Lovecraft’s Brood

It’s that man again, or some of his progeny, infecting the world with their nightmares. Lovecraft’s Brood is a story collection edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of follow-up to Lovecraft’s Monsters, although the new book is a more expansive take on the Lovecraftian weird tale. As with the earlier collection, I designed and illustrated this one throughout. The illustrations were more of a challenge this time since the stories weren’t always focused on explicitly physical threats; or if they were, the threats remained either unseen or inexplicable. That can be good sometimes—there’s a tendency in horror illustration to always go for monster portraits or spoilerish scenes from the end of the story—but it doesn’t make the artist’s task an easy one. For a few of the pictures I used a minor detail; in the case of Mister Ainsley, for example, there’s a mention of taxidermy experiments which is what I chose to focus on. What “Mister Ainsley” looks like (or actually is) is never described as…