HP Lovecraft – { feuilleton }

Intégrale Howard Phillips Lovecraft

More Lovecraft book covers. Blame the season for this although depictions of Lovecraft’s cosmos have been occupying my thoughts for a while now, as I explain below.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the weird-fiction collections that Mnémos had been publishing in France, all of which used for their cover art paintings by the Polish “anti-symbolist” Zdzislaw Beksinski. I like Beksinski’s paintings very much, and thought they were a good match for most of the covers that Mnémos had produced, being sufficiently weird and evocative without being directly illustrative. (The sole exception was the peculiar dog-like creature on the cover of a Frank Belknap Long collection, The Hounds of Tindalos. Long’s “hounds” are malevolent extra-dimensional entities whose name shouldn’t be taken literally.) I mentioned that Mnémos had also announced a seven-volume collection of HP Lovecraft’s fiction and non-fiction, but at the time of writing there were no pictures of the books available, and I’d forgotten all about the collection until a few days ago. All the books in the set, which are translated by David Camus, have since been reprinted as standalone volumes.

Intégrale Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a little deceptive as a title for a Lovecraft collection when the word “intégrale” is often applied to complete editions of something. The Mnémos set looks like it contains all of the fiction in the first few volumes plus a quantity of essays, but Lovecraft famously wrote more letters than he did stories; the letters here are a small selection inside volume 6. In addition to the books, the collection also contains a map of the Dreamlands, together with cards and bookmarks embellished with details from Beksinski’s paintings.

As with the Mnémos covers for Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith, you could use many different Beksinski paintings for these editions, all of which would work to some degree. Even if some of them seem mismatched they offer a change of direction away from those varieties of fantasy art which have become very mannered in recent years when applied to weird fiction in general and Lovecraft’s stories in particular. This is partly a result of over-production: the huge success of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game drove a demand for more and more Lovecraftian artwork, with the result that clichés emerged sooner than they would have done if the available imagery was limited to book illustrations and comic strips. I’ve contributed to the situation as much as most although I’ve also kept trying to find directions away from the stereotypes; my Cthulhoid picture was one such attempt even it still leans on the tentacular. I’ve been thinking recently of following the King in Yellow portrait with more poster-size art that explores other possibilities in this area. I’d encourage other artists to do the same when they can (commercial constraints often force your hand). Beksinski’s paintings show one route out of the mannerist cul-de-sac.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The fantastic art archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beksinski on film
• Beksinski at Mnémos

Richard Taylor’s Lovecraftiana

The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) by August Derleth.

To look at any of the cartoons drawn for the New Yorker by Richard Taylor (1902–1970) you wouldn’t suspect that the Canadian artist had spent a few years at the end of the 1950s creating a handful of book covers for Arkham House. I’ve never read much about the history of August Derleth’s publishing endeavours so I can’t say how Taylor came to be offered this work. An unlikely choice he may have been but he did a better job with his five covers than many of the artists in the 60s and 70 who attempted to illustrate the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft, Derleth and co. The hand-drawn titles and monochrome colours make the quintet an attractive series within the Arkham House catalogue as a whole.

The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959) edited by August Derleth.

A collection of Lovecraft’s fiction fragments, some of which have been expanded by Derleth. Also remembrances of the writer by Lovecraft’s friends, plus essays and other material.

Dreams and Fancies (1962) by HP Lovecraft.

A cover I’ve known for years as a result of its being featured in that cult volume of mine, The Fantasy Book by Franz Rottensteiner. (Previously.) I used to wonder about the contents of this book, Dreams and Fancies being an unfamiliar title that was absent from the paperback reprints of Lovecraft’s fiction. The title piece is another Derleth fabulation, a collage of Lovecraft’s transcribed dreams as they were recounted in letters to various friends. This is followed by some of the short fiction and poetry that reworked these dreams. The collection ends with the aeon-spanning novella, The Shadow Out of Time, which Tayor has taken as his subject for the cover art.

The Trail of Cthulhu (1962) by August Derleth.

The Horror from the Hills (1963) by Frank Belknap Long.

Note: I’m a little sceptical that the Richard Taylor responsible for these covers is the same one who was drawing cartoons for the New Yorker. The only source for this is isfdb.org, a site whose artist attributions are sometimes erroneous. If anyone can confirm or deny the accuracy of this information then please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The Lovecraft archive

The Return of the Sorcerer

The story’s first appearance in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931. No illustrator credited.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery is a series I’d have happily watched if one of the UK channels had rebroadcast it in the 1980s, the way that Channel 4 did with the original Twilight Zone. This weekend I watched for the first time the opening episode of Night Gallery‘s third and final season, an adaptation by Halsted Welles of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Smith is a writer whose works are still mostly neglected by film and television but he was in good company in Night Gallery, a series which featured adaptations of stories by a number of fellow Weird Tales writers including HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. The story is one of Smith’s modern-day horror tales in which a poverty-stricken translator is offered a lucrative position at an old and sinister house, a place where a fearful occultist requires translations of an ancient volume. The Arabic text turns out to be passages from an early edition of everybody’s favourite forbidden tome, the Necronomicon, and Smith’s story, which was published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in 1931, is the first outside Lovecraft’s own to mention the book, thus beginning the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos by other hands.

The Night Gallery adaptation was broadcast in 1972. Unlike the first two seasons, where episodes ran for an hour, the third season reduced the running time to under 30 minutes which doesn’t give director Jeannot Szwarc (credited as Jean Szwarc) any time to build up the suspense, if he was capable of such a thing. If you’ve ever seen any of Swarc’s feature films you know not to raise your expectations. As a compensation for the absense of atmosphere we get some striking set designs and a decent cast. The fearful magus, John Carnby, is played by Vincent Price, encountering the Necronomicon for the second time in his career after he’d earlier used the book to summon an eldritch monstrosity in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. Bill Bixby plays the wary translator, while Patricia Sterling is Carnby’s toad-loving partner in Satanism, an addition to the story by Halstead Welles, whose presence adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. The episode could never be considered a lost classic but I enjoy seeing stories by the Weird Tales writers making their first infiltrations into the wider culture. This one is worth watching for Vincent Price and the magical decor alone. I think I ought to go looking for more Night Gallery episodes.

More of those Cocteau hands-through-the-wall. Bixby’s character doesn’t seem very perturbed that the scarlet hall is filled with mysterious vapours.

Mystical decor: on the left, Frieda Harris’s Ace of Discs from the Thoth Tarot deck; on the right, The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

Mystical/Satanic decor: the painting in the background is Frieda Harris’s Ace of Cups from the Thoth Tarot deck.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• Illustrating Zothique
• The Plutonian Drug
• More trip texts
• Yuggoth details
• The Garden of Adompha
• The City of the Singing Flame
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

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

Existence no longer exists

Yesterday was HP Lovecraft’s birthday so here’s some cosmic horror of a sort. It’s debatable whether a narrative can still be classed as horror when the constituent elements are rarified and abstracted to this degree…maybe weird SF would be better? Or theory fiction in the form of 5–10 minute YouTube videos? So far there are four of these things credited to “Unorthodox Kitten”, the first one being a kind of introductory chapter which includes algebra in its explication; by the time we reach the fourth chapter we’re told that “Math never existed” although the links on some of the notes take you to papers which contain copious equations, including an argument that returns us to the first video…

What does it all mean? My introduction to the quartet was via Scotto Moore’s newsletter in which Moore suggests that the videos may be a part of some ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. One for recreational mathematicians or quantum physicists, no doubt. This is certainly possible given the links to Fermat’s Library, but I’m happy to take the things as they are, mysterious fragments freighted with dire implication. I imagine Eugene Thacker would approve.

Infinity, Singularity and The Rapture (10:10)

The OHR EIN SOF
The painters, who are the product of a new cycle of fragmentation, despite their almost divine ability to paint everything at will, are merely lifeless hypothetical concepts compared to their predecessors from the previous cycle. These predecessors perceive them as weeds that must be eliminated, not out of fear, but as a principle to maintain nonexistential silence.
the war of the iterative gODS has begun.
the incomplete jump occurred.
IT must be stopped, iT can’t be stopped,
only the INFINITE filling all existence,
there is only the iNFINITE filling all canvas,
artificial lethal sEA with an infinite IRON,
trying to see the INFINITE through yOu,
no light, just colors.
iT came but YOU were not here when iT arrived,
iT gracefully retreats, yet the essence remains unchanged.
Can existence exist without nonexistence?
Are yOU afraid of non-existence, now? :)

Everything is happening at the same time (5:44)

the CYCLE, THEIR god. IT wasn’t there, but Theirs TOOL Existence is the wonderful place beyond oUR reach as a portrait of everything possible. yet, yOU were given no colors and yOU still were able to paint a masterpiece of non-existence. YOU don’t have to :)

The External Reality of Finiteness (4:39)

the battle of the gODS lasted a fraction of an instant.
They did not even realize They no longer existed.
Their cREATION was Their doom, the cREATOR’s doom.
as just a mere painting of the Infinite from the bLIND nonexistent view of iTS.
Nothing is out of oUR reach.
The Physical Impossibility of Non-existence in the Existence of something Existing.
Before the jump, the celebration orbs were sent, now working as cREATOR’S last echoes.
the luxury of the future Majority to not exist at all.

Existence no longer exists (10:02)

The shells of long-abandoned artificial stars, held together by autonomous anti-expansionary devices, were destined to fade into obscurity along with the rest of the universe. It was only a matter of time before the corpse of the Laniakea supercluster followed suit to make space for a new cYCLE.
gOds are dead, the cYCLE is broken. theY tried to be iT.
theY wanted to free themselves from their finite torture.
finding the horrifying truth of their existence with a forcefully finite painted INFINITY of iterations.
tHEY created it to find the solution, theY did. you just haven’t gotten to that point yet.
tHEY are now infinite INFINITY, with a finite original goal of theirS.
with noonE to see iTS infinite torture They made for iT in iTS infinite portrait of inlimitation.
forever alone in an instant of ITS, IT paints and paints, not knowing the nonexistent palette of iT is just another iteration of IT in an infinite fractal of instantless existence with an end as finite as infinity.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• From Beyond
• Eco calls on Cthulhu