A
short story by
Neil Gaiman, available in the
Smoke and Mirrors collection published by
Harper Collins. Set in a '90s
Innsmouth, a nervous
Lawrence Talbot, a
werewolf adjustor (He 'adjusts' problems) who appears in a number of the collection's stories, is the focus of attention from various
Peter Lorre-lookalike townspeople. It's a short sarcastic jaunt through the
Lovecraft mythos, and Neil Gaiman pulls it off by avoiding the usual "
eldritch" cliches while still giving a sense of the
cosmic horror caused by the existence of old, powerful nonhuman intelligences completely hostile to humanity's existence. There's a few sly references to old
horror movies in the story -
Lawrence Talbot is the name of the werewolf played by
Lon Chaney Jr. in the movie
The Wolf Man, and
Peter Lorre did his parts in such films. There may well be more I didn't catch.
The story has also been published in the comics anthology Oni Double Feature, issues #6-8, published by Oni Press. It was adapted to sequential art format by P. Craig Russell, illustrated by Troy Nixey, and lettered by Sean Konot. Originally in black-and-white, Oni Press reprinted it in a single volume under the same name, colored by Matthew Hollingsworth. The adaption used only Neil Gaiman's original words for dialogue, with Nixey's fairly unpleasant, bizarre and distorted illustrations filling in for most of the text. It's a creepy little story, and the art manages to hold up despite the fact that most pictures of Lovecraft's creatures are less frightening than the images in one's mind created by description alone. The coloring is passable, if nothing spectacular.