Lovecraft [Hardcover]

Hans Rodionoff (Author), Keith Giffen (Author), Enrique Breccia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2004

A fascinating but disturbing study of one of America’s greatest horror writers, the intense LOVECRAFT examines the bizarre life of author and recluse, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Since his early childhood in the late 1800’s Lovecraft was haunted with dark visions of demons and death. Trapped in a world of macabre creatures and grotesque thoughts, the writer found escape only by weaving his living nightmares into fictional blood curling horror stories. An uncensored tour into a troubled mind, this beautifully painted hardcover edition traces the toils of a man considered both mentally ill and genius as he stumbles across the fine line between reality and insanity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by a Rodionoff screenplay that assumes the "reality" of the alien monsters invented by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Argentine artist Breccia and DC writer Giffen (Lobo) take a surreal, psychosexual look at the American horror master's life story. The book focuses on the graphics, notably lurid, dialogue-free sequences depicting Cthulhu and his tentacled kin assaulting helpless humans, starting with HPL's father, Winfield, shown in bed with a woman not his wife in a Chicago hotel. Like the actual philandering father, who contracted syphilis, this Winfield dies in an insane asylum in Lovecraft's native Providence, R.I., though not before passing on the family copy of Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon to his young son. The story's remainder concerns Lovecraft's repetitive attempts, in childhood and adulthood, to ward off a series of repellent creatures (perhaps the evil offspring of the dreaded magical tome, or just the product of his sick imagination). Those familiar with the five volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters or S.T. Joshi's 1996 biography may be dismayed to find only caricature. In typical Hollywood fashion, the authors make Lovecraft's one-time wife Sonia Greene a generic heroine (prettier and slimmer than the original), whom he meets in a hospital where he's recovering from an assault by an unclothed Wilbur Whateley. The child Lovecraft has the pronounced lantern jaw that he developed only in maturity. Still, Cthulhu Mythos fans who aren't pedantic nitpickers will enjoy the way the book blends bits of biographical detail with Lovecraft's frightening fictional concepts to create a grotesque and disturbing visual experience.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Why would anyone want the monsters of H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories actually to have harried their creator? For the sake of a good story, of course, but also because having the Old Ones--Cthulhu and the rest, the sight of which can reduce General Patton, John Wayne, and Muhammad Ali into blobs of gibbering terror--bedevil Lovecraft accounts for his hellish early life. His father had a mental breakdown and died in an asylum before H. P. reached school age. His possessive but distant mother, before her own breakdown and asylum death, forbade Lovecraft's wife, Sonia, to enter the family house. In the upshot, Sonia moved to Cleveland and never saw him again. Rodionoff posits that the key to Lovecraft's misery was a book of the Old Ones' lore. Failing to control him through it, they ruined his every happiness. Thanks to Keith Giffen, who recast Rodionoff's screenplay as a graphic novel that Argentine artist Enrique Breccia makes a spectacle of melting colors and sharp-featured figures, Lovecraft's misfortunes are our creepy pleasures. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Vertigo (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401201105
• ISBN-13: 978-1401201104
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #435,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Lovecraft" sets the standard for comic book craft, April 8, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Lovecraft (Hardcover)

The line between genius and madness is often difficult to draw, but especially so when considering the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Lovecraft, who died at age 46 in 1937, is best known for a series of horror tales surrounding a fictional book called the Necronomicon, a hellish text that could call forth any number of gruesome creatures. While the black magic book is merely a figment of Lovecraft's rich, twisted imagination, some believe the Necronomicon to be actual text dating back to A.D. 730 and even referenced by famed future predictor Nostrodamus.

Hans Rodinoff, Keith Giffen and artist Enrique Breccia explore the notion that the Lovecraft family was caretaker to the ghastly text in their superb graphic novel "Lovecraft", easily one of the finest graphic novels of the 21st century, perfectly blending Rodinoff's prose with Breccia's magnificent artwork.

While Rodinoff weaves plenty of truth about Lovecraft into his fiction - such as his oppressive mother forcing him to wear dresses as a small child - he creates a story of a slow decent into madness that might well have been penned by Lovecraft himself. Breccia's artwork perfectly pulls the reader across the planes of delusion and sanity by mixing media in an artistic achievement seldom seen in the comic-book genre. For sequences of delusions, Breccia works in a loose watercolor. Characters flow and bleed in bright, vibrant reds, greens and blues. In waking-world sequences, Breccia adopts a tighter pen-and-ink style with watercolor accents and a heavy cross-hatching shading creating a realistic study of Lovecraft's life outside of madness, where the watercolor highlights are more muted and controlled with tighter brushwork.

Rodinoff's choice of Lovecraft as a subject should hopefully shed more light on one of the great American horror fiction writers of the early 20th century. Lovecraft bridged the gap between Edgar Allan Poe in the mid-19th century and today's horror masters such as Stephen King. Lovecraft's stories often drew upon Poe's spiritual studies of the human condition while incorporating the twists from unintended consequences of the new scientific and technological era emerging in his time.

Lovecraft remains something of a counterculture fascination to this day. A Dungeon and Dragons-style role-playing game based on Lovecraft fiction is still played by devotees. The Necronomicon, and Lovecraft's writings, are referenced in countless pop music songs, most notably by Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult. And Lovecraft has inspired a handful of horror movies. Perhaps the most well-known is 1985's "Reanimator," the tale of a doctor who discovers a serum that reanimates the dead.

Rodinoff's treatment of Lovecraft's legend and legacy is a true and tender tribute. Rodinoff's story incorporates not only a fascinating study of the human mind and madness, but also a beautiful tale about the redemptive power of love and the struggles of a dysfunctional childhood.

Daniel P. Finney
St. Louis Post Dispatch(...)

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovecraft's creepy crawlies eat psyches, February 19, 2004

By 

Stephen Richmond "Librarian/Teacher/Reader an... (Newton, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lovecraft (Hardcover)

A wonderful, beautifully written and illustrated tribute to America's master of the weird and creepy, H. P. Lovecraft. This "may have been/could have been" pseudo-biography of Lovecraft provides deliciously horrid explanations for why Lovecraft's life went the way it did. From his bizarre childhood in which his mother insisted on dressing him as a girl to the difficulties he had in maintaining personal relationships, the authors unceasingly engage with word and pictures in this excellent example of what the graphic novel should be. An astounding, if unsettling work. Readers of Jonathon Scott Fuqua's IN THE SHADOW OF EDGAR ALLAN POE will also enjoy this.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less Is More, March 5, 2007

By 

D.P. Merde (Gut-Bucket, South Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lovecraft (Hardcover)

Enrique Breccia did "The Dunwich Horror" in an old issue of "Heavy Metal" magazine, which is great. His work in "Lovecraft" isn't as successful, though. But it's not his fault . . . mostly. He does draw HPL as a little boy saddled with that monstrous lantern jaw he didn't acquire until much older. This may make Lovecraft easy to identify as a child(the little girl clothes and locks might confuse you otherwise), but one wonders if this was Breccia's idea or the idea of the writers whom I wish to blame for everything else that's wrong with this book. The pacing of the story is just bad; it's like Lovecraft meets Manga. But I doubt this is Breccia's fault. He successfully illustrates "The Dunwich Horror" in far less pages in HM. The idea's a good one, interweaving HPL's life with his mythology, but I don't think the length of the book is adequate to really bring it off. It's too rushed to approximate the ponderous profundity of HPL (despite the ponderousness of that jawline!). I'm convinced that Lovecraft's unique effects depend on pacing. This graphic novel just crams too much into one story. Lovecraft's best stories concern themselves with only one of the many situations suggested here. To try including so many, undermines the pacing and strangeness of weird fiction that relies on primarily normal circumstances in which only one little thing may be wrong. It's just that whatever that thing is, it is profoundly wrong, irritating the brain until it forms a perfect pearl of cosmic realization that amounts to fixed and overwhelming terror. As with the oyster, the irritant must be very small and be given the time necessary to form and overwhelm the consciousness. The cover illustration works on this level, suggesting a plant that's not quite a plant. I do believe that what HPL does in unillustrated prose is unique, but one may at least aim at the same effects in other media inspired by him. The first "Alien" film is an excellent example of a film that inspires the same cosmic terror as does HPL's prose. It too gets more out of less. And it's possible in graphic form. On comic book terms, Breccia managed in the seventies with "The Dunwich Horror" (less words and more curious images left for the reader to associate) and Coulthart more recently with his "The Call of Cthulhu." Granted, these are adaptations of actual Lovecraft stories, but their success comes as well from an understanding of Lovecraft's pacing and the nature of the weird. Not only does "Lovecraft" lack an actual plot by HPL to undergird it, its writing lacks the understanding necessary to be "inspired" by him more successfully.