The thread about “Getting” Lovecraft reminded me of the Del Rey run of Lovecraft paperbacks that had the gray covers. Didn’t like them.
I think any collection that has “The Shadow over Innsmouth” should have the following cover:
A watercolor painting of a quaint New England seaside village, very much in the style of all those paintings that stack up like driftwood in every store in every seaside tourist trap in America. It’s a sunlit, cheery scene, except that there are no people to be seen anywhere, just buildings, which, if you look closely, are in extreme disrepair. There’s only one figure visible. He’s in the foreground, a man clinging to the ground with all his might, screaming for help, his eyes wide with horror, because an enormous tentacle issues from the broken doorway of a nearby building to wrap itself around his lower leg and is dragging him into it.
The cover of The Annotated Shadow over Innsmouth (with annotations by S.T. Joshi) is a line drawing of the gable of an old Innsmouth house, the gingerbread and filigree all rotted and crumbling. Through the dirty curtain on the window you can just make out the batrachian-widened figure of an Innsmouth resident with the beginning of “the Innsmouth look”.
I agree. The first HPL stories I ever read were in a book with part of that painting (Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, was the name) and in my mind, it’s been indelibly associated with him every since.
OK, I’ll give you another one. Mountains of Madness. I see this as a very 1930s Super Science adventure, with a group of bearded scientists standing on one of the gigantic stairsteps of the city under the ice, firing revolvers at some unseen horror. Their expressions are of mingled wonder and horror, Maybe the long-dead bones of a few inhuman beasts litter the step behind them. Everything except the scientists is covered with a whitish rime of ice, and their lights, though dim in the vast chamber they inhabit, are reflected by all the icy stalagmites that have formed on the various protrusions of the chamber’s architecture, creating a dark cathredral effect. A red spatter of blood covers the ice where one of the explorers stood, and some of the red is spattered on their bulky brown 1930s Arctic wear.
I guess the thing is, I think of Lovecraft’s work as very much 1930s adventure pulp stories with a horror theme. I don’t think the grey covers caught that, though they were horrible enough.
Anyway, I was hoping others who’d come up with their own ideas for covers by other autthors would chime in.
