READING DIARY, SATURDAY JUNE 1, 2019

H.P. LOVECRAFT’S THE HOUND AND OTHER STORIES Adaptation and Artwork by Gou Tanabe

Acclaimed Japanese artist Gou Tanabe is best known in his home country for his straight-forward manga adaptations of literary works by such internationally renowned masters as Anton Checkov and Maxim Gorky. In recent years, he’s applied his ample talents to producing sophisticated, respectful, black and white adaptations of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and the results—translated and made available to English speaking markets thanks to the good people at Dark Horse—are nothing short of astonishing.

This volume presents three of Lovecraft’s earlier stories, including one of my personal favorites that often gets overlooked in surveys of the gentleman from Providence’s work: “The Hound”, which is as deliriously decadent a reading experience one is likely to find outside of Huysmans’ late 19th century novels. Indeed, Huysmans even gets name-checked in the original text (which you should listen to here on Youtube).

The first story presented is “The Temple”, a tale of a German U-boat crew who fall prey to a cursed trinket brought aboard their ship by an odd British prisoner. After a mysterious explosion leaves the sub partially immobilized and a mutiny whittles the ship’s crew down to a couple of officers, a deep dive reveals what appears to be the remnants of an ancient civilization carved out of the sea floor. Could it be Atlantis?

The second story is the aforementioned “The Hound”, about two decadent aesthetes whose love of all things morbid has transformed them into a pair of veritable super-Goth grave-robbers. They spend their time looting Europe’s cemeteries for spooky treasure, and reading their flesh-bound copy of the Necronomicon for shits and giggles. That is, until the night they dig up the wrong grave, in the wrong cemetery.

The final story in this collection, “The Nameless City”, is also the shortest. It’s about an Indiana Jones type explorer who comes across the legendary nameless city in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, finding a passageway that allows him access to ever deeper and ever larger underground chambers, until he stumbles across evidence of an ancient civilization that was entering its twilight before mankind had even experienced its dawn. And judging by the bas relief and other sculptures they left behind… they were none too pleased about having competition.

Throughout all three stories, Tanabe’s versions are studiously accurate to the original texts, and the artwork is uniformly excellent. My only complaint being the book’s digest size. The small format occasionally makes it difficult to make out what it is, exactly, that we’re being shown. It certainly isn’t a deal-breaker, and it won’t keep me from purchasing others in this series, particularly seeing as the price is quite reasonable, particularly for specialty material such as this.

The last thing I’d like to point out is Tanabe’s excellent attitude about all this. For some artists, adapting Lovecraft can be a bit of a money-grab. But at the end of this book, Tanabe has a special message for his readers, which I will reprint here in its entirety.

A sleepless night. A presence at the door. A whispering, barely heard. An anxiety and fear such as you haven’t felt since you were young. An intuition of primordial death. Lovecraft was a writer who crafted such unknowable darkness—a priest of his own Mythos. I know fear even at the richness of his creativity.

By illustrating his stories, I intend to become an apostle of the gods he made. I do not feel my work is yet complete. The images swell in my mind. “If I draw it like this…” “If I do it this way…” I hear the divine voice, commanding me to continue.

I am blessed that you are reading this. You have my gratitude.

1014, High Summer

Gou Tanabe