Wayne Douglas Barlowe has a successful career as an illustrator for fantasy and science fiction books. Even if one doesn’t know him by name, his style is unmistakable. While fellow illustrator Boris Vallejo takes his cue from the noble tradition of the American pin-up, Barlowe renders his subjects with the disinterested expertise of a natural history illustrator. Barlowe’s pictures retain the flavor of John James Audubon. What Audubon did for birds, Barlowe does for Guild Steersmen, dinosaurs, and Overlords. The Audubonian emulation continued with the publication of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979) and the companion volume Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy (1996). In each book, the aliens or mythological creatures possess a physical presence that bespeaks a plausible reality. He designs these beings with a meticulous anatomical accuracy. Beneath the fantastical exteriors (scales, skin, fur, etc.), one can observe the bones and muscles.

Barlowe gave vision to his own imagination, not the ideas of others, in Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage of Darwin IV (1990). The world and creatures are entirely fabricated, but the book itself has a feel of a National Geographic feature article. Writing as a participant on the voyage, Barlowe and a fellow alien species travel to Darwin IV. The planet presents an alternate evolutionary track with varieties of animals in a coherent ecological system. Unlike Earth, the animals lack jaws and eyes, Barlowe theorizing Darwin IV experienced a prolonged period where the sun was blocked by clouds or fog. The results are visionary, beautiful, and thought provoking. (Barlowe brought this same artistic and scientific rigor to the creature design of Avatar, the only saving grace in that otherwise overlong, tedious, morally simplistic cinematic train wreck.)

Barlowe’s Inferno brings together the two strands of his previous work and welds them into a uniquely innovative version of Hell. He reprises his role as the artist-traveler, in this case working like a netherworldly John Singer Sargeant painting portraits and landscapes. Instead of the Post-Reconstruction nouveau riche and the Grand Tour, we see Belial, Lilith, and Molech. Instead of cathedrals and canals, we see the teeth of Leviathan crushing cities made of bricks, the bricks made of souls hammered and smashed into place, Procrustean and sadistic. Because Barlowe’s work espouses a natural history ethic, he also included the portrait of an Australopithecine demon, a kind of Darwinian Cain and a wry callback to the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. A “firstborn” chews a soul in the desolate landscape, the creature a remnant of the original inhabitants of this alien environment. Barlowe posits that Hell was colonized following Satan’s Fall in the same manner of human colonizations. The fallen angels became demons and then dominated the landscape in the manner akin to human deforestation, urban development, and gentrification. Demons have designer handbags, this time made from filleted human skin.

Barlowe renders the textures with haunting precision. Demons have skin like stone and the damned have bodies warped like funhouse mirrors, their stony bodies morphed into ironic tortures. The book, a combination travelogue-natural history catalogue, makes, to paraphrase Milton’s description of Hell, “darkness visible.” Barlowe’s darkness is culturally diverse, physically horrific, and uniquely visionary. It represents a modern homage to Dante’s Inferno and a daring extrapolation on the theme of damnation.

This review is part of a blog post examining how different artists depict Hell:

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/critical-appraisal-the-lands... ( )