GHATANOTHOA

GHATANOTHOA

"Sight of the god, or its image, as all the legends of the Yuggoth-spawn agreed, meant paralysis and petrifaction of a singularly shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on the outside, while the brain within remained perpetually alive—horribly fixed and prisoned through the ages, and maddeningly conscious of the passage of interminable epochs of helpless inaction till chance and time might complete the decay of the petrified shell and leave it exposed to die."

"Oozing and surging up out of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic—tentacled—proboscidian—octopus-eyed—semi-amorphous—plastic—partly squamous and partly rugose—ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated."

H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, Out Of the Aeons

Another redrawing! This is a really obscure Great Old One from one of Lovecraft's revision stories for Hazel Heald. This one was mostly linework and color but I did slightly rework the design.

Authors would submit short stories and he "revise" them for publication. Sometimes they were straight forward revisions but often he was provided with a short, vague idea and he would ghostwrite the story. You can usually tell because the ghostwritten stories contain all his usual themes of lost ancient civilizations, monstrous gods from other worlds and creeping madness.

Here's an illustration of Ghatanothoa in the reflection of an eye by Hugh Rankin. This illustration accompanied the story in it's original publication in Weird Tales from April 1935.