SAND-DWELLER
"Then out of one of the caves came a Sand-Dweller—rough-skinned, large-eyed, large-eared, with a horrible, distorted resemblance to the koala bear facially, though his body had an appearance of emaciation. He shambled toward me, manifestly eager."
H. P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, The Gable Window
Here's my redrawing of the bizarre sand-dweller. I fixed the linework, eyes and the anatomy; specifically the shoulder.
Derleth's posthumous "collaborations" with Lovecraft are some of the absolute worst in the mythos canon. He's a hack on the grandest scale and his bizarre hierarchy for the Old Ones is perplexing and forced. On top of that most of his creatures are derivative (lots of frog monsters) or so stupid that they're funny. The sand-dweller is the latter. I think I managed to create something interesting here but a "rough skinned koala" is not the best starting point.
Other folks, but not many, have tried their hand at interpreting the sand-dweller. On the left is the illustration from the Call Of Cthulhu rulebook, and on the right is the illustration from Chaosium's Skin Deep module by illustrator Graey Erb. While I appreciate the attempt to make the sand-dwellers scary & vicious, it strays too far from the koala descriptor for me. Derleth made that dumb decision and we have to abide by it!
The first illustration is away more in line with how I picture them. Much more koala-like and the rough skin is really prominent (I took rough skin to just mean furless).
I'd also love to credit whoever made that first illustration but Chaosium is awful at crediting their artists. They're just listed in a massive pile in the front of the book with no attribution to specific illustrations.
Tomorrow's a really obscure creature from one of my favorite stories.
I like the goofier monsters, they're scarier to me than something trying too hard to be scary - those tend to converge on the same image of "scary", which robs them of the shock necessary to horrify. Also - being eaten by a wolf, or a tiger or somesuch, has some dignity to it - by association you gain something of the dignity of the tiger - there's no dignity in being eaten by a gawping koala-faced goon, and thus more horror.
ReplyDeleteAll to say: I like your depiction the most.
Yeah, Sand Dwellers are pretty dumb. Somehow, their depictions miss out on one of the weirdest details of the Koala - their two thumbs. I drew Sand Dwellers once, and I included those thumbs!
ReplyDeleteI don't like them being vicious monsters. Everything's a vicious monster, can't chuck an interdimensional rock without hitting a vicious monster. I like the idea that the Sand Dwellers are more pitiable and despairing, like they were an alien civilization obliterated by the rise of their own Great Old Ones and the remnants are scrabbling in the dust of a dying world. A sad and grim portent of the doom you find common in these stories.