S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters is a wonderful novelty book, mashing up the Call of Cthulhu RPG and (thanks to a bit of kismet regarding the game creator’s name) the Peterson Guide to Birds. It works like a field guide, with a flow chart for identification, full color plates and notes on habitat and ecology, all delivered with a straight face and referring to dozens of imaginary scholarly reference works along the way. It’s a hoot, pretty much.

While not formally an RPG sourcebook (there’s zero stats or gameplay info), the art here set the image of many of Lovecraft’s “indescribable” creatures in my mind for a very long time. In a way, Call of Cthulhu is an amazing gateway into weird fiction. In another way, it diminishes the source material by reducing nebulous things in concrete images and statistics.

But let’s talk more about the art, shall we? All the color plates are paintings by Tom Sullivan, who did a ton of work for Chaosium from ’82 to ’92, so much so that I can scarcely see his work and not think Call of Cthulhu. Funny thing is, he also worked on another monumental horror project during that period. Maybe you can puzzle out which. Pay close attention to the mouth and eyes of both the Flying Polyp and Ithaqua. And that Dark Young looks a lot like a tree, doesn’t it? Do they remind you of anything, perhaps something you saw in a movie?

I recently learned (thanks, random guy on Tumblr) that Sullivan was behind the special effects for Evil Dead II, designing both the movie’s iconic Necronomicon and the makeup for Raimi’s deadites. Mind blowing. It’s all in the teeth, really.