2021

STEPHEN JONES. The Art of Pulp Horror. Colchester, UK: Applause Books, 2020. 256 pp. $40.00 hc. ISBN: 978-1-5400-3297-3.

The artists of pulp horror could do it all.

The bodice grabbing bony spectre on the front boards of this book was originally painted by Norman Saunders for the comic book Unknown World #1 (1952, Fawcett). Saunders is now best remembered for the infamously gory Mars Attacks! (1962) bubblegum card series. At the same time Junior was playing with these, Dad was ogling Saunders’ covers for “men’s sweat” magazines such as Man’s Story. “Pulp” then does not just refer to the popular early 20^th-century publications printed on coarse cheap paper that gradually yellowed, turned brittle and acquired a sharp acrid smell, albeit one beloved by us collectors. Rather, it is a whole coarse aesthetic, somewhat yellowed in acceptability to some modern tastes, that perhaps always repulsed if not shocked its contemporaries. This volume, while seeming to initially lack focus, demonstrates this lineage of lo-brow, examining pulp through all media, from books to comics, from broadsides and posters to paintings and back again. Starting with The Art of Horror (2015), this third in a series of bumper art books by Stephen Jones might at first look to be table leavings of those previous but is instead a full meal in itself.

A strength of this collection is in its telling of this history from a UK perspective. Sarah Cleary starts by making the point that most editions of gothic novels preceding the advent of The Penny Dreadful in the 19^th-century were too expensive and unattainable for the average punter, relegating shilling shockers to chapbook formats. This popular press then was already slated for the cheap seats. Boys’ weeklies such as The Magnet (1908-1940) with Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars’ chums appeared, as well as minor academies established by the likes of Edwy Searles Brooks featuring “ Detective-turned-housemaster Nelson Lee, his assistant Nipper and the schoolboys of St. Frank’s.” More grown up fare was offered in periodicals such as The Passing Show (1922-1939) and Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story (1923-1927) as well as hardback anthologies such as The Creeps Library Series (1932-1937) edited by Charles Birkin.

Pulp stateside boasted artists such as Robert A. Graef, responsible for covers of The Argosy (the Frank Munsey publication starting in 1882) showcasing fantasies by A. Merritt and Ray Cummings. A new discovery for this reviewer was the superb linework of John Richard Flanagan who started as a “stand-in” for that Australian mage Norman Lindsay. Flanagan went on to delineate the diabolisms of Fu Manchu, Wu Fang, Yen Sin, et al. As to that, there are six pages in this collection exhibiting that xenophobic trope known as “The Yellow Peril” inherent to the period.

There is an overflow of imagery that could have been in Jones’ last book The Art of Horror Movies (2017). Paper ephemera is included from lost films such as the 1933 RKO version of The Monkey’s Paw and, more famously, the 1926 Lon Chaney Sr. vehicle London After Midnight. An outstanding 2018 painting by Bob Eggleton channels Chaney’s Man in The Beaver Hat, chromatically capturing that face in all its bug-eyed sawtooth slaver. Gregory William Mank contributes a foreword to the section on “Poverty Row” studios such as Monogram, which featured George Zucco, Glenn Strange and recurring casts giving comfort in cliches of chills. As in the previous volumes, other contemporary artists offer tribute to these classic and not so classic horrors. Canadian illustrator Sara Deck designs a funereal poster for Val Lewton’s 1943 film The Seventh Victim. Rue Morgue alumni Graham Humphries is also amply represented with a 2018 and 2019 diptych(?) of the film ‘set’ Oakley Court which has been used many times, from Hammer’s The Reptile (1966) to Richard O’ Brien’s Rocky Horror (1975). Finally, there is the reproduction of a 1965 British quad poster for the American International Lovecraft adaptations of Monster of Terror (Die, Monster Die!) and The Haunted Palace as a double bill—oh those lucky cinephiles!

Paperback cover art ranges from (the sadly recently deceased) Rowena Morrill’s surreal Dunwich Horror (1978, Jove), complete with lizard skeleton yo-yo, to Hector Garrido’s depiction of John Christopher’s The Little People (1965, Avon), which can best be described as Machen if adapted for a men’s sweat magazine. Eric Stanton’s ‘sleaze’ paperback covers clearly show the influences, if not the outright collaboration, of his studio mate, Steve Ditko. Toiling in these same pits of publishing, African American artist Bill Alexander is represented by covers for Myron Fass Eerie Publications’ horror comic reprint magazines. His lurid ‘fun’ house styling mirrors that currently employed by California Bay Area painter Skinner. Other original ‘comic’ art by Lee Elias and Warren Kremer for the Harvey horror titles of the 1950s in some instances serve even more crispy grue beyond that of the legendary EC line.

Coda

On my 4^th grade schoolyard, I traded doubles of the 1966 Topps bubble gum card series for Batman. By comparison to the ‘camp’ TV show of the same time, there was more ‘sweat’ in the hairbreadth escapes of Gotham’s Finest painted on these than under the makeup on Cesar’s Romero’s moustache. Norman Saunders was again responsible. I can still taste those powdery pink brittle tablets that were enclosed in those card’s wrappers. Proust can keep his madeleines—these will always remain my Communion Wafers to this lineage of Lo-Brow Kulture.

R. MURRAY GILCHRIST. I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales. Edited by Daniel Pietersen. London: British Library, 2021. 320 pp. £8.99 tpb. ISBN: 978-0-7123-5400-4.

1.

    “I walked in pain, as though giant spiders had woven about my body.  On the terrace strange beasts—dogs and pigs with human limbs—tore ravenously at something that lay beside the balustrade…the monsters dispersed hurriedly among the dropping blossoms of the pleasaunce, and where they had swarmed I saw naught but a steaming sanguine pool…”

Not in Kadath, nor a Hodgsonian nightmare, we are in equally dark dreamlands here.

Tragical romances as stylistically rich as those of Robert Murray Gilchrist (1867-1917), like old acquaintances, ought not be forgot and always brought to print. The British Library Tales of The Weird series and Dead Reckonings contributor Daniel Pietersen raise a cup of kindness to share with us all.

In 1975, Hugh Lamb’s Terror by Gaslight reprinted Gilchrist’s “The Basilisk”. Other selections followed in further anthologies by Lamb. Collections of the writer unfortunately have been out of print for more than a decade. A Night on the Moor, the Wordsworth paperback edition and the earlier Ash-Tree Press hardcover, The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread (2003), contained the bulk of the material in this present volume. The latter’s cover by Ash-Tree stalwart Paul Lowe is gorgeous (well, to those of us with predilection for venomous mythopoeic taxonomies) but somewhat misleading to its contents overall. Lowe’s painting for Frances Oliver’s Dancing On Air (Ash-Tree Press, 2004) could rather more accurately represent one of Gilchrist’s tales for example.

Two women artists lend a truer feel to this current imprint that will hopefully have a lengthier availability. I Am Stone cover artist Sandra Gómez also contributes a frontispiece sharing a time-warped synchronicity with the plate “St. George” by the occult artist W. T. Horton (The Book of Images, 1898). Photography by Fay Godwin introduces each section of the tales, perfectly documenting the genius loci of Gilchrist’s moody Peak District. In one case, there is evidence of what appears to be a basilisk skeleton…

2.

Among more than a half dozen scholarly essays, Dan has written about RMG in this journal before: “Bestarred with Fainting Flowers: Symbolism and Myth in the Work of R. Murray Gilchrist” (DR #21) and “I No longer Live in This House: The Liminality of Undeath in the Works of R. Murray Gilchrist” (DR #26).
Pietersen postulates that Gilchrist is a liminal writer, that is, his work falls through the cracks between Gothic, Decadent and Weird genres. It would be a mistake to adhere to the writings of the author any of these labels, albeit a majority of the stories here are Gothic in tone. The Decadent category, let alone Weird, can only truly apply to a handful of Gilchrist’s more ornate fictions, including the aforementioned “Basilisk” and “The Crimson Weaver”. One might classify some other stories as Folk Horror, such as “The Panicle” and the greatest revelation in this volume, “My Friend”. All labels aside, his writing sets an alluring bejeweled snare for the reader’s interest despite the frameworks of melodrama in these narratives. The Spectator said of Gilchrist’s writing in his first novel Passion and Plaything (1890) that it was “and unpleasant book containing far too much in the way of sensuous description”. We will always assent to more of that, please. Several stories of his do have abrupt endings (“The Stone Dragon”), sometimes not quite clear in their resolution à la Frank Stockton.

In some of his later writing, however, Gilchrist developed a clearer, more direct style which does add to the telling. The tragic “The Madness of Betty Hooton” and the darkly comic “Sir Toby’s Wife” (which Pietersen dug up for this collection from The British Library vaults) are examples. The giggling sexton in the second tale could have been a role for that splendid ham barnstormer of the last century, Tod Slaughter.

Pietersen ascribes greater agency to Gilchrist’s female characters as opposed to the ofttimes weak, passive male narrators. But this may be just wishful thinking. Female antagonists such as “The Crimson Weaver” fall easily into the Fin de Siècle trope of La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

   “Stooping, with sidelong motions of the head, she approached: bringing with her the smell of such an incense as when amidst Eastern herbs burns the corpse…She was perfect as the Diana, but her skin was deathly white…”

The protagonist Marina in “The Basilisk” is no less objectified:

   “Her beauty… was pale and reposeful, the loveliness of a marble image… I had found her laden with flaming tendrils in the thinned woods of my heritage. A very Dryad, robed in grass colour, she was chanting to the sylvan deities. The invisible web took me, and I became her slave.”

3.

Gilchrist wrote twenty-two novels, six short story collections and four regional guidebooks. He must have been somewhat successful, but who was he writing for? Robert was something of a country dandy, who periodically appeared in his local parish wearing a cassock and girdle (predating Montague Summers stylistically). Existing photos of him show a sweaty tousle-headed Scot with physiognomy of a Highland Jean Lorrain, on closer inspection a sly gleam betrayed in the eye of the author posing for Decadent.

Gilchrist’s apprenticeship to the cutlery business until he was twenty-one might have been where he met George Alfred Garfill, who worked in his own family’s scythe works. The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances was dedicated to Garfill who would be Robert’s companion from 1895 until his death.

“My Friend” might be the one story especially written for George. And himself:

   “…the friend I had won (the first and the last) loved me so dearly that he would be unhappy unless his hand were clasping mine…”

Parts of this story reads like actual biographical entry:

   “Circumstances had bound him to a profession that chafed his very core: but Nature had given him aspirations, and miraged him a future as great (if as worthless) as my own. How daring I grew! Farther and farther I had ventured down the heretical abyss”

The narrator and his friend journey to the countryside and come to a set of Druid stones. What follows is—a meditation? Or is it a flashback to an ancestral memory?

   “A sacrificial hymn was beginning at the Circle—a naked and bleeding victim was bound to the altar…the long bearded priests shook their white robes—the sharp knife glittered—and my own stiletto waxed heavy, as it strove to draw me downwards…Again the skies opened, but with only a momentary gleam; one glance of the Almighty Eye. But it was not so swift as
to prevent me from seeing the face of the Sacrifice.”

“My Friend” is worth the cost of admission to this ceremony and this volume alone.

4.

Pietersen states that there are a mere eight copies of Gilchrist’s novel The Labyrinth (1902) on public loan to the entire world. The Spectator review of it upon release as “a book with an atmosphere of nightmare” whets one’s interest. Friend and critic, Arnold Bennett said:

   “Murray Gilchrist’s best work lies in his short stories, some of which are merely and quite simply perfect…[but] The Labyrinth…is astounding. The Labyrinth is like a rich, mellow naïve eighteenth century tapestry; whenever I think of it, I think of it as the one truly original modern English novel…Perhaps in about twenty years it will be the correct thing to have read him.” [“Books and Persons”, The New Age, 21 March 1908, p.412]

A humble plea then.

After immersing ourselves in the language (A fourteen page “Notes on the text” with glossary is included) and revelations of I Am Stone, we need a reprint now of this—possibly tragic? romance of The House of The Eleven Staircases. With, of course, no one less than Daniel Pietersen at the helm editorially, brought to print by some canny independent publisher…

After more than one hundred years it would be the correct thing.

JON B. COOKE and RONALD E. TURNER. Slow Death Zero. San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2020. 128 pp. $24.95 tpb. ISBN: 978-0-86719-883-6.

I called the doctor
Up in the morning
I had a fever
It was a warning
She said “There’s nothing I can prescribe
To keep your raunchy bag of bones alive”
I got some money left for one more shot
She said “God bless you” I said “Thanks a lot”
It’s a slow, slow death.

–The Flaming Groovies, “Slow Death” (1972)

San Francisco’s proto-punks The ‘Groovies’ lyrics refer to an unrepentant addiction. It was a warning THEN. If you’ve smelled the Purple Haze in the skies from out-of-control wildfires or had a Hard Rain fall by the feet in the NOW of 2021, it could also refer to humanity’s current self-injected climate catastrophe(s).

As a Hippocampus reader why should YOU be interested?

Contributors Richard Corben, Cody Goodfellow, Mike Dubisch, Skinner, and initiator of this all-new 50th Anniversary collection, Thee Jon B. Cooke have all done their servitude in the Lovecraftian art and literary mines. But there’s a different grade of ore here.

Cooke pens a six-page history of Slow Death which was inaugurated two years before that Flaming Groovies single—it would be reason to pick up this anthology alone. As he has done with in-depth articles for Comic Book Artist (TwoMorrows Publishing), Jon serves up a thorough look at the underground comic title, What It Is and How It Came To Be, with every cover of the original run reproduced. Gary Arlington, who started the San Francisco Comic Book Company which published it had a vision: “My dream is for E. C. Comics [The groundbreaking 1950s publishers of Weird Science, Two-Fisted Tales, among other titles] to return with the better underground cartoonists.” Ron Turner was another fan. Drew Friedman contributes an inside front cover portrait of “Baba” Ron, The Once and Future founder and Last Gasp guru and
this publication’s co-editor. Ken Meyer’s Jr.’s vignette of Cooke in Wally Wood-ish space
gear should be a tee shirt design for those of us fans (some since JBC’s seminal ’90s fanzine Tekeli-li!). Make it so.

From the 30 artists and accompanying 6 writers here are a few highlights then, reflecting toxic rainbows:

William Stout’s art will always get this writer’s attention. A great cover showcasing his rich detailed style is followed by a 7-page piece that is more optimistic than most of its company called “Antarctica”. He states

“The world’s greatest photographers all noted that it was impossible to capture the color
of the continent because of color photography’s chemical limitations…as an artist, I

don’t have that limitation—whatever colors I see I can put down onto paper!”

The Colour Out of Antarctica, indeed. Stout had done three covers in a row for the original run of Slow Death, The “Two-Fisted” homage on #8’s Greenpeace Issue being a standout and predecessor to this current collection.

Richard Corben is responsible for possibly the best comic—excuse me—graphic narrative adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft ever done, “The Rats In The Walls” (Skull #5, 1972). One of the last pieces done before his recent passing “Garbage Man” is included here, in contrast to Stout’s storyline being one of the bleakest. “With a nod & thanks to Richard Corben & Howie” (“When Howie Made It In The Real World”, Slow Death #2, 1972), Jon Cooke notes in the Errol McCarthy illustrated tale “Last Chance Gas” that he penned. It has a happy(?) if not righteous ending for its two protagonists.

Cody Goodfellow and Mike Dubisch (Black Velvet Cthulhu) team up for two offerings, “Flotsam & Jetsam” and “Terminal Colony”. Both are scathing indictments of those who become part of the solution only to become a bigger problem—Spoiler: The cancer on the Earth may be US. Goodfellow in particular has proven a true discerning conscience for the enlightened Weird Community but is no Cody Comelately. We are lucky to have him visit this planet.

A Wizard, A True Star, the Bay Area’s Skinner delivers a Panter-esque double page spread of E. C.-like aliens finding our world already trashed: “But hey! At least the flooding makes for some good tubin’ across town!” says greeter Baba Ron trying to scam some beers.

Brooklyn’s Danny Hellman (who I first encountered by covers done for the fanzine Brutarian) ends the book with a faux comic book cover for The Fighting Hippie #18, with Ron Turner breaking that 4th wall to save penguin hugger Greta Thunberg (to whom this whole book is dedicated) from the evil machinations of John D. Rockefeller. There is a suggestion by Jon Cooke of future issues beyond this celebratory revival.

If we make it that long of course before our last gasp.

Slow death…eat my mind away
Slow death…turn my guts to clay
Slow death
Yeah, yeah.

The joey Zone

ROY V. HUNT. A Retrospective. Edited by David and Daniel Ritter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: First Fandom Experience, 2021. 144 pp. $45.00 tpb. ISBN: 978-1-7332964-6-5.

1.

I gave posthumous thanks to Leah Bodine Drake in my review of her recent Hippocampus omnibus collection two issues ago of this journal. She made me aware of Denver, Colorado’s Roy Vernon Hunt (1914-1986) through her review of fellow Denver Scientifiction fan, writer, and publisher Stanley Mullen’s Moonfoam and Sorceries (Gorgon Press, 1948). Happily, thanks to David and Daniel Ritter and First Fandom Experience (“FFE”) (firstfandomexperience.org) gratitude may be extended while contemporaneous.

This organization is doing important research, giving Credit Where Due to all of us fans, Past, Present and Future, from nascent talents cultivating art or writing up to Dirty Old Pros. Although decrying this collection of Hunt’s as “not fully comprehensive”, one is hard put to imagine any volume possibly more engaging or worthy of being on a shelf next to similar collections of Bok or Finlay.

The reproductions in this artist’s monograph are impeccable, from the restoration of faint empurpled mimeographed fanzines to white gouache stipple (Voice of the Imagi-Nation and Fantasy Advertiser covers). There is a ten-page section describing the various technologies used to produce early fanzines, from offset lithography down to hectography, while a four-page chronological index of work featuring Hunt’s art rounds out the text.

2.

At the age of 26, Roy Hunt was married with two daughters. So it was a more seasoned individual who debuted as an artist and writer in this period of Science Fiction’s First Fandom, putting out The Alchemist, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1940). It featured his review of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others. One might say it was somewhat positive:

       “…it is the most outstanding volume of bizarre classics to be published… You will entirely forget that you are reading printed pages as you are swept completely into the outer realms…Only here can you get the full meaning of horror and nameless things out of cosmic depths and of time’s abyss. Here in this volume all the splendours and marvels of far-flung galaxies are laid before your eyes in an unending pageantry of weirdness…in this reviewer’s opinion and that of many fans, Lovecraft excels Poe himself.”

Printed separately by lithography and bound in The Alchemist, Vol. 1, No. 4 (December 1940), Hunt’s “Star Spawn” was a further—this time visual—tribute to The Outsider, in particular Virgil Finlay’s beautiful dust wrapper. Finlay’s seminal piece was made up of collaged bits of work done previously by him for Weird Tales, The American Weekly and other publications. Roy’s is a complete original illustration delineating that “unending pageantry of weirdness.” The art ended up in the collection of one Forrest J Ackerman, who knew a good thing when he saw it…

Hunt’s first professional work was an illustration for Robert W. Lowndes’ Mythos tale “The Abyss” (Stirring Science Stories, February 1941). A non-traditional drawing of Cthulhu followed in the fanzine Starlight, No. 1 (Spring 1941), bearing more than a passing ancestral resemblance  to Ray Harryhausen’s Kraken surfacing much later in Clash of The Titans (1981). Could Harryhausen, a confederate of early fans Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, have had access to this publication?

Roy designed a superb cover for the Third World Science Fiction Convention (The “Denvention”) in July 1941 as well as the cover and membership cards for the Fourth (”Pacificon”) held in Los Angeles (1946). Another non-traditional take on Cthulhu was done for the cover of Fanfare, Vol. 2, No.2 (February 1942). This was the first art by Hunt that this writer ever saw as it is one of his most reproduced works. Printed in an ichoric emerald ink, a “vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural” backdrop has Cthulhu in the foreground, IT’s general outline less anthropomorphic than usually depicted, possessing the crouching form of “a dragon… [with] a pulpy tentacled head” surmounting that. This version shows up again as a “bas relief” in Hunt’s illustration for Lin Carter’s “H. P. Lovecraft: The Books” (Inside, No. 16, September 1956).

Hunt’s two very different versions of The R’lyehian are further argument that there can, if not should, be a multitude of visions of “forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught”.

3.

While working as a curator and artist at The Colorado State Historical Museum in Denver, Roy produced a series of woodcut prints on commission for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). He would use this medium in fanac going forward. The highpoint of his woodblock art had to be the cover of the first issue of The Alchemist published after WWII (Vol. 2, No. 1) in August of 1946.

A photo of Hunt published in Stanley Mullen’s fanzine The Gorgon, Vol. 2, No. 1 (August 1948) shows him in front of his bookcase. You can make out the spine of John Coleman Burroughs’ dustjacket for his Dad’s Synthetic Men of Mars (1940—enthusiastically reviewed by RVH in The Alchemist, Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1940). Also on Roy’s desk is a studio portrait photo of the writer A(braham) Merritt, who was an extensive correspondent with the budding artist (“There’s nobody I’d rather have want my photo more than you.”—Merritt to Hunt, August 20th, 1941). Merritt’s side of the conversation is published in Sam Moskowitz’s A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool (Oswald Train, 1985). It is hoped that someone (FFE perhaps?) could find and reprint Hunt’s letters in this dialogue. Roy apparently lobbied for Hannes Bok, acting as an intermediary, for the job of illustrating Merritt’s The Metal Monster (1920), perhaps in a definitive edition: “Thanks for the offer on Metal Monster and full edition…I like the black and gold idea…” (Merritt to Hunt, May 11th, 1941).

We need to ‘hear’ Roy’s letters!

Like Bok, a fair amount of Hunt’s art for fanzines has an Art Deco style prevalent at that time. Roy did contribute a bibliography of Merritt’s work to the premiere issue of The Gorgon in March 1947, Covers for another ‘40s fanzine Le Zombie not only show what appears to be the use of a litho crayon for additional shading but the influence of Alexander King’s voudon tableaus in William Seabrook’s Magic Island (1929).

4.

Roy seemed foremost to be a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, beginning with his enjoyment of Hal Foster’s adaptation of Tarzan of The Apes in the Sunday newspapers. Hunt aspired to “study under J. Allen St. John [ERB’s main illustrator]…I would set about copying [pictures and colored jackets] diligently”. This is especially evident in Hunt’s own cover design and typography. After high school, he had worked creating handcrafted marquees for theaters. His lettering shows the clear influence of St. John’s titles for Burroughs’ dust jackets (Capital ‘T”s especially looking ‘sword-like’. Not to mention St. John’s iconic redesigned logo for Weird Tales.)—a bespoke hand drawn jacket for John Taine’s novel The Gold Tooth being the best example (and superior to the actual printed edition’s design from 1927). While doing his wartime service with the US Navy, Roy actually ran into his idol ERB who was then serving as a war correspondent.

Hunt also recounted meeting the screen’s first sound Tarzan, Frank Merrill, in ERB-dom, No. 21 (July 1967). His cover for the 80th number of that same publication is one of this writer’s new favorites: A profile of The War Chief, Shoz Dijiji, rendered in concentric hues of a Colorado sunset. It transcends the influences of other artists, being a definitive illustration for a Burroughs work (1927) that is purely Huntian. I remember when this fanzine came out in 1975, this writer was less receptive to its cover’s style, preferring something more…Frazetta-like? With age comes wisdom. The art of Roy V. Hunt became then more than just the sum of his influences—Lovecraft, Merritt, Burroughs, Finlay, St. John, etc.—achieving that rare alchemy of being an inspiration to those of us who come after him.

All of those book illustrations for Mullen’s Moonfoam and Sorceries which started this appreciation are reproduced fully herein, yet one now needs the totality of the actual published tome in its dark blue inked silver wraps. The quality of art and accompanying research is strong proof to anyone interested in great Old School fantasy illustration that they also need Roy V. Hunt. A Retrospective.