Fans of H.P. Lovecraft will recognize the author’s face in Paul Peart-Smith’s illustrations for “He,” a story drawn from the horror master’s unhappy sojourn in New York. Volume II in the project of transforming Lovecraft’s short stories into graphic stories includes other clever touches amid the many writers and artists contributing to this effort. The essence of the nine stories represented here is boiled down into prose suitable for speech balloons and captions, and the pictorial styles veer widely, from comic books to beautifully colored illustrations to highly stylized geometrical representations. The only problem is that the best of Lovecraft’s cosmically uneasy horror is always best left to the shadows of the imagination.
