Friday, September 26, 2008

Faces of Horror

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear -- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

H. P. Lovecraft
"Pickman's Model"


Since most of my free time over the next few days will be taken up with the actual reading of stories and novel(s) in preparation for October, until the 1st I'll be putting up this series of pictures of, and quotes from, the kind of writers I'll be talking about for the next month(!).

2 comments:

Fox said...

Love that quote.

And truly, Bill, I know we might have unintentionally soured your excitement about October book posts, but I'm really looking forward to it.

Since I am totally a blank slate when it comes to these kind of books, I stand to learn a lot.

Greg said...

"We" - You mean "you". I never soured anybody. I have nothing but support for my friend.

But seriously Fox, I don't think you soured Bill on anything.

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