I never thought I'd see the day. My curiosity got the best of me when I came across this digital copy of the UK skin magazine, MAYFAIR from 1970, so I thought I'd take a quick peek--you know--just to look at the articles. Hardly a few pages in, I stopped, and not just a little surprised: here was H.P. Lovecraft's story, "From Beyond"! Interest in HPL was enjoying a new resurgence at the time, but still, to have one of his stories published in a men's magazine? It truly boggles the mind.
Written in 1920, "From Beyond" was first published in the fan magazine, THE FANTASY FAN #10 (June 1934), and has since been anthologized many times, as is the rest of his fiction. It is not recognized as one of this best tales, but it's his first to elaborate on the recurring theme of his characters discovering a world outside our own five senses and the resulting interaction with it. You might know it better as cosmic horror.
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| The first page of HPL's original manuscript. |
After the story itself, it is best known for Stuart Gordon's film adaptation from 1986. And here it is, over a half-a-century later, in a men's magazine.
A very unusual Lovecraft artifact, to be sure.
The accompanying illustration is by George Underwood. Underwood is a British artist and musician, who played in two different bands with his high school friend, David Bowie. Underwood famously punched Bowie in the eye in a fight over a girl which left Bowie with permanent sight problems. Nevertheless, they remained life-long friends.
Underwood gave up on a music career and went to art school, In the 1970s he designed album covers for Bowie (THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS, HUNKY DORY) , T-Rex, Procol Harum, and Mott the Hoople among others. He also illustrated hundreds of book covers.
Okay, since you might be wondering, here's the cover.
Founded in 1966, Mayfair's first deputy editor was the future horror novelist Graham Masterton and it apparently counted William S Burroughs as an early regular contributor (both fiction and non-fiction), although that was a bit before my time as as occasional reader). It carried science fiction and horror stories well into the 1980s, under second editor Kenneth Bound, but all that disappeared when it was engulfed by the Paul Raymond porn empire in 1991. There was also a two-page comic strip, Carrie, in which the titular heroine always began the story fully clothed and ended it naked; from its debut in 1972 until 1975, it featured painted art by Don Lawrence (The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire).
ReplyDeleteThere was also a fair amount of genre fiction in the rival 'top shelf' magazine Knave during the 1980s, including some early stories by Neil Gaiman. I was actually approached to do some editorial work for both Knave and its slightly less salubrious sister title Fiesta, but that's another tale for another time...
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