A Lovecraft Bestiary
Legendary “weird fiction” writer H.P. Lovecraft spawned a mythos that continues to thrive well after his death, and its nihilistic, uncaring universe is populated with aliens, extradimensional beings, and regular old earthbound monsters. The funny part about most of these creatures, though, is that few words are usually used to describe how they actually look. That hasn’t stopped artists from trying, though. My first introduction to Lovecraft was my copy of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials I got as a kid, wherein the titular Wayne Barlowe drew his closest approximation of what Lovecraft’s Elder Things — the aliens from “At the Mountains of Madness” — looked like. Michael Bukowski continues in Barlowe’s grand tradition by drawing pretty much every one of Lovecraft’s numerous horrors, using creative license to fill in the blanks that Lovecraft’s proclivity for dramatic obfuscation left behind. Read more…