There is a particular kind of horror that H.P. Lovecraft reserved for art.
Not the horror of monsters in the dark, or of ancient gods indifferent to human existence — though those things are present here too — but the horror of a man who could see something the rest of us cannot, and who chose to paint it from life.
Pickman’s Model, first published in Weird Tales in 1927, is one of Lovecraft’s most perfectly constructed stories. It is told entirely as a confession. A man named Thurber has been avoiding a mutual friend, has stopped riding the subway, has stopped going into cellars, and is only now, over drinks, willing to explain why. He tells the story of Richard Upton Pickman — Boston’s greatest painter, and its most disturbing one.
Pickman’s canvases depicted ghouls. Not in the impressionistic, symbolic way of lesser artists, but with an anatomical precision so convincing that those who saw his work were physically ill. He was expelled from his art club. Shunned by polite society. But he had a secret studio in the oldest part of the city — beneath the streets of Boston’s North End — where he was working on something far worse than anything he had ever shown in public.
What Thurber finds in that cellar changes him permanently. And what he finds the next morning, in his coat pocket, explains everything.
Lovecraft gives us no monster with a name here. No creature we can safely categorize and put away. Only a photograph, and the knowledge that somewhere beneath the oldest cities, in tunnels that connect graveyards to the sea, something has made itself at home.
This is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories to narrate — quiet, methodical, and ending with one of the most devastating final lines in all of horror literature. I hope it finds you somewhere comfortable, with the lights low and nothing pressing to be done.
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