THINGS THAT DEVOUR AND DISSOLVE

THINGS THAT DEVOUR AND DISSOLVE

"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren’t they?" "Things are hunting me now—the things that devour and dissolve—but I know how to elude them."

"My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are—very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop."

H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond

Here's my redrawing of the things that devour from one of HPL's more famous stories From Beyond! Since I originally posted this one I've been unsatisfied with it. Something about the anatomy and the thinness of the creature made it seem...insubstantial. Which I supposed is a good thing when dealing with interdimensional beings but it didn't seem menacing enough. This new version feels way better to me. Chunkier.

I imagine this slug-thing pulling you in with those feelers and dissolving you with digestive fluid.

In my head there are two classifications of inter dimensional creature in the story; there's the smaller flabby, jellyfish things and then there's the much larger things that devour and dissolve.

Stuart Gordon's excellent film adaptation has depictions of both types of creature; the flabby things and the things that devour. I assume the large worm creature in the basement is one of the things that devour, while the jellyfish & eels are the flabby things. 

While the movie is pretty famous and the story is referenced a lot, there's very few illustrations from the original time period. The first publication in Weird Tales has no accompanying art. 

I am pretty fond of this illustration from Dutch artist Erik Kriek's adaptation.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention two of my favorite musical references: Massacre's From Beyond from the album of the same name (with art by now disgraced thrash icon Ed Repka) and Death Breath's Flabby Little Things From Beyond from the album Stinking Up the Night!

Tomorrow's creature is a monster from Lovecraft's cavalcade of creeps The Horror At Red Hook!