The biggest challenge, it would seem to me, of adapting Lovecraft's work to any visual medium is the strength of HPL's work is the way it encourages your (the reader's) imagination to run wild filling in the blanks. When you are presenting his stories IN a visual medium, you are bound, to one extent or another, to fill in the blanks FOR the reader. Lovecraft's monsters are terrifying against the backs of your eyelids; printed on the page (or on a movie screen), generally not so much.
Charles Dexter Ward circumvents a lot of that problem in that the action mostly takes place off the page. Only one monster shows up here and it is kind of perfunctory and less than, well, terrifying, but the story does not need it to be. It only needs it to be, if not shuddersome, then just kind of funky and strange, and it is good enough. The challenge here is making a very talking story lively through the illustrations and that is pulled off pretty successfully. The art here, as in his previous At the Mountain of Madness, are stylized and very restrained. They do a nice job of drawing you in to a lot of fairly static locations, but their style works for them, as does the muted color palate. The atmosphere is slightly unsettling without every becoming melodramatic or lurid - far from it, in fact.
This is a nice way to revisit TCCDW. I am not sure how I would feel about using this to introduce HPL to a new reader. Young readers, perhaps, who might find Lovecraft's language dense and difficult, but again - the great strength of HPL's work is the way it worms itself into your head. But for those looking to enjoy the story in a new setting, as it were, this is a most enjoyable visit.
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