I’d never seen him do his Regular Clown before, but I knew the figure’s history, in that this very Clown had formerly arrived at a hospital to cheer up a terminally ill friend.
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He made darkness gleam by his character performance, with the same seeming ease by which he does it with his fiction. Caped, fanged, and green of complexion, he made the sinister a joyful terror. Now “normal” clowns are frankly creepy, but the delightful thing about Wilum doing the bright and cheerful type is that his usual character was the vampire Count Pugsly, promotor of Jones Fantastic Museum. Once when I was staggeringly unable to cope with the next minute of existence, a knock came to the door, and when I opened it, there stood a traditional party clown with huge red lips and clad in motley. I dare say I survived the ‘seventies because of his friendship and concern, whether he knows it or not, and I suspect he knows since I lingered at times on the precipice of a suicidal depression, from which he refused to let me fall. In Wilum’s case I am additionally privileged to call him brother, of the kindred soul kind, having known him since our wondrously ill spent days of youth. It restores somewhat my faith in humanity that the truly strange, the truly beautiful, and the completely individual can be met with delight by a visible number of deeply dreaming readers. To my surprised delight both men were found by devoted followings, each achieving a comprehending audience. And here were depths of darkness and sorrow and disturbing moments of humor and grotesquerie that seemed to have seeped from bleakly loving souls, broken rather than twisted, broken by an ugly world perhaps, manifesting in our material world like diamonds of jet. The public likes crap, and preferably particolored unoriginal crap. In both cases, having read their stuff before they were published anywhere but the amateur press, I felt they were probably too original for popular success. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, then made those lessons into something strictly their own-emotive, decadent, lonesome dark jewels. There are really only two living authors I believe took a lot of what they learned from H. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author and publisher. This edition © 2013 by Arcane Wisdom an imprint ofīook Design & Typesetting by Larry L. The Strange Dark One (first published in Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep by Miskatonic River Press 2012) In Memoriam: Robert Nelson (first published in Lovecraft eZine June 2012) Introduction © 2013 Jessica Amanda SalmonsonĬover Art, Signature Sheet & Interior Artwork © 2013 Gwabryel Brechet