Virgin Finlay - In dim abysses

Virgil Finlay (1914 - 1971) - twelve pen-and-ink illustrations for sf magazines.

1. The City of the Dead by Augusta Groner, 1948.

2. The Shadowy Third by Ellen Glasgow, 1951.

3. The Angry Street by G. K. Chesterton, 1947.

4. The Triggered Dimension by Harry Bates, 1953.

5. The Mad Planet by Murray Leinster, 1948.

6. The Man Who Mastered Time by Ray Cummings, 1950.

7. Full Moon by Talbot Mundy, 1953.

8. The Moon Pool by Abraham Merritt.

9. According to His Abilities by Harry Harrison, 1964.

10. The Bird of Time by Wallace West, 1952.

11. And Not in Peace by George Whitley, 1946.

12. Being by Richard Matheson, 1954.

To Virgin Finlay

upon his drawing for Robert Bloch's Tale, "The Faceless God"

by H. P. Lovecraft.

In dim abysses pulse the shapes of night,

Hungry and hideous, with strange miters crowned;

Black pinions beating in fantastic flight

From orb to orb through soulless voids profound.

None dares to name the cosmos whence they course,

Or guess the look on each amorphous face,

Or speak the words that with resistless force

Would draw them from the halls of outer space.

Yet here upon a page our frightened glance

Finds monstrous forms no human eye should see;

Hints of those blasphemies whose countenance

Spreads death and madness through infinity.

What limner he who braves black gulfs alone

And lives to wake their alien horrors known?

Published in Weird Tales (July 1937).