I’ve been thinking recently about squid, and their place in the canon of Gothic literature and film. This has been inspired by reading China Miéville’s novel Kraken (2010); a dark urban fantasy centred around the theft of ‘Archie’, an Architeuthis Dux (Giant Squid) specimen from London’s Natural History Museum. Miéville uses this premise to explore a mythos of doomsday cults and magic. Archie is in fact real, although the existence of a shadowy ‘Teuthist’ cult in London remains unverified. In this post I will explore some representations of these creatures and analys

Salem Brownstone is a relatively lengthy graphic novel that tells the story of orphan, Salem, who, on receiving a telegram informing him of his father’s death, inherits his father’s peculiar house and possessions and is plunged into a terrifying and dangerous mystery involving uncanny circus performers, shadow creatures, dark elders from another realm, and bizarre ritual magic. Initially, the images and tone of the novel place us in a film noir-cum-art-deco inspired universe, where everything is blanched, grey, ethereal and slightly out of kilter.

H.P. Lovecraft opens his essay ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’ with the following declaration: My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualizing more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentari