YagaZap!

Halloween Inspired Paintings

These will be in the upcomingMonster Show 4 at Domy Books in Texas this Halloween.

Vastarien

How many times I gotta tell you freaks? Aint nobody sleeps with uncle creepy peeps!

Nightmare Nazi Demons (fragment)

Say hello to a few of the nightmare nazi demons from An American Werewolf In London.

WitchFinder General

Hands Of A Witch

Two grotesque hands, old and wrinkled, wrap around a neck, squeezing tighter and tighter. Each finger stretches unnaturally apart and around, again and again, coiling down the body. Long sharp black fingernails scratch along the skin. The ribcage collapses, the air escapes in a deep horrified wheeze. The eyes drip blood, then spray like running faucets. Every organ bursts, every bone breaks, every muscle rips, the body closes in on itself like a burst balloon. The impossibly long fingers looping in an ever tightening pattern. A strange pulsing occurs, each finger tip like the mouth of a leech, the blood, the bone, the liver and kidneys, stomach and intestines, sucked through the labyrinth passages up and around, towards the ever enlarging hands, floating in the air as they make a disgusting wet sloshing sound, seeming ready to burst.

The fingers release their victim, slowly then quickly winding back into the semblance and size of normal fingers, if only bulging with some sick meal still oozing into the still growing hands. The shriveled body drops lifeless to the floor, an expression remains on the flattened face of intense unimaginable pain. The two hands float strangely like something from a cartoon, drifting through the open window and into the night.

Somewhere in the forest a dead witch sleeps, her body mutilated and torn apart, piece by piece. Lost are the legs, gone are the arms, eaten by wolves or taken as trophies. But the hands remained, one last curse on man, the nightmare duties given to them through the blood of babies and the hearts of men. Flying like bizarre bats through the trees, across vast fields of corn, into small villages where, drop by drop, bone by bone, the witch's hands return the life taken from her.

News Regarding Books Involving Stephen King And Thomas Ligotti

I learned a few weeks ago that my illustration of the Mist story by Stephen King will have detail shots used as the end pages as well as be featured as a two page spread somewhere in the upcoming gigantic artbook titled "Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired By Stephen King" with none other than the director of the recent Mist film, Frank Darabont, writing the introduction. The book will be expensive but worth every dollar given the amazing printing quality and vastness of visual content in the book being published by Centipede Press. You can preorder the book here ranging from several hundred dollars for the standard version to somewhere over one thousand for the bells and whistles version. If you have the previously released H.P Lovecraft artbook from Centipede Press that I had artwork in, this book will be of the same size, but with more pages, and make a nice companion to that book.

I'm also incredibly honored to announce that I will be doing the cover to the upcoming reprint of Thomas Ligotti's "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" with the blessing of Thomas Ligotti himself. The book will be published by Subterranean Press next year. An article regarding the reprint can be viewed here.

Post Apocalypse Abomination!

A brief experiment in photoshop done while I should have been working on a million other projects.

In The Shape Of Man

Had a weird idea for a story the other night. A child is found dead in a bathtub covered in strange suction marks that look like they came from the mouth of a lamprey eel. After the child is buried, the plumbing back home starts acting weird, toilets overflowing, weird rattling pipes in the walls. Then late at night the mother hears the sound of heavy breathing coming from the dead child's bedroom. She opens the door and finds the dark outline of a small child on the bed. After turning on the lights she sees what looks like dozens of black eels slithering in the form of her dead child. She screams and they break apart into the shadows, making a wet slippery noise into the dark. The husband comes into the room thinking his wife is crazy.

Maybe a plague of unknown animals, digging into graves and feeding on bodies. They climb out of the ground to recreate the dead. The vocal cords emulated through the throats of monsters, a high screech that blends back down into lower decibels to sound like a long dead grandfather. A twisting undulating mass of the creatures stretching into an arm, the end a giant ball uncoiling like the head of a medusa.

I picture human shaped things covered in sheets walking strangely, some losing sense of the anatomy of humans and contorting, stretching, pulling apart into nightmarish abstractions of what resembles a person. The sheets wrapped tightly like skin around them, intended to hide what is underneath, writhing and pulsing in and out as the eels coil through each other in the shape of man.

It ends with the extinction of the human race, an unimaginable number of the creatures combined into billions of human designs, some far beyond recognition. An insane parade of creatures imitating people, all traveling towards one destination. A pilgrimage to someplace in Africa, perhaps the Middle East. The most ancient of human remains, recreated and calling to the others. A siren sound that shatters through the sky, the weather deforms around the destination. Storms grow in intensity around a vast towering structure. All the creatures build over one another, higher and higher into one gigantic shape. The human designs break apart into almost spider or crab like anatomies, the size of trucks, long limbs stretching over one another, climbing higher and higher. Lightning flashes on the miles high collage of twisting pulsating eel like creatures. Eventually it all stops moving, all of the grotesque creatures become solid as stone. The storms disappear, leaving a Godlike structure reaching miles into the sky. But somewhere inside something is moving, scratching, banging, trying to make its way out.