Kadath and Yog-Sothoth

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Last month I posted an updated version of the Yuggoth collage I created in 1994 for the Starry Wisdom story collection. I didn’t mention at the time that one purpose of the reworking was to freshen the piece for a more ambitious updating of my own Lovecraft book, The Haunter of the Dark, a volume which has now been through two different editions. I’m generally resistant to the temptation to tamper with old artwork, something which is always present when you’re using digital tools. I’d much rather create something new. In the case of The Haunter of the Dark, however, this has felt necessary when the plan for the new edition requires adding a quantity of my more recent Lovecraft-related pieces to the older art. The section of the book titled The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which deities and locations from the Cthulhu Mythos were mapped across the Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Most of the art for this section was done in 1999 when I’d only been using Photoshop for a couple of years. I was excited by the possibilities the software presented but some of the results look very typical of the period: lots of obvious filtering, and transparent layering of a kind I seldom do today. Since I finished reworking the Yuggoth collage (which happens to be a part of The Great Old Ones section) I’ve also reworked three more pieces: Nyarlathotep, Kadath and Yog-Sothoth. The latter two you see here, Nyarlathotep isn’t quite finished yet. My intention with the new versions has been to retain the idea, and in some cases the composition, of the original, while creating a new piece which avoids the shortcomings of the 1999 versions.

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Kadath, 2025.

Of the two, the original Kadath was a piece I was never happy with. I hadn’t thought very much about how to represent Kadath beyond having a cluster of buildings in a snowy setting. Lovecraft is evasive about the details but the place is essentially a fantastic palace (or maybe a city) in an icy wasteland. My original version collaged together bits of Indian, Thai and Cambodian architecture which created a definite “exotic” appearance but I was never happy about using identifiable temples in this way. The composition was also rather messy. The new piece also takes the collage route, only this time I’ve used architectural details from some of the pavilions built for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Several of the themed pavilions built for the exposition were fanciful and fantastic extrapolations of the Beaux-Arts style that don’t resemble anything built before or after. The buildings were also temporary constructions so they’re a lot less identifiable than buildings with a longer history.

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Yog-Sothoth, 2025.

As for Yog-Sothoth, this one follows the idea of the original but with better choice of elements and presentation. Once again, details are vague as to Yog-Sothoth’s appearance but I always come back to the description of an inter-dimensional mass of spheres or globes. The original illustration manifested these globes by swiping a variety of globular creatures from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, something that worked quite well but the composition could have been better. The new picture follows suit, only this time I’ve borrowed details from another Haeckel book, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria): Eine Monographie (1862), which is less well-known and with illustrations of many more globular or radial organisms than in the other volume.

For the remaining pieces I’m going to be drawing rather than collaging. The results will be posted here in due course.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

The Last Ritual

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Starting the new year with a new cover, and another from the plethora I was working on last year. Art Deco occultism is the theme this time, a satisfying combination since the rectilinear Deco style is a good match for the sigils and thaumaturgic diagrams you find in grimoires. The publisher is Aconyte Books, a new imprint launched a year ago to produce novels that complement the games created by parent company, Asmodee UK. Arkham Horror is an Asmodee game with a Lovecraftian theme, and S.A. Sidor’s novel is set in the game’s world:

Aspiring painter Alden Oakes is invited to join a mysterious art commune in Arkham: the New Colony. When celebrated Spanish surrealist Juan Hugo Balthazarr visits the colony, Alden and the other artists quickly fall under his charismatic spell. Balthazarr throws a string of decadent parties for Arkham’s social elite, conjuring arcane illusions which blur the boundaries between nightmare and reality. Only slowly does Alden come to suspect that Balthazarr’s mock rituals are intended to break through those walls and free what lies beyond. Alden must act, but it might already be too late to save himself, let alone Arkham (more).

The design of the cover combines the look of much Art Deco metalwork, especially bronze door and grille designs, with the kind of inlay you see on Deco furniture and the more lavish leatherbound books of the period. Part of the brief was to show a magic ritual taking place but I thought it wouldn’t do to make the figures look too realistic, hence the stylised poses; George Barbier rather than Weird Tales. Another request in the brief was to incorporate the Yog-Sothoth sigil from the Simon Necronomicon (the bronze circle under the title). I think I’ve said before that the symbols in the Simon Necronomicon tend to be used a lot today as though they’re the only ones available, even though the book is only one of several unofficial attempts to imagine the contents of Lovecraft’s notorious grimoire. I’ve always favoured the George Hay-edited Necronomicon so the symbol at the top of the cover is the Yog-Sothoth sigil from the Hay volume.

The Last Ritual will be published in August 2020.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 62

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A plate from Tales of the Amur by Dmitry Nagishkin, a 1975 edition illustrated by Gennady Pavlishin.

• The week in Surrealism: Opera of the surreal gives Dalí an encore: Yo, Dalí, a previously unperformed work by Xavier Benguerel, receives its premier in Madrid. Meanwhile Tate Liverpool’s summer exhibition, René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, is profiled here. “René Magritte has inspired more book covers than any other visual artist,” says James Hall.

If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines.

Lydia Davis on Rimbaud’s Wise Music.

Umberto Eco’s glimpse into the art of the novel | Return to Wonderland: an essay on Lewis Carroll’s world by Alberto Manguel | Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein: On How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish.

And then there’s the mystery of what happened to him for those four months in London when we have no trace of him. Rimbaud mentions Scarborough in “Promontory” and talks about “Hotels, the circular façades of the Royal and the Grand in Scarborough or Brooklyn.” Since there’s that missing period in England, people say he must have gone to Scarborough, and have even checked hotel registers for that period, but as far as I know nobody has ever found anything. Someone even checked railway and train schedules in order to pin him to this real place. I seem to remember a French writer admitting that Rimbaud was never in Brooklyn, but kind of wishfully thinking that he might have been. Which is very funny. “Rimbaud in Brooklyn”: there’s a project for someone.

A Refutation of Common Sense, John Ashberry on translating Rimbaud.

Robert Jeffrey posts a video of his nine-year-old self giving Madge a run for her money in 1991. As Boy Culture puts it: “Anyone who feebly clings to the belief that gay can be prayed away should take a look at this and give up already…” Amen.

• The mathematics of Yog-Sothoth: Richard Elwes on Exotic spheres, or why 4-dimensional space is a crazy place.

For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry by Christopher Smart (1722–1771).

Lesbian pulp fiction, 1935–1978 and Faber 20th century classics.

As The Crow Flies, a new album from The Advisory Circle.

New World Transparent Specimens by Iori Tomita.

79 versions of Gershon Kingley’s Popcorn.

Minor Man (1981) by The League of Gentlemen.