Tag: From Beyond

Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen (2013) by Erik Kriek

Erik Kriek hat etwas sehr Heikles gewagt: in Zeichnungen einzugangen, was man am besten und effektivsten der Phantasie des Lesers überlässt. Jeder, der ein Erzählung von H. P. Lovecraft, dem Meister der amerikanischen Ostküsten-Horrorgeschichten, liest, macht sich eigene Vorstellungen von den Monstern. Ich lasals kleiner Jungemeine erste Lovecraft-Geschichte, als mein Vater mir eine dicke Anthologie mit englischen und amerikanischen Horrorgeschichten schenkte: Vor und nach Mitternacht. Die sparsamen Illustrationen stammten von Eppo Doeve, unde heute, sechzig Jahre später, steht dieses Buch immer noch in meinem Regal, sind die Erzählungen in meinem Gedächtnis, befinden sich die Bilder auf meiner Netzhaut. Merkwürdige Zeichnungen, unvollständig, sparsam und, so wie es sich gehört, in Schwarzweiẞ. Das BUch hat eine lebenslange Faszination ausgelöst: Immer noch kaufe ich regelmässig Horror. Es erscheint keine Neuausgabe von Ambrose Bierce oder Roald Dahl, in die ich nicht hineinschaue, um ze sehen, ob darin – wie kurz auch immer – nicht doch etwas Neues steht.Erik Kriek has dared to do something very tricky: to capture in drawings what is best and most effectively left to the reader’s imagination. Everyone who reads a tale by H. P. Lovecraft, the master of American East Coast horror stories, creates Monsters from his own Imagination. I read my first Lovecraft story as a young boy when my father gave me a thick anthology of English and American horror stories: Before and After Midnight. The sparse illustrations were by Eppo Doeve, and today, sixty years later, this book is still on my shelf, the stories are in my memory, the images are on my retina. Strange drawings, incomplete, sparse and, as it should be, in black and white. The book triggered a lifelong fascination: I still buy horror regularly. No new edition of Ambrose Bierce or Roald Dahl appears that I don’t look into to see if there isn’t something new in it – however briefly.
Forward by Gerard SoetemanEnglish translation

Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen (“From Beyond and other Tales,” 2013, Avant-Verlag) is a German-language collection of graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories “The Outsider,” “The Color Out of Space,” “Dagon,” “From Beyond,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The adaptations are very faithful to the original, often down to the level of the language, which is often directly quoting from the German-language translation of Lovecraft’s stories.

Kriek’s adaptation of “The Colour Out of Space”

Kriek, who is both writer and artist, has lavished most of his creativity on the art itself—with great care and attention to the setting and costumes of the characters, putting them in period-appropriate dress and rooms, giving them little quirks Lovecraft didn’t mention but might well have imagined. The style makes heavy use of shadows for the panes of the face and the set of the body, very reminiscent of the black-and-white artwork of 1970s Warren horror magazines like Creepy or Eerie, but cleaner and starker. The clear-cut reality of the normal frames gives Kriek’s wilder, more imaginative and fantastic pages more impact.

Note how the panels have slanted, no longer even and orderly, and the Dutch angle used. Visual rhetoric for “The world has gone wrong.”

There have been so many graphic adaptations of Lovecraft’s fiction over the years by so many artists, it is difficult to find points for fair comparison—or perhaps it is better to say, it’s hard to know where to start.

“The Outsider,” for example, is a 2,595 word short story; Kriek adapted it in six pages. Alec Preston Stevens also adapted “The Outsider” in six pages in Prime Cuts #1 (1987), so too did Bhob Stewart and Steve Harper in Monsters Attack #2 (1989), and Devon Devereaux and Tom Pomplun in Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft (2002); Hernán Rodríguez did it in 14 pages (as “The Stranger”) in Heavy Metal (vol. 32, no. 8, Fall 2008), Tanabe Gou stretched it out to 24 pages for his 2007 collection …and because they are all adaptations of the same story, a really deep analysis could almost go line-by-line and panel-by-panel in comparison.

The same could be said for most of Lovecraft’s other stories. He did not leave a particularly large body of work, but nearly every story and many of the poems he wrote or had a hand in have been adapted in some fashion at some point by somebody—even relatively obscure works like the revision “Medusa’s Coil” is represented by “Medusa’s Curse” (1995) by Sakura Mizuki (桜 水樹氏) and “Nelle Spire di Medusa” (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Tommaso Campanini. Probably only Edgar Allan Poe has received better coverage in the comics.

Which might beg the question: why? What does a new graphic adaptation of Lovecraft bring to the audience that wasn’t there before? Was there something lacking about all the previous adaptations of “The Outsider” that moved Kriek to try his hand at Lovecraft in his own vivid style? Kriek’s adaptation in particular is very faithful to the original; he was not adapting the stories to his own times, not injecting any contemporary value or message into Lovecraft’s narrative. These adaptations are a genuine effort to do justice Lovecraft’s original vision, while also showcasing Kriek’s own interpretation.

The candelabra gives a Gothic touch, which makes the sudden high-tech appearance of the resonator all the more disturbing.

Which might be the answer in itself. Comic adaptations of Lovecraft exist because the stories are there in the public domain. No one can stop you. They are mountains to be climbed, caves to be spelunked. The fact that you are not the first to climb to the top of a particular mountain does not take away from the achievement of doing it. Anyone who completes a comic adaptation of “From Beyond” or “The Color Out of Space” may be competing, in some philosophical fashion, with every other artist who seeks to express the inexpressible in some fixed medium, but there is never going to be any final winner. Someone else is bound to come along and try their hand at it…but people can point to books like Vom Jenseits und andere Erzählungen and say: “Already, here’s what I did. What have you got?”

The Black housemaid, and the use of the narrator’s first name, are subtle differences from Lovecraft’s version of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

Kriek’s collection ends with “Vom Jenseits” (“From Beyond”) by Milan Hulsing, which is not the short story of the same name but a short biography of H. P. Lovecraft illustrated with a few choice pictures based on photographs of Lovecraft and his life. “Jenseits” is the German term for “on the other side” or “beyond,” but it can also refer to the afterlife, the underworld, the next world—in other words, there are some connotations that may or may not quite line up exactly with the English terms. Euphemistically, we are doing the same thing; catching a glimpse of another world…only the resonator is the book in our hands.

Addendum: I could not end this review without including this anecdote from the introduction:

Lovecrafts Erzählung Das Ding auf der Schwelle faszinierte und fasziniert mich noch immer so, dass ich sie, als eine Hollywood-Produzentin mich bat, einen Polit-Thriller zu schreiben, zu einem Drehbuch umgerbeitet habe. Um die geforderte Aktualität hineinzubekommen, dachte ich mir einen sehr wichtigen Berater eines neugewählten amerikanischen Präsidenten aus, der in einer kleinen neuenglischen Stadt à la Lovecraft landet. Man erlebt, wie er durch Seelenwanderung allmählich verrückt wird und zu glauben beginnt, dass das Ende der Welt, wenn es nicht sowieso schon bevorsteht, von ihm herbeigeführt werden muss. Als vollkommen Wahnsinniger reist er zerück nach Washington, um dort als Mitglied des Nationalen Sicherheitsrats dem Präsidenten verhängnisvolle Ratschläge zu geben … Die Produzentin lehnte das Drehbuch ab: „Wahnsinnige würden in Washington niemals in solche Positionen gelangen.“ Und dann … kam Oliver North, um Reagan zu dienen, und – später – taten Bushs Ratgeber ihre segensreich Arbeit so, dass die Vereinigten Staaten in maẞlose Schulden gestürzt wurden, um heillose Kriege zu führen und zu bezahlen … tja.Lovecraft’s tale “The Thing on the Doorstep” fascinated and still fascinates me so much that when a Hollywood producer asked me to write a political thriller, I reworked it into a screenplay. To get the required topicality in, I thought up a very important advisor to a newly elected American president who ends up in a small New England town à la Lovecraft. You see him gradually go insane through transmigration of souls and begin to believe that the end of the world, if it isn’t imminent anyway, must be brought about by him. As a complete madman, he travels back to Washington to give disastrous advice to the president as a member of the National Security Council … The producer rejected the script: “Insane people would never get into such positions in Washington.” And then … Oliver North came to serve Reagan, and – later – Bush’s advisors did their beneficent work in such a way that the United States was plunged into gross debt to wage and pay for hopeless wars … oh well.
Forward by Gerard SoetemanEnglish translation

English-language readers in the United States have a bad habit of not paying attention to what happens outside the Anglosphere, but the non-English-speaking world is large, and they pay attention to what we do here…because it affects them too. The resonator lets those from beyond see us as well as we see them; it translates both ways…and the world of H. P. Lovecraft is so much bigger and weirder than we can imagine.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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“Resonator Superstar!” (2015) by Anya Martin

But whatever you dub it, it’s not my father’s Lovecraft circle of white cis men anymore. Women, people of color and LBGTQ writers are reshaping and stretching the borders of the weird.
—Anya Martin, Q&A: Atlanta writer Anya Martin on her debut horror collection “Sleeping with the Monster” (8 Nov 2018)

The success of the film Reanimator (1985), based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West—Reanimator,” led rather shortly to the production of another Lovecraft film adaptation, with the same director (Stuart Gordon), producer (Brian Yuzna), and leads (Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton). From Beyond (1986) burned through the plot of Lovecraft’s story in the pre-title shots, and from the bare bones of the tale the filmmakers created a memorable, fast-paced horror film built on sensuality and practical effects, solid performances and evocative, memorable images. In some foreign markets, it was released as Resonator.

Anya Martin’s “Resonator Superstar!” is a story inspired not directly by Lovecraft, but from the adaptation of Lovecraft. While the literary DNA of Lovecraft’s original seven page story is there, the imagery and themes of the story are derived more from the film than the source text. Where many pastiches, sequels, and homages call back directly to Lovecraft’s, the different path of influence and inspiration have their stamp on Martin’s story. The most important difference is that “Resonator Superstar!” stands on its own: but it also allows readers to reflect back on what does and does not come from Lovecraft’s story, and why.

Thanks to director Stuart Gordon’s gloriously over-the-top film adaptation of From Beyond, it’s difficult to get away from pairing sex and the Resonator…and why would we want to? s there anything a Freudian in horror filmdom as the sight of Jeffery Combs’ pineal stalk thrashing around between his eyebrows? We think not!
—Scott R. Jones, “Magic Circles, Noxious Machines” in Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales FROM BEYOND 3

Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” is essentially asexual, though some readers might find a buried homoerotic reading in two men in a small space, experiencing together a heightened, unnatural sensitivity. The lack of female characters on Lovecraft’s part was typical, and probably deliberate: romance is a human element, ultimately mundane, and Lovecraft was focusing on the weird element, the strange world beyond the normal senses of most human beings.

From Beyond grounds this focus back into the human realm, with a focus on sensuality and sexual stimulation: Tillinghast’s BDSM practices are recast as explorations into the limit of human experience, which the resonator device aims to bring him past. The cast is expanded to allow the interplay and interaction of more complex human relationships, especially as they each begin to feel the effects of the resonator.

Martin’s “Resonator Superstar!” starts where From Beyond leaves off: protagonist DiDi and her beau Curt offer a completely contrasting relationship than the nameless protagonist and Tillinghast in Lovecraft’s original tale, and the attitude and plots of the stories likewise diverge from that very basic difference. Curt is portrayed as intelligent, egotistical, controlling; DiDi as enamored, more self-conscious, sympathetic. Their relationship is explicitly sexual yet undefined (“the usual dance of we’re-fucking-but-are-we-a-couple-or-not”), and readers can read in their own warning signs from Curt’s treatment and behavior. The third, shadowy figure in the relationship is the object of Curt’s obsession.

DiDi’s inherent insecurity in the relationship is confirmed by an outside interloper: Hester Tillinghast, a living link to Curt’s obscure research into Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and the resonator. Lovecraft had toyed with lover’s triangles in some of his ghost writing, but it is hard to imagine him writing a lover into “From Beyond”—much less to have them catch their partner in flagrante delicto—blazing with the full ultraviolet imagery of From Beyond…and DiDi trapped as, in an echo of the film, the resonator activates itself once again.

The key difference between Lovecraft’s story and Martin’s is not so much the phallic extension of the pineal glands or the well-researched background on Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, but the different focus and development of the plot and characters. Lovecraft’s plot impulse is spare and straightforward, one man hating another; Martin’s plot is dealing with more complicated relationships, emotions, and more people. Lovecraft’s narrator, faced with a need to act, shoots the resonator; Martin’s DiDi, striving to save her lover, shuts off the resonator program. They accomplish much the same actions, but their reasons for doing so are very different…as are, ultimately, the results.

The film From Beyond took three steps beyond Lovecraft’s narrative out of necessity: there really wasn’t enough raw material in the original short story to sustain a full-length feature film. “Resonator Superstar!” references From Beyond by choice: the story can stand on its own, even if the reader has never seen the film or read Lovecraft’s original tale. Readers who have experienced both will have a better appreciation for what’s going on in Martin’s work, but the story is sufficiently removed from the original context of Lovecraft’s tale that it isn’t necessary in the same way that reading “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is critical to appreciate “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys or “A Coven in Essex County” (2016) by J. M. Yales.

What is surprising about “Resonator Superstar!” is not that it takes more direct inspiration from From Beyond than “From Beyond,” but that this inspiration should be discernible in both imagery and theme. Because most of Lovecraft’s fiction is in the public domain, it is relatively accessible and available to refer back to it directly, or even remix it as in “Kanye West—Reanimator” (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky & “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon. The callback to the film adaptations are comparatively rare in Lovecraftian fiction because relatively few of Lovecraft’s film adaptations have achieved the kind of success to warrant their images sticking in the popular consciousness—although as a counterpoint to that, Chaplinksy’s book obviously takes as its inspiration the iconic Reanimator film poster for its cover art.

“Resonator Superstar!” first appeared in Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales FROM BEYOND (2015) and reprinted in Anya Martin’s collection Sleeping with the Monster (2018). Martin’s other Lovecraftian fiction includes “The Prince of Lyghes” (2015), and “Old Tsah-Hov” (2015); she also touches on H. P. Lovecraft in the essay “The H Word: The Weird at the World’s End” (2017) for Nightmare Magazine.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)