cooking for ghouls

''the ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.


''no i dont know what's become of pickman, and i dont like to guess. you might have surmized i had some inside information when i dropped him--and thats why i dont want to think where he's gone. i should think you'd have known i didn't drop pickman for the same silly reasons that fussy old women lik dr. reid or joe minot or rosworth did. morbid art dosn't shock me, and when a man has the genius pickman had i feel it an honour to know him, no matter what direction his work takes. boston never had a greater painter than richard upton pickman. i said it at first and i say it still, and i never sweerved an inch, either, when he showed that "ghoul feeding". that you remember, was when minot cut him.


''i remember your asking pickman yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions. wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? it was partly because of that laugh reid dropped him. he said pickman repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him toward the last. but keep in mind that i didn't drop pickman for anything like this. on the contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that "ghoul feeding" was a tremendous achievement. as you know the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the museum of fine arts wouldnt accept it as a gift, and i can add nobody would buy it ...


''i got into the habit of calling on pickman quite often, especially after i began making notes for a monograph on weird art. probably it was his work which put the idea into my head, and anyhow, i found him a mine of data and suggestions when i came to develop it. he showed me all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some pen-and-ink sketches that would, i verily believe, have got him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. now, eliiot, im what the man in the street would call fairly "hard boiled", but i'll confess that what i saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. they were his pictures, you know--the ones he couldnt paint or even show in newbury street-- ...


''there was one thing called "the lesson"--heaven pity me, that i ever saw it! listen--can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless doglike things in a church yard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? the price of a changeling i suppose--you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes--how they grow up--and no sooner had i wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eyes caught a picture embodying that very thought... it was their changeling--and in a spirit of supreme irony pickman had given the features a very perceptable resemblance to his own.


''richard upton pickman, the greatest artist i have ever known--and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. eliot--old reid was right. he wasn't strictly human. either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. its all the same now for he's gone-back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt.''

h.p.lovecraft, pickman's model.