DESTROYING ANGEL
DESTROYING ANGEL
Cover illustration for The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series X
All of the concepts I submitted for the 1982 Year's Best Horror Stories cover were strong. If I had tried to guess which one would be chosen, the concept that became this painting would have been my last guess.
But Don Wollheim saw possibilities in the concept better than I did and selected it to develop for the cover. For an allegory on the use of opium and its derivatives— specifically heroin—I posed the Angel of Death amid a field of poppies, offering a false mask of friendship.
He is accompanied by diverse symbols and various accoutrements of the drug user. On his head, he wears a single wing, representing false freedom of thought and the illusion of flight, and he wears a crown of Destroying Angel mushrooms.
The tree is meant to suggest the dendritic branching of blood vessels, but it is withered. And the background consists of a purple haze—a reference to the reason I got to ruminating on the whole subject to begin with, the death of Jimi Hendrix.
Additional images from DESTROYING ANGEL
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What’s funny to me is that the first time I saw that cover, “Purple Haze” was my earworm for the rest of the day. (I LIVED for each new “Year’s Best Horror” collection, both for the great stories therein and for the equally enticing covers. I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if not for these, and for a bookseller in the late Eighties who encouraged my and others’ appreciation of good horror fiction.)
I know I used to have a cassette tape I picked up strictly for this album cover, but can’t for the life of me remember the name of the band. I dimly recall a metal cover of Eleanor Rigby, but I could be getting that confused with some other obscure album.