Along with the fashion and interior architecture I’ve thrown at you comes the larger concept art of the surrounding cities of the high-tech neo-decadent Decopunk-Gothic future I see as one tendency within our mutating civilization as it moves into the unknown future. Enjoy the ride!
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, and other digital tools.
Sometimes you beat your head against a wall and beat it some more until you’re bloody pulp, the suddenly it happens – the breakthrough you’ve been seeking opens its doors slightly and reveals the wonders of a realm you’ve been wander around on the periphery for too long…
Over and over, I’ve been seeking a style that blends my love of the weird and horror-based fiction with my love of the darker approaches to futuristic sci-fi in Bladerunner, Alien, and 
other cinematic worlds… even the films on futuristic vampires by Wesley Snipes comes to mind. A world that fuses the bio-solor-art-decopunk feel with advanced merging of human and inhuman and dark Deleuzian future where assemblages constructed out of parametric generated ai designs take on an architectural voyage into a new world yet to be fully visioned out.
In many ways I’m extrapolating notions that have been current in so many various speculative realist and philosophical circles on ai, futurism, posthumanism and our current trends within the sciences of biotech, nanotechnology, and other aspects of advanced technology. But instead of imposing a new hierarchical vision and one that just continues the 
androcratic neoliberal and male dominated regimes why not as David Roden is suggesting in Snuff Memories a dark return of the pre-Patriarchal societies of the pagan goddess dark matriarchal worlds but in a futurism that blends the old into a total reformatting of human, technology, and civilization that does away with the past and creates the dream of the unbounded potential.
Decopunk is a recent subset of the punk sci-fi genres (specifically Dieselpunk), centered around the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne art styles that were popular during the Roaring 20s and stayed in fashion until sometime in the 1950s. It has a sleeker and shiny aesthetic compared to Dieselpunk, which has a tendency to be more gritty and dark aesthetic to it. Often times, Decopunk will use slightly more modern technology compared to the times it’s supposed to evoke like VHS tapes.
I take the concept and extrapolate it into the future rather than a nostalgia of the past. I envision a future where biotech, nanotechnology, posthumanism and the various invasive 
technologies expose us to an open hybridity in both bodily flesh and social, cultural and civilizational mutations. Becoming something other than human we will begin to see the various biotech-genetics and ai generated incursion of advanced sciences that will at first begin in rogue nations to spawn and weaponize an advanced species of beings. Whether this is beneficial or not it will happen. Even if the First World nations of the West enact laws against such abuse it will go on in black programs under-the-radar of inquisitive nations until it is possibly too late.
I’ll leave the morality of this to others. As a visionary artist I seek only to envision a possible future scenario and tendency already situated in our speculative era of philosophy and art.
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
As I take the rabbit hole into my posthuman landscape with the help of David Roden and Justin Isis I begin seeing strange things…
In fashion a contamination of period styles from all aspects of earth history, an influx of 
genetic hybridity from predatory insectoids (i.e., the greatest predators of the insect kingdom: Arachnocampa luminosa, Dragonfly, Siafu ant, Praying mantis, Japanese hornet), an Autocratic predatory society based on abstraction and absolute sensation of surface 
tensions based on bionomic-nanotech body armor and resilience, a world not based on inheritance of blood-lines but of mood and ambition (Justin Isis – on in which the ancient sense of heraldry, sigil-suits, Holographic tags, drone eyes), artificial flesh and clothing incorporating ai and quantum matrix infusions. An architecture as well that shifts as the winds of climate change transform, mobile, ready to move, based on extensive and elaborated, elegant and heraldic systems of 
biotech-solar-nanotechnolgy that will construct itself out of local environmental needs and designs. This is not a near future world but will obviously place it in the concept abstract category of speculative futures incorporating the posthuman and neo-decadent paradigm.
There is much to do, much to work through, much to design as one incorporates a mutligenetic hybridity, mutlicultural refractions, multihistorical infusions, mutlitechnological incorporations, and neo-economic futurism based on letting the abstractions of the Outside in. I’m only at the conceptual stage and elaborating tentatively the tendencies toward such a 
world. Of course, I’m incorporating and as always beholden to the current posthuman scholarship, artists, architects, designers, fashion, etc. I’d have to name a hundred names that over the past decade have influence my thought. I need to gather a list. But two have hit me from different though parallel thought and moods: Justin Isis, David Roden, and Neo-Decadence,
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
“Rhetorics of depth or intensity must be sacrificed, not because actual bodies are abstractions, but because unbound posthumanism cannot frame the deracinative effects of the future as the adventure of some given subject (whether human, animal, mundane, or transcendental). If this future can be embodied, it is by remaking and remarking bodies, reiterating the disconnection that lifts the formerly human into the orbit of the posthuman.” (p. 82). …
“Posthumanism explores the possibility space of subjectivity through performance— mutating and experimenting with exemplars and models (biomorphs) rather than by inference or dialectics.” (p. 82). …
“I introduce the idea of limit agency to motivate the claim that our concepts of agency might be too parochial to travel far outside our historical niche. If so, unbinding posthumanism requires us to relinquish them as constraints on the potentialities released by the posthuman predicament. Thus, even the ecological agent of Posthuman Life proves too “speculative” for speculative posthumanism, which thus loses its means of identifying disconnection events. We must withdraw from speculations on technological deep-time bounded by a psychology-free ecological agency to terrain where disconnection becomes “maximally unbound.”” (p. 85).
—David Roden, Posthumanism: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic
Note: Somewhere within these beings above there is a subtle inflection of David Roden himself. I used his photos, thoughts, both philosophical and fictional to create these posthuman beings who may or may not emerge out of some artificial agency in our coming age of disconnect.
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
Find Christopher on goodreads: here
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
He’s always sad around the holidays, being reminded of his nostalgia for a lost infernal paradise …
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
I just love miniature globes with all the little scenes carefully crafted in them… maybe we are just a scene in some horror merchant’s hellish paradise… what strange beast hides among the bones of the earth twitching and squirming among the tidepools of time…
Happy Holidays in infernal paradise…
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
“q-thinks Nessa Map’s sandy hair pale freckled, her skin’s persistent taint of cellulose from rotting books. Ligotti renders such things equivalent and useless: libraries, care homes, monasteries, cemeteries, craters, parking lots – ‘starless cities of insanity,’ the back-street medicine shop where his narrator loiters. ‘Medicine-shop situations’ without exception. I cannot, but if I could, I might except the periodic visits from a floating puppet in an anachronistic Pierrot costume.”
—David Roden, Snuff Memories
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with blender 3D, Photoshop, Midjourney ai, and other digital tools.
Art Inspired by David Roden’s Snuff Memories
David’s work is forcing me to think against myself. I see figural, and not abstract; and, yet, I need to turn myself inside out or outside in and see without seeing. New concepts, new techniques. Reading the passage below one can visually see it as physical, but how to see with the unseeing eye the conceptuality in it? This is my task:
“The Editor bursts from our belly and probes the air with lacy, silky antenna. We sponge the area defensively, soaking up blood and scraping something hard and pliant, like a soft shell below my thorax. This body is an enduring mystery.”
I let you decide…
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©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
Been working stylish neo-decadent cycles and landscapes in post-Tokyo strangeness…————————
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Conceptual art for a posthuman future with mutant bikers riding the cyberpunk streets of Neo-Manhattan…
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The anti-representationalist strategies, this aesthetic of ‘abstract horror’, and the fantastic realist use of a conceptual terror fused in sensual abstraction. Along with use abstract concepts rather than metaphors to describe and think the physical against the transcendence mode in metaphysics of two thousand years. —My Aesthetics of the Dark Fantastic
I’ve always been a devotee of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realists whose works unlike the surrealists was not wholly irrational and absurd but dealt with a fusion of consciousness with the unconscious of the world itself. Their philosophy is of a dualistic nature, echoing the philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the psychological theories of Freud and 
Jung, but one can also detect traces of ancient myths and religions, especially those of Mesopotamian origin and belief-systems and the classic struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian characteristics.
These artists of the Vienna School draw their inspirations from the layered labyrinthine underground which represents the other side of life and psyche, the darker layers of dream and nightmare. I’ve attempted in digital art to bring this out through the use of various 
techniques and styles always with the intent of fusing my own philosophical preoccupations with pessimism and posthumanism. This other side, which is an inner imaginative-inspirational counterpart to the real outer world, expressed with the help of logic-alogic associations, analogisation and symbolization could be seen as an alternate reality. Like in dreams, the categories of outer reality and of space and time are dissolved, and past and future blends with the present. Cause and effect are interchangeable, and the infinite realm of the soul is traversed with the help of imagination and fantasy, explored, ecstatically experienced and presented through artistic-creative activity. Continue reading
I have not slept; the darkness would not let me. I have met the daemon within, and he would not let me go till I released him in form…
I’ve been down this path before in my life, but not as intensely as this. I have been scorched by the flames of this dark power and lived. I know I need sleep, and I will. He is burning in me.
Those who have been touched by the daemon within them know of what I speak. It is not a spiritual disease, nor a physical sickness. To be touched by the daemon is to know the unknown as unknown and unknowable. It is, and it rides you like firestorm, it’s wings beating, beating…
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The prince of darkness is a gentleman!
—William Shakespeare“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost“Perhaps the maniac is the only true keeper of the promise.”
–Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“The desert is a paradise. Civilization, a city without a soul, is hell…”
—Gaston BachelardHe’d always known it was there in the darkness, waiting like a momentary absence between love and death. Speed, giddiness, sensitivity, this need to say and do everything and all at once; obsession over details, sleeplessness – that eternal insomnia of the daemon’s power; self-elaboration – as if to justify that
which was impossible; moving through time in quickening death throes; the paranoia of the dammed… In the end it was this obsession with creation, this blind urge to be absolved once and for all with the light, with form… maybe what was needed was formlessness, that ruin of being nothing and no one.
—S.C. Hickman
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“Something must be craved, and something must then pay the price…”
–Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide
Maybe they should’ve known, the signs were always there in the cracked crevices of speech and thought, the silences that would slowly reveal the lesions of fracture that were dismantling the world and themselves. Like an old painting the flecks of plaster falling away, the erosion of years of neglect, slow revealing of the hollow cracks and despair in the pigments of time and ruins. Nothing would remain as the ruptured thoughts made their way out, as the nightmares within fed on the remains of darkened years that would never return.
He would walk the tightrope across which a lone state of delirium might form a hidden route to world-erasure.
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”
—Samuel R. Delany“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.”
—Sun Ra
For those who do not know me both my love of Samuel R. Delaney’s work, along with my early love of a woman who from Uganda I’ve lived my life against the mainstream culture of hate, bigotry, and prejudice in life, culture, and economics. Other artists and authors of the world of Afrofuturism have entered my life and allowed me to share in their vision which is the burden of all of us who must day by day change our lives.
Ytasha L. Womack, writer of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, defines it as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation”. She also follows up with a quote by the curator Ingrid LaFleur who defines it as “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens.” Kathy Brown paraphrases Bennett Capers’ 
2019 work in stating that Afrofuturism is about “forward thinking as well as backward thinking, while having a distressing past, a distressing present, but still looking forward to thriving in the future.” Others have said that the genre is “fluid and malleable,” bringing together technology, African culture, and “other influences.”
Seminal Afrofuturistic works include the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer, and the photography of Renée Cox; the explicitly extraterrestrial mythoi of Parliament-Funkadelic, Herbie Hancock’s partnership with Robert Springett and other visual artists, while developing the use of synthesizers, the Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Deltron 3030, Kool Keith, Sun Ra and the Marvel Comics superhero Black Panther.
The works above and below are not cultural appropriation and will never be sold or profited from, rather they are a homage and a gratitude for a lifelong love of Africa, her people, and the struggles of the diaspora to attain their own identify in this despicable world that is white America in this time.
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The man’s face had seen annihilation,
the war-torn ruins of the earth,
the death of love and sorrow,
the last face of time.–S.C. Hickman
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
—E.M. Cioran
When does art cross over into reality or reality into the unreal world of art? Is inanity in the mind or the world? Why are we so full of desperation and sorrow? Why do we turn a blind eye to the pain of the world? You cannot hide from the nightmare it will find you in your insanity. You cannot escape the darkness it will enter you and consume you. In the end there will be nothing left but darkness and eternal night. No thought, no dream, no… nothing
There is a pain that must be faced, a sorrow that must be seen, a world of darkness no one will believe and all turn from into a sadness without reprieve. I have known sorrow and pain beyond telling. I’ve seen the face of love go down into hell and not return. She left us in the debris of this torturous world of ruins and will not let us out till we have seen her darkness revealed.
Why are we unkind to each other? Why do we hurt each other, when it is ourselves we seek to efface and forget? Why do men obliterate the thing they love? I have wandered the earth of hell and seen the war of death amid the skulls of battered lives where our inhumanity is not a thing of dreams but a stark nightmare that is eating us alive.
If you talk about pain, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. They sink into that night from which nothing sane returns…
*Note: I’ve seen this, the brutalism of the male knows no boundaries, and is everywhere in this hellzone of existence. Sadly. Battered Woman’s Syndrome must be faced by society and change…
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
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“I assume a series of masks in a multi-part invention or fantasy the specialists here misconstrue as cancerous. Here is what Ligotti might describe as the churning latrine of the Absolute, of an insubordinate nature or undialectical future.”
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©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The Servitors of the Outer Gods, also known as the Idiot Flute-players, are a mysterious species expanded upon by Chaosium for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, which were based on August Derleth’s “The Lurker at the Threshold”.
The Servitors of the Outer Gods are amorphous beings that resemble squids, frogs, and octopi which are constantly changing their shape and appearance. When needed they accompany the Outer Gods, though most of them are in the Court of Azathoth.
The music to which the Outer Gods dance to is made by these demonic drummers and flautists. On occasion they will also play for cultists to summon deities or to provide background music.
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The Mi-go are an extragalactic species that has colonized numerous worlds, including Yuggoth (which Albert Wilmarth believed to be the dwarf planet Pluto). They are described as winged creatures with large claws and heads covered in antennae.
The Mi-go are a scientifically and technologically advanced race, having a particularly sophisticated grasp of surgical techniques and neuroscience. (HPL: The Whisperer in Darkness)
The Mi-go are pinkish, fungoid, crustacean-like entities with a “convoluted ellipsoid” composed of pyramided, fleshy rings and covered in antennae where a head would normally 
be. They are about 5-feet (1.5m) long, and their crustacean-like bodies bear numerous sets of paired appendages. They also possess a pair of membranous bat-like wings which are used to fly through the “ether” of outer space (a pre-Einsteinian concept). The wings do not function well on Earth. (HPL: The Whisperer in Darkness) Several other races in Lovecraft’s Mythos have wings like these as well, suggesting they are a standard mode of interplanetary travel.
The Mi-go are fundamentally alien with respect to Earthly life; according to two reports in the original short story, their bodies consist of a form of matter that does not occur naturally on Earth. Similarly, the artwork of the Elder Things of Antarctica depicts both the Mi-go and the Cthulhi as being made of an unearthly type of matter. (HPL: At the Mountains of Madness) 
Due to their alien composition, the Mi-go do not appear in photography, since the matter they are made of reflects light differently, and they can’t consume Earth food. When they die, their bodies dissolve within a few hours. In terms of their biology, they are described as being most like fungi, although their outward appearance is much like that of a crustacean. Interestingly, they are capable of going into suspended animation until softened and reheated by the sun or some other source of heat.
They typically communicate by changing the color of their heads; however, they are oftentimes able to speak the human language. If not, they can modify their bodies to make them able to speak. However, there will always be a buzzy sound when they speak, and their voice sounds creepy. Additionally, they are also capable of telepathy.
The Mi-go can transport humans from Earth to Yuggoth (and beyond) and back again by removing the subject’s brain and placing it into a “brain cylinder”, which can be attached to external devices to allow it to see, hear, and speak. Several types of Mi-go exist, including winged and wingless variations. Being accustomed to the darkness of space and distant worlds such as Yuggoth, the Mi-go prefer to avoid sunlight and are most active at night. However, this aversion to sunlight is not related to eyesight, since the Mi-go are in fact blind and perceive the world by other senses. (HPL: The Whisperer in Darkness)
One of the moons of Yuggoth holds designs that are sacred to the Mi-go. The symbols inscribed upon the moon are useful in various processes mentioned in the Necronomicon. It is said that transcriptions of these designs can be sensed by the Mi-go, and those possessing them shall be hunted down by the few remaining on Earth.
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black things with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts. „
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Night-gaunts are a species of flying creatures inhabiting Earth’s Dreamlands. They are described as having smooth whale-like skin, long slender humanoid bodies, curving horns, leather bat-like wings, and a blank expanse of flesh where one would expect a face to be.
They revere and worship Nodens as their lord and master.
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“We see but do not see, since there is nothing to which the sight can be compared.”
“We as future corpse. In the wake of the infantas, viscera moths pop and circle in the thermals above the refrigerated cradle. Belleypedes skitter over the floor. Abreactive traumas burst as Hazmats gawp like groggy pugilists at the blind editors, unsure of their next move.”
David Roden’s Snuff Memories is the Posthuman Dream Quest, a 21st Century romp through the futural maze where the algorithms bleed and humans are mere flotsam and jetsam in the black circuits of the new machinic civilization. Written as if William Blake had been resurrected in the Secret Forges of the Demiurge, given the opportunity to rewrite his epic worlds as virtual lore for the Machine Gods: a cross between David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard in a Deleuzian Nightmare where Dante and Johnathan Swift travel as machinic companions into Death’s Kingdom.
Truthfully… Roden’s work is one of those strange crossover texts somewhere between theory-fiction and scrying on the wall of Time. It cannot be interpreted, only survived. Like those strange maximalist concoctions of James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon one does not so much read this work as assemble it in one’s nightly dreams as one enters the liminal interzones of the Unreal yet possible future. Each fragment is a Deleuzian rhizome forging new links in a bubble multiverse where the time-wars make and unmake us under the various masks of a plasticity unbound…
Minimalist in intention and design Roden’s Snuff Memories replaces our time-worn memories with its own, shaping us to an hyperaccelerating vector of imaginative need, shifting us into spectrums of dark light where the impossible folds us into the labors of the Abyss.
Check out these links for more quotes and art:
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Thomas Ligotti on the philosopher Philip Mainländer:
“Ontologically, Mainländer’s thought is delirious; metaphorically, it explains a good deal about human experience; practically, it may in time prove to be consistent with the idea of creation as a structure of creaking bones being eaten from within by a pestilent marrow.” (TCHR, 38)
These images have haunted me for years and only now through nightmares and the visionary materialism I’ve always espoused in collaboration with the new ai technologies of image generation allowing me to bring both together in a dark art that exposes the deepest darkness within Ligotti’s literature (along with my own darkness).
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“SIX WEEKS AGO, driving down a sun-splashed suburban street to the supermarket, I saw a young couple and a boy approximately six years old leading an old man down the sidewalk, the boy holding the man by the wrist. On the old man’s head sat a colorful, conical, pointed birthday hat. He was clad in a light blue sweater vest and white linen pants. His eyes were covered with a black blindfold. The trio, clad in catalog-perfect pastels, pleated and pressed and perfectly fitted, grinned and guffawed, while the old man’s slack mouth and upraised brows betrayed discomfort, possibly terror.”
Love reading Matt’s work and really getting into illustrating it. All experiments so far and this one is deeply influenced by Chris Mars, Naoto Hattori & Matt Dangler. I love their grotesque and comic horror styles and each one has his own complex and affective stance along with incomparable details. In this one I blended all three in style, while referencing Chris Mars in oil on panel painting style. Obviously, this is not my style but, and definitely not plagiarism it’s my working through and understanding what they do and how they do it. I love it and want to understand the mechanics of it. I do the same for Matt’s writing which is singular and driven by his own view of existential horror with a comic-horror and satirical eye onto our everyday lives.
Plus, I did not follow every detail in Matt’s superb description. This is not realist, but fantastic realist. See if you can guess who’s in the window there in the back? Yep… you got it right, it’s Matt looking out over the strangeness of it all.
Matthew M. Bartlett was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1970. At an early age he was given as a gift the novelization of The Omen; not long after that, he inherited a worn copy of Christine by Stephen King. He fell deeply in love with horror: with the Universal monsters, with Hammer films, with the rented videos from the horror section of that almost-gone artifact known as the Video Rental Store. He began writing poetry while in the English program at Central Connecticut State University. An abiding interest in horror fiction led him to start a Livejournal page whose posts were his first forays into fiction: bite-sized tales accompanied by doctored daguerreotypes and his own photographs taken in Leeds and Northampton, Massachusetts. These posts centered around a long-dead coven using radio waves to broadcast disturbing and dangerous transmissions from the dark woods of Western Massachusetts. His inspirations are varied and the foremost are certainly not atypical for the genre: H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein. Other authors he admires include Donald E. Westlake, Richard Yates, J.D. Salinger, and Hunter S. Thompson. He also draws inspiration from the radio monologues and shows of Joe Frank; the poetry of Philip Larkin, of Mark Strand, of Stephen Crane; the movies of Wes Anderson, of Ben Wheatley, of the Coen Brothers. He continues to write dark and strange fiction at his home in Western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife Katie and an unknown number of cats.
Reviews by me:
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
A horde of tame, trained hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. There flapped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things… not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor decomposed human beings, but something I cannot and must not recall. „
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Festival
Byakhee are interstellar predators that travel and survive in the vacuum of interstellar space. If one has the means by which to survive the myriad threats space presents, then one could ride a Byakhee to anywhere in the cosmos. When travelling beyond the speed of light, the creature’s metabolism is greatly increased. When descending to the surface of any given planet, it is usually to feed, at which point it is best avoided.
This interstellar race is believed to serve Hastur the Unspeakable and may be summoned to partake in rituals. Composed of conventional matter, they are vulnerable to ordinary mundane weapons but possess cunning intelligence and guile, and some are able to cast spells.
Dwelling in interstellar space, Byakhee do not have bases on Earth, but may be summoned to perform deeds or to serve as steeds, carrying riders through interstellar space – such riders may need to partake of the revered Space Mead to survive such cold journeys. Some suggest that Byakhee do not fly through space but rather fold space around themselves, allowing near-instantaneous transport between two points.
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“The flies got in everywhere: inside lamina upon lamina of human excreta, in sputa and in shit, in piss and blood, in rotting garbage and rotting people, into open wounds and sores, into nostrils and mouths and eye sockets. The flies reaped and they sowed: the fevers, the diarrhoea, the vomiting, the pathogens. Everything about the fly accelerated in the heat: its movements, its life cycle, its mating behaviour. The days got hotter and hotter and the flies got faster and faster at being more and more of themselves. Flies had been following humans for 6 million years, and now that unwearied parasitism had come of age to spectacular effect.”
—Gary J. Shipley, Terminal Park
“An apocalypse does not end so much as uncover. It’s an epistemic revelation, a disclosure of secrets, a divine correction manifested in the world. It shocks us into submission, and from here we see how the world as we’ve imagined it falls away. The end of the world is no more than the end of the world’s conforming to our cognizance of it. The apocalypse is the truth in a place that’s systemically allergic to the stuff.”
—Gary J. Shipley, Terminal Park
Read Gary’s books and find out more about the author of some of the greatest philosophical grotesque works of horror ever written, unlike anything you’ll read anywhere else in this macabre universe of decay and rot:
Links to reviews I’ve done in the past:
*Note: Love collage, and felt it necessary to convey the mood of this world… I did all of these using references from Gary’s work…
©2022 S.C. Hickman Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the images above without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
She wove the threads of light as the songs encircled her every thought and galaxies spun within like petals falling on the winds of time…
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
Couldn’t sleep yet, my mind drifted to my dead wife, remembering the abuse she’d suffered earlier in life at the hands of those in her family… and, brought on the mental and physical disease that finally took her… some nightmares never go away… maybe creating such art is like Patrick Woodroffe another favorite artist once suggested: “Painting is a way of exorcising one’s demons…”
I have my share….
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
“Anareta”
“Planet earth (terra firma) is a giant time machine for consuming time, a fake delusional prison planet of machines consuming humanity as dead toys…” it said.
Woke up with someone whispering the above to me… and, plugged it into my mad codebase of parodic satire.
A while ago I found someone’s full concordance of all the words used in Cormac McCarthy’s 
Blood Meridian. So that’s an exhaustive catalog of where in the text and how many times every word gets used — which is pretty intense. This wasn’t a glossary mind you, so I’m gonna start busying myself with giving definitions for all the words I was unsure/ completely in the dark about.
“The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.”
Anareta is one of my favorite words from Blood Meridian, it’s an old astrological term for a 
planet that signals ill-fortune in your horoscope — the ‘interficient’ planet, the Destroyer, the ruler of the Eighth House, considered the House of Death.
Apparently, the planets you looked to as beneficial and health-giving were the planets in your first house, and perhaps to either side of the eighth, so the seventh and ninth. The chief of these positive influencers was referred to as the Hyleg or Apheta, the Giver of Life.
the word Hyleg traces back to Middle Persian, hîlâk, meaning nativity. Apheta comes from greek, aphienai, to ‘spring forth’ (hienai ) + ‘from’ (apo-). Aphetic and hylegiac indicate life giving qualities.
Anareta — from αναιῥιω — gets used in ancient greek to mean murderer and assassin but I can find no further breakdown of its etymology. I love that in its original use, whatever planet 
occupied the ‘anaretic degree,’ the region of evil influence in your horoscope, was the Anareta, so different planets could assume the title of ‘Destroyer’ — but in McCarthy’s passage he posits the existence of a planet of pure danger and death, named Anareta.
Reread one of my mad essays on Bill Burroughs:
What Burroughs envisioned was an early version of the Internet of things: Smart cities, AI, Robotics, and intelligent objects and artifacts which will one day anticipate, modify, modulate, and ubiquitously decide and make decisions moment by moment at the accelerating speed of light to produce around us an artificial world so meshed in fabricated and up-to-the-moment
resolution that the natural world will have long ceased to matter and the Reality Studio of our Virtual Existence will have overtaken the external and substituted its fake systems and machinic life. A time when the nanosystems that inhabit our bodies will have replaced each aspect of our organic for anorganic substratum’s and we will be processed desiring machines bounded by the pure systems of command and control of a Total Algorithmic Environment (TAE).
It’s as if the ai feeds me back a vision of the Gnostic cosmos written by Theodore Sturgeon and P.K. Dick in a strange new language of imagery as mad as I am. 🤣
Is this the world we really live in, while the one we’ve been deluded into accepting is just a fake insanity and delusion of machines? Yes and no…. like the mad-hatter lost in the insane underworld of posthumanity I follow the lead of my daemon.
We are already living in a lie, living in a Reality Studio of fabricated fictions, part of an assemblage of fake worlds in which we have one use value: as desiring machines whose sole purpose is to feed the Authority, System, Unity, etc. with our energetic desires. As Burroughs described it, we are amusing ourselves to death in a Reality Studio Entertainment System,
The Amusement Gardens cover a continent—There are areas of canals and lagoons where giant gold fish and salamanders with purple fungoid gills stir in clear black water and gondolas piloted by translucent green fish boys—Under vast revolving flicker lamps along the canals spill The Biologic Merging Tanks sense withdrawal capsules light and soundproof water at
blood temperature pulsing in and out where two life forms slip in and merge to a composite being often with deplorable results slated for Biologic Skid Row on the outskirts: (Sewage delta and rubbish heaps—terminal addicts of SOS muttering down to water worms and gloating vegetables—Paralyzed Orgasm Addicts eaten alive by crab men with white hot eyes or languidly tortured in charades by The Green Boys of young crystal cruelty).
Ultimately, we are as a civilization reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence propagation (i.e., The Singularity), the forces of production are going for the revolution on their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolutionary program 
guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now that the long senile specter of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past.
©2022 S.C. Hickman All images were created with Midjourney ai and are licensed by them for personal or commercial use.
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 