin to Penda’s Fen (1974) in its otherworldly ruminations. I’ve come to prefer the phrase “folk revelation” as perhaps a more accommodating description for these sorts of stories. Whatever the case, I hope you get to see this remarkable film.

Brian Showers discussing the contents of The Green Book 24, newly published by Swan River Press. The Outcasts has just been released on blu-ray by the BFI

• Still casting a spell: Broadcast’s 20 best songs – ranked!

• New music: Earthly Pleasures by Jill Fraser.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: John Carpenter‘s Day.

• RIP Maggie Smith.

• The Visitors (1981) by ABBA | Two Different Visitors (2003) by World Standard & Wechsel Garland | We Have Visitors (2010) by Pye Corner Audio