Macabre Mondays: Horror Literature Art

Mine, that is.

Sep 18, 2023

Once upon the 1980’s, I turned in a report to my eighth grade English teacher on short story characters. I believe this was my first interaction with Poe.

When I stumbled across this again in adulthood, the face of the old man cracked me up. I love pre-teen me.

O, the drama. Let’s go in for a good closeup on this Crayola skinny marker masterpiece.

The menancing blue eye is real. LOL

And then there’s this charmer:

The fire is pretty good; the feet are nightmare fuel.

Another project for the same class was to create a magazine as a book project. Everyone chose Anne of Green Gables or something else age-appropriate. This weirdo chose Amityville: The Final Chapter by John G. Jones. I created an entire magazine based around the continuing story of the Lutz family. I’ll bet I was the talk of my country middle school’s teachers’ room.

Yes, the enclosed index card was supposed to be its card catalog addition.

I remember the entire class wanted to read it, in this she’s-spooky-I’m-scared-of-what-she-did-this-time way. I’ll have to dig it back out and read it on the podcast.

Move to adulthood, and I got into grabbing vintage illustrations from the original fairy tales, the horrific versions, and adding color and shading to them. Some of them I even typeset into new pages, like this image from the original Bluebeard from Charles Perrault, first published in 1697.

I like the way I used light to focus on the triangle of gazes and the key.

And here’s my typesetting of that page:

I hope you have enjoyed this little horror show-and-tell. I’m still laughing at Monkey Paw’s feet and the old man’s squinty, accusatory face. Back to working on the third Boo Without Goo podcast episode and the second episode’s resource list (Macabre Monday: Boo Without Goo entry).

Check out the other participants’ entries (did I get everyone?):