H. P. Lovecraft & Virgil Finlay

H. P. Lovecraft and Virgil Finlay seem like a match made in horror heaven. HPL created the weirdest tentacular monsters and ultra-dimensions that only a master like Finlay could draw. And it’s no secret Finlay is a fan. Despite this wonderful pairing, the majority of Lovecraft’s major stories were illustrated by others, mostly Hugh Rankin. This was an accident of timing. Rankin dominated the illustration work in the early 1930s while Virgil took over around 1935.

Lovecraft died in 1937 so Finlay mostly got to illustrate lesser works published after the Providence master’s death. What this also meant was when Arkham House was created in 1939 to preserve Lovecraft’s work, Finlay was the obvious choice for cover artist. His art graced the first HPL book, The Outsider and Others (1939). The second volume, Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943) did not continue the Finlay covers.

The author and artist were obviously fans of each other’s work. HPL wrote a poem in tribute of Finlay that appeared after his death in the July 1937 issues of Weird Tales, an issue Finlay illustrated. The sub-title reveals that the poem was inspired by Finlay’s art for Robert Bloch’s “The Faceless God”. The artist would illustrate most of Bloch’s Egyptian Mythos stories.

Finlay did receive a second chance to do some of the earlier stories for Famous Fantastic Mysteries in the 1940s. These are truly Virgil Finlay’s best, since he either had more practice or more time to produce these images (probably both).

Finlay’s last Lovecraftian pieces were the cover and illo for the September 1952 Weird Tales, which featured “Halloween in a Suburb”, a poem by HPL. Finlay is famous for his complex black & white images but he was also one of the better cover artists for WT as well, as this painting proves. It was the only cover H. P. Lovecraft got.

The first Lovecraft story to get a Finlay illustration was “The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, December 1936), a tale in which Lovecraft kills off Robert Bloch in effigy as Robert Blake.

It was followed by “The Thing on the Doorstep” (Weird Tales, January 1937), HPL’s last Cthulhu Mythos story to appear during his lifetime. He passed away on March 15, 1937 of Bright’s Disease.

“The Horror from the Burying-Ground” (Weird Tales, May 1937) was a collaboration he had done with Hazel Heald back in 1933. The story was written in 1933 but waited four years to appear.

“Psychopompos” (Weird Tales, September 1937) was a long poem with a Finlay illo that looks more like Harold S. deLay.

“The Shunned House” (Weird Tales, October 1937)

“The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (Weird Tales, February 1938) by William Lumley. This collaboration story is famous for its ending, in which the first person narrator writes down how he is being pulled to the cellar by a demon hands. He writes everything short of his gurgling death rattle.

“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (Weird Tales, March 1938)

“The Quest of Iranon” (Weird Tales, March 1939) reminds me so much of George Barr but he was only two years old at the time. Barr, of course, was influenced by Finlay. This story was one of the Dunsany-inspired stories. Finlay can handle the fantastic as well as the horrific. He did many of the Sword & Sorcery stories of Clifford Ball and Henry Kuttner.

Moving away from Weird Tales, Finlay became the top artist for Mary Gnaedinger’s reprint line for Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels and A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. Finlay’s versions of these Lovecraft stories were so good they became the standard illustrations. I had never seen the J. M. de Aragon illustration from Amazing Stories, September 1927 until I looked it up. It’s terrible and Finlay easily replaced it. Hugh Rankin’s version of “Pickman’s Model” is better but has much less impact than Virgil Finlay’s giant dog-headed monster.

“The Colour Out of Space” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1941)

“Halloween in a Suburb” (Weird Tales, September 1952)

Virgil Finlay went on to a long career, doing illustrations for Science Fiction magazines and books until January 1971. Many of his later pieces have a Lovecraftian feel to them even when they were other authors’ work. The haunting weirdness of HPL was ever an inspiration to the greatest of Pulp illustrators.