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A LOVECRAFT RETROSPECTIVE: ARTISTS INSPIRED BY HPL, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

To begin with, Centipede Press’s A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HPL, released in 2008, is almost certainly the most physically extravagant book in the history of fantasy publishing. It is massive. The plainest version of it weighs twelve pounds—even without the slipcase. The trim size is 12 by 15.5 inches. With about 400 pages of glossy paper and a heavy cloth binding, it’s two inches thick. Color on almost every page. Brilliant reproduction. Numerous foldouts. This is more than a bug-crusher, if I may technical language here. (“Bug-crusher” is a useful term coined by Gardner Dozois to describe one of those gargantuan volumes—usually a bloated, unedited novel by a big-name author—which, if toppled over on its side without any additional pressure, will crush a bug.) This is more of an armadillo-crusher, sufficient to crack the chitinous hide of the half-insect, half-fungoid Mi-Go of Yuggoth if you should happen to be careless.

So don’t drop it. You can order a copy from Centipede Press, c/o Jerad Walters, at 2565 Teller Ct., Lakewood CO 80214, or you could check out Centipede’s Web site at www.centipedepress.com and gaze upon page after page of amazingly idealistic publications and proposals, although I suspect you won’t be able to order some of the more grandiose ones. While Centipede does offer the occasional paperback, most of its publications are priced in the hundreds of dollars. A Lovecraft Retrospective, for instance, sells for $395.00 in the clothbound and slipcased edition, and a whopping $2,485.00 for the ultra-limited, signed, leather, traycased, edition which comes with extra prints. The jaw drops.

Is it worth it? I have not seen the deluxe, twenty-four-hundred dollar edition, but with the “plain” $395.00 edition in front of me as I write this, the answer is, in a word, if you have that kind of money to spend, yes. I wouldn’t wait for the remainder or for the cheap paperback—this is the luxury item for the devoted Lovecraftian. Next to it, a Cthulhu cult statue before which you may perform unspeakable rites is just a trinket. (Centipede offers one of those too.)

You can see from what he publishes that Jerad Walters really enjoys a fine book. Every detail matters; he insists on the finest of everything.

To describe the contents of A Lovecraft Retrospective a little more closely: There’s a preface by Stuart Gordon, who made the Reanimator films; an introduction by Harlan Ellison; an afterword by Thomas Ligotti; and artist profiles and commentary by genre experts like Stefan Dziemianowicz and Jane Frank as well as several of the artists themselves. Robert M. Price, one of the great Lovecraft scholars, contributes an essay on the various hoax versions of The Necronomicon—with graphics, of course. There is a section on “Early Art,” which covers Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok, Lee Brown Coye, Frank Utpatel, EC Comics, and Richard Taylor. (If this last name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, he’s otherwise mainstream artist who did some wonderful covers for Arkham House in the ’50s and early ’60s, for The Horror from the Hills, The Trail of Cthulhu, The Shuttered Room, etc.) Tucked in just in front of the Early Art section is a sampling of even earlier illustrations to Lovecraft stories from pulp magazines and 1940s paperbacks, all of it printed to a degree of fineness which would have amazed and dazzled the original artists. Here we get the best reproduction ever of the first genuinely great Lovecraftian painting, the June 1936 Astounding Stories cover by Howard V. Brown for “The Shadow Out of Time,” depicting the scholar-aliens of the Great Race in their library of 150 million years ago, with a human figure placed among them for scale. On the facing page is Brown’s “At the Mountains of Madness” cover, also from Astounding, but since the original painting may no longer be extant, this is shot from a copy of the magazine itself, and no doubt touched up with Photoshop to get rid of any creases. This is probably the best rendition we will ever see of that painting, either, which shows two hapless explorers pursued by a shoggoth that looks like green mucus.

We move beyond this to “Middle” and “Modern” art, with page after page of sumptuous reproductions, both color and black-and-white, of Bernie Wrightson, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, H.R. Giger (a generous selection from his Necronomicon), Stephen Fabian, Michael Whelan, Ian Miller, Allen Koszowski, Les Edwards, Randy Broecker, J.K. Potter, Dave Carson, John Jude Palencar, Bob Eggleton, and many more..

That’s a lot of Lovecraft art. It’s like a massive gallery show, giving the complete history of the development of Lovecraftian illustration and Lovecraft-influenced art. Is all of it great art? As Harlan Ellison points out in his introduction, no. The early Avon cover for The Lurking Fear is very close to what Harlan says it is: “apparently rendered by an exceedingly ham-fisted and talentless simian, using only its tail and hind-paws.” The Andrew Brosnatch illustrations, from Weird Tales in the 1920s, also range from mediocre to awful, his header for “The Music of Erich Zann” being perhaps the single most uninspired piece of fantasy art in the life-cycle of the universe. It is easy to appreciate why fans of the period referred to Brosnatch as “the master assassin” for his ability to completely destroy the point of any story through one of his illustrations. But there are only a couple of these, and they are undeniably of historical importance. Most of the book is simply breathtaking. The range is enormous, from the starkly realistic to the wildly dreamlike and surreal, plus one superbly executed joke, Gahan Wilson’s famous cartoon from Playboy showing Wilbur Whateley as a flasher.

There is much which readers of the more recent Weird Tales will recognize, artists who have appeared in the magazine since its revival in 1987: Page after page of finely-rendered Allen Koszowski black & whites including his classic horror feature of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Black-and-white and color work from Stephen Fabian (although from Whispers, not from Weird Tales). A couple Jason Van Hollanders. Jeff Remmer’s “Dagon” cover from issue #321. And, outstanding in a book which contains quite a few portraits of the Big Squid Guy, two splendid Cthulhu paintings by Bob Eggleton: one from Weird Tales #305, one from the first issue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror.

Lovecraft’s own illustrative relationship with Weird Tales is problematic. His first stories, published during the Edwin Baird editorship, 1923-24, were given absolutely wretched illustrations. But then, so was everything else. It’s a sad fact, largely concealed over the years by the rarity and expense of surviving copies, since gradually revealed by facsimile reprints of same—now, from Girasol Collectibles, you can buy reprints at $35 apiece of issues that would otherwise cost you thousands of dollars—that in its first year and a half, Weird Tales was an astonishingly ugly, ill-designed magazine, and not very well edited either. The literary quality soared when Farnsworth Wright took over in late 1924, but the artwork did not improve nearly as rapidly. While some of Hugh Rankin’s charcoal drawings must have seemed effectively atmospheric at the time, the ones we see here, such as that for “The Dunwich Horror,” still come off as marginally promising amateur work, particularly in the context of a book like A Lovecraft Retrospective. The magazine did not consistently feature competent art until the mid-1930s, and, apart from a couple J. Allen St. John covers, nothing that could be described as really outstanding until the advent of Virgil Finlay in 1936. Up to that time, by far the best Lovecraft art published anywhere was the two covers for HPL’s two appearances in Astounding.

Curiously, for all he was very popular among Weird Tales readers at the time, Lovecraft was never given a cover in his lifetime. This may well be because the 1930s’ idea of what sold pulp magazines had to do with scantily-clad ladies in jeopardy or bondage, and Lovecraft stories notably lacked these elements—quite unlike those of, say, Robert E. Howard, who was not above deliberately writing a lesbian whipping scene into a Conan story in order to capture the cover. The prim and puritanical Gent from Providence would never so lower himself. But as a result, the original, pulp Weird Tales is not all that fully represented in A Lovecraft Retrospective. There is only one cover, not a very good one, showing two Deep Ones from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; this was used only on the Canadian edition of WT in 1942. The only other 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.