The price was a rather steep US$55.00, the place was Amazon.com. I suppose I should have gotten it straight from CreateSpace, but whatever.
The book is, as advertised, a collection of illustrations of the various beasties and entities in Lovecraft's work - which, although this is not immediately apparent, also includes the work of all of HPL's collaborations before and after he died, entries from his commonplace book, stories based on entries from his Commonplace Book by Ramsey Campbell et al., and some selected Clark Ashton Smith critters for good measure. It is also an impressively thick soft cover - 354 pages of regular paper - and this presents the first real problem.
Really, for an art book - which it is, even if it's sized as a regular book - is glossy paper. You're buying it for the art, and you want to make out every detail. Which brings us to the second problem: somewhere while scanning this book, or colorizing the images digitally, or resizing them to fit the page, or just using low-rez versions of the images, the outlines have become pixelated. This isn't particularly noticeable when you're holding it at a reasonable reading difference, but it becomes painfully obvious when you bring it anywhere near your eyes to try and look at details that are simply lost.
Aside from this, there are a few layout and presentation issues. There is no introduction or author/writer's word, so the general assumption is that you the reader know what you're buying and why you're buying it, and the actual format is very easy to figure out. There is also no table of contents (or rather, there is, but it's disguised as an index and placed at the back of the book). The basic format is: Name of Critter (top left), illustration of critter, and then a selection of quotes showing where the critter is found/described in Lovecraft's oeuvre, sometimes with additional quotes from supplemental sources. Other critters in the quotes that are also illustrated in the book have their names bolded and rendered in red, which unfortunately sometimes causes words to run together. But this is fine, a good way to do it; I might have move the critter names to the right-hand side of the page for ease of flipping through it, but that's a minor quibble. More arresting is the occasional displacement effect - an image too large or a line too long that gets booted to the next page, leaving a vast white emptiness.
Which all boils down to: this is a fairly slick but still fairly expensive amateur production.
Bukowski's artwork, the core of the book, is actually very good - I would very much have enjoyed seeing them professionally inked and printed on nice glossy paper at a larger scale, though the cost of that book would likely have been enormous. While I have a few quibbles with Bukowski's research, some of his interpretations are brilliant - Hastur in particularly is a kind of golden anti-Cthulhu which I thought particularly appropriate and striking. Naturally, in covering so many monsters there are also a few...odd choices. For example, many of the peripheral critters from "The Colour Out of Space" were given separate pages, so there are entries for "Deformed Rabbit" and "Grotesque Woodchuck." Likewise, HPL's occasional references to real-life mythology and demonology are depicted alongside his Mythos creations.
The final segment of this review discusses the adult content in the book, and has been spoilered:
Spoiler:
All in all, I probably would not recommend the purchase of this book - it feels like a betamax, especially for the price. I do hope Bukowski continues with his Mythos artwork, and eventually produces a more professional product at some point in the future.
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