Virgil Finlay's Shoggoth Pit, Weird Tales Jan 1937 Lovecraft
What startles here is the intimate scale of cosmic horror: a massive, slack-jawed face dominates the foreground, submerged in a roiling mass of bubbles and tentacles, while impossibly tall vertical shafts recede into darkness behind it — a vision of Lovecraft's shoggoth pit rendered with meticulous crosshatch and stipple work that transforms the unspeakable into something almost geometrically elegant. The illustration accompanies H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Thing on the Door-Step' in Weird Tales, January 1937.
Six thousand steps down to an abomination of abominations — Lovecraft was not a man who undersold a staircase. Finlay obligingly rendered the destination in obsessive stipple detail, which is either madness or professionalism, and possibly both.
“The Thing on the Door-Step By H. P. LOVECRAFT 'A powerful tale by one of the supreme masters of weird fiction—a tale in which the horror creeps and grows, to spring at last upon the reader in all its hideous totality' THE THING ON THE DOOR-STEP 53 "The pit of the shoggothsl Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations."”
