cover HPL ever got was by Virgil Finlay, illustrating the poem “Hallowe’en in a Suburb,” on the September 1952 issue. It’s not here, possibly because the original does not survive and reproduced magazine covers seem below par in this book, or possibly because the compilers didn’t think it among Finlay’s best. (I don’t either.) While a great deal of the significant Lovecraftian illustration of the past eight-four years is gathered here, no one could reasonably expect it all to be.
One of the things we conclude from this book is that the real blossoming of Lovecraftian graphic art came a generation and more after his death. There were few good illustrations in the pulp magazines, mostly by Finlay and Bok, then stirrings in the ’50s and ’60s, but nothing exploded until at least the ’70s. This coincides with the permeation of Lovecraft’s influence throughout the culture generally; as he became a major, worldwide figure, more and more competent and even brilliant artists were drawn to and inspired by his work. The result is a lot more than just a collection of paintings of rampaging calamari. It is an expression of the unique and powerful Lovecraftian vision, filtered through numerous other sensibilities. If you were to go back in time and tell Lovecraft that a genius Swiss surrealist painter named H.R. Giger, not yet born when Lovecraft was alive, would one day paint a Necronomicon of mindblowing paintings derived from his writings, the Sage of Providence would tell you (ever so politely) that you were gibbering mad. If you somehow managed to show him a copy of this book, he would conclude you were Nyarlathotep. In the 1930s, such a volume could have only come from another planet. Verily, the artwork that has grown out of the Lovecraftian tradition is like nothing that was available in Lovecraft’s time. Compared to Giger or Palencar or Bob Eggleton, the master assassinations of Andrew Brosnatch are exposed as the retarded scrawls that they are. Lovecraft himself would have been amazed, awed, and occasionally revolted by what he saw here. He himself greatly underestimated his own merit and importance; he regarded himself as a failure, like Keats, “a name written on water.” But this retrospective proves, if we needed any further proof, that Lovecraft’s legacy has instead risen like Great Cthulhu out of the depths, and will continue to go on and on, filling our dreams and turning them into nightmares.
GROWING UP POE: SPECIAL SECTION
Edgar Allan Poe would be celebrating his 200th birthday this year. He cast an epic shadow across American fiction; he inspired every last horror writer who came after him; and his fans founded this very ’zine. WEIRD TALES wondered if Poe still has the same impact today—so we asked a bevy of dark fantasists how much the Grandpa of the Gothic loomed in their tender years. The answer: a whole freakin’ lot.
LEAKY GRAVES, by Ramsey Shehadeh
I’m standing on a small stage in a big classroom in Bethesda, Maryland.
I’m 17. A sparse crowd of teenagers, sprawled on folding chairs, are staring up at me with expressions that range from desperate boredom to mild, grudging shock.
I’m screaming at them.
Specifically, I’m screaming this:
“O God! what COULD I do? I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!—no, no?”
Which is to say, I’m giving a dramatic reading of The Tell-Tale Heart. The beating of the old man’s heart, buried with the rest of him beneath the floorboards, has finally pushed his murderer over the edge, and he will soon tell the police what he’s done. The performance calls for some mad eye-rolling, a little rending of clothes, loads of unhinged raving, and the occasional vigorous spate of lectern-pounding.
“They heard!” I wail. “They suspected!—they KNEW!—they were making a mockery of my horror!” Portions of my little audience are certainly making a mockery of something, but it isn’t my horror. The unfortunate girl sitting in the front row, well within spittle range of my acting spasms, has her head in her hand, and is trembling slightly with something that is not, I assure myself, laughter.
This is speech class, and we’ve been asked to give a reading from our favorite stories. I didn’t have to think too hard about what I wanted to do. Back then, Poe was my man. I had a giant omnibus edition of his collected work at home, and spent a really unhealthy amount of time poring over its myriad unpleasantnesses. The poems I mostly left alone, because poetry was for girls, but the stories were a revelation: a cramped suffocating claustrophobic revelation, yes, but nevertheless an endlessly fascinating window into the troubling depths of the human mind.
I didn’t give it much thought, then, but it seems in retrospect like an odd thing for a youngish person to be obsessed with. The trajectory of early life is defiantly outwards, a symbolic extension of that first escape from the womb. We spend a lot of time trying to get away from the inside of our own heads. But Poe’s fiction represents the exact opposite of this impulse. It’s relentlessly, pathologically, inward, peopled with characters who are forever burying each other in dark, improvised graves.
Graves that are, all too often, insufficient to the task. Whether it’s a stubbornly beating heart or a bricked-up cat or the dank subterranean pricklings of conscience, Poe’s internments always seem to be springing inconvenient leaks. It doesn’t matter if you take these stories at face value, or see in them the dark atrocities of a mind at war with itself: the inescapable message here is that we can’t rid ourselves of the worst aspects of our nature. Because those things aren’t just a part of us—they are us. Even if we succeed in hiding them from the world, we can’t hide them from ourselves.
“But anything was better than this agony!” I scream—feeling, now, that I’m speaking for the whole class, whose amusement has lapsed back into sardonic ennui. My strategy of substituting volume for insight seems to be failing, at least partly because this material really isn’t suited to bellowing—its claustrophobic brand of sensationalism is an interior thing, a crawling-into-your-own-head thing. It’s a dark funhouse mirror, reflecting the worst parts of all who read it.
So why on earth does anyone read it? Our culture’s preference for escapist fiction is pretty well-documented (in box office returns, if nothing else) and much of Poe’s stuff is anything but escapism. So what’s going on?
My guess is that we actually want to look in that mirror, if only to make sure that we don’t recognize too much of ourselves in it. There’s a definite there-but-for-the-grace-of-sanity dimension to the thrill you get from reading these stories. Which is, I think, the hallmark of all good horror. I’m as much a fan of Cthulhu-esque pandimensional abomination fiction as they next guy, but for real scares there’s nothing like the specter of the mind betraying itself. Because the worst demons—maybe the only demons—are the ones that live inside our skin.
“Villains!” I shriek, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!” Thus ends my dramatic reading.
There’s a brief silence, followed by perfunctory applause, all limned in a giant nimbus of desperate relief. I step off the stage, and go back to my seat. I chewed up about all the available scenery, which is a kind of accomplishment, I suppose—but otherwise the whole thing was a pretty mortifying failure. No acting career was launched that day.
Which I’m okay with, in retrospect. You don’t want to get too close to Poe. I’m quite content to stand back and admire his dark genius from afar. It’s a nice place to visit, as they say. But I wouldn’t want to be buried there.
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Ramsey Shehadeh splits his time between writing stories and writing software. He blogs at doodleplex.com.
