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| H.P. Lovecraft portrait by Sean Phillips |
In our hyper modern age where science fact and fiction meld
to combine into some odd amalgam of the banal and the fantastic it is quite
easy to mock earlier incarnations of horror. Demons, spirits, and gods from our
prehistoric era had control of man’s fate and history for centuries until
eventually our mechanical revolution laid waste to the old religion to make way
for the cult of science and so-called rational thinking. Within this stream of
history, what has often plagued mankind’s nightmares has taken on many
different shapes. From bloodthirsty animal predators and indifferent bacterial
microbes to the emergence of ever more deadlier science experiments gone wrong
the things that terrify us have not dissipated only expanded. Within the realm
of horror fiction, writers and artists have attempted to give shape and form to
all our fears and neuroses but more often than not the work put out by them
falls just short of being anything other than entertaining.
