Corpus Monstrom!

The Monstermen first appeared in the pages of Hellboy. All of the stories were written and drawn by Gary Gianni, a remarkable artist who has since gone on to be the successor to John Cullen Murphy on the venerable Prince Valiant comic strip, only the third artist on that venerable American creation.

He has moved on from Camelot in more recent years still, but as with this volume his early Dark Horse work is still with us and is fascinating in many respects.

"The Monstermen" is a small (somewhat undefined) group also called "Corpus Monstrum" and are dedicated to fending off supernatural attacks of various kinds.  You get the sense that there are others, but the two we actually meet are the helmeted Benedict who takes the lead and his associate Lawerence St. George, a movie magnate who seems to be an assistant. We also encounter a villain of sorts named Crulk who reappears in very peculiar ways.

In the stories contained in this volume the team battles vengeful ghosts, dark demons and shambling monsters across the globe. My favorite story is titled "The Skull and the Snowman" in which the team encounters a most familiar monster. The stories are exceedingly luxurious in their image, but frankly I found the storytelling a bit too spare in places to allow me to keep up. There is though a wonderful atmosphere to the stories as a whole that elevates them, even with some meager plots.

The volume from Dark Horse contains the whole canon was supplemented by several classic horror and fantasy stories by the likes of William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Gianni is an outstanding illustrator and he adds to classics like Howard's "Old Garfield's Heart" and Smith's "Mother of Toads".

I found this book for cheap, but it's really rather worth its price if you can find it. 

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At The Mountains Of Madness At Last!

This short novel by H.P. Lovecraft has been on my must-read-eventually table for years, but for whatever combination of reasons (distractions and forgetfulness) I never got around to actually reading it. I've dabbled in Lovecraft my whole life, reading and re-reading "The Call of C'Thulhu", "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Colour Out of Space" many times as well as other classic Lovecraft short stories. But I've never read some of his longer works. I'm rectifying that oversight this summer.


Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in three parts in 1936. Lovecraft (according S.T.Joshi) regarded it as his favorite work. It begins in wonderful Lovecraft fashion as a report in vivid detail of an expedition to Antarctica which after some reality-establishing labor, finds a vast range of mountains which are taller and more vast than then discovered on Earth. And inside a cave at the foot of these mountains they uncover strange seemingly preserved new life forms. What evolves from there is vintage Lovecraft. I won't spoil any of the twists, but Lovecraft's ability to describe the weird and make the reader feel that weirdness in the depths of their being is well on display in this tour of this outpost of "The Old Ones".

Then I dug out "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" by Clark Ashton Smith, a story which likely was inspired by Lovecraft's original, just as Lovecraft's story was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.


The soul-chilling Antarctic setting of this story is assumed to have also inspired John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" the inspiration for RKO's The Thing from Another World which itself inspired John Carpenter's bleaker version many years later. I'll have to dig out that classic and give it another reading, and perhaps bring home that "Thing" movie they made last year and finally watch it. Lovecraft's influence on fantasy is difficult to overstate.

On yet another note, my recent Wold Newton reading suggests that McReady from Campbell's original story is highly suggestive of Kenneth Robeson's Doc Savage. That's a curious connection I'd like to examine first hand.

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