Harry Clarke's 'Glow and Glare' – Poe's Tales of Mystery 1919

Predating laser light-shows by decades, this image viscerally captures the terrifying power of spontaneous ignition in an alien landscape — a reminder that early illustrators understood dramatic energy physics better than they knew it. Harry Clarke's masterful stipple-and-dot pen-and-ink technique conjures a vast, otherworldly forest of crystalline spires at night, two tiny human figures dwarfed by a catastrophic upward burst of fire, a luminous city or celestial body hovering impossibly on the horizon above the treeline.