Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye's Final and Darkest Era

by Lee Brown Coye, Caleb Braaten (Editor), Mike Hunchback (Editor)

"There was never an artist who came close to capturing horror and dread like Lee Brown Coye. He was master of the weird and grotesque illustration. Coye's sketches had the shape of nightmares."—Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story

"It was always my belief that a good drawing was a good drawing, whether it was in the archives of the Metropolitain Museum or in a pulp magazine."— Lee Brown Coye

No other artist working in mid-century pulp fiction created work as twisted as Lee Brown Coye. By the 1970s, after surviving a life-threatening illness, Coye would outdo himself, creating lurid illustrations exclusive to rare privately published books and fanzines. With nearly one hundred gloriously rendered Coye-penned images, Pulp Macabre showcases Coye's final and darkest era, containing some of the most passionately ghoulish artwork ever made.

Mike Hunchback is an enthusiast of various eras of extreme and bizarre underground art, and is currently working on a biography of original Fangoria magazine editor Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin.

Caleb Braaten operates Sacred Bones Records, which has recently teamed with David Lynch to release his new album The Big Dream.

Genres: Art, Horror, Nonfiction

220 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 2014

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

"After several decades as an illustrator in various mediums, Coye hit a career shift when he started illustrating August Derleth's horror anthologies, which led to Lee Brown Coye to be sought out as an uncompromising illustrator of the macabre. Most of the drawings in this volume contain his work from the mid 1970s, including Manly Wade Wellman's Worse Things Waiting, Les Daniel's Dying of Fright, Hugh B. Cave's Murgunstrumm and Others, as well as Death Stalks The Night (also by Cave) which he began right after a crippling stroke and saw a posthumous release after nearly twenty years." - from the Huffington Post.

Pulp Macabre is beautiful volume. It is a joint release by Feral House and Sacred Bones Records.

See a video and audio preveiw here:

https://vimeo.com/121435576

Personally I wish the pages were a bit larger, that perhaps the publisher had spent a bit more money to make the book a truly art sized book. This is a minor complaint though, as it is just wonderful to have this book and view it's pages.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful volume of Coyes influential art. Great book to leave out and flip through.Definitely one for the permanent library. Thank you Goodreads giveaways!

[Robert Adam Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This focuses on the last years of Coye's life (late 60s to early 80s), reprinting the complete illustrations of many of the books of that era by writers/editors like Hugh B Cave, Manly Wade Wellman and Les Daniels. The writing is largely about people like Robert Weinberg, Les Daniels, Karl Edward Wagner and Stuart David Schiff trying to keep alive and sometimes bring back the contributors to Weird Tales magazine who weren't being published by August Derleth/Arkham House. Derleth had utilized Coye before he died and Coye needed these people for the kind of work he wanted to do and found a larger and maybe more sympathetic audience than he had when he was drawing for Weird Tales.

I appreciated the short biographies because I knew very little about Weinberg and Daniels. I found some of the claims a bit exaggerated (I wouldn't consider Schiff that well known in the recent past and although Coye is very morbid, a lot of the writing seems to describe something even darker than he is) but I do agree that Coye might have been the greatest artist to come out the pulps and his vision was a great deal stronger than even a lot of the most celebrated horror artists.

What I appreciate most is the very late scratchy drawings, I don't think I had seen any of these and several of them are previously unpublished. I think it might be among his best work and I'm not sure how much this was a chosen direction for him and how much it was him struggling with his ill health, it is said he needed to relearn how to draw. 75 isn't so bad an age to die but I wish he got longer to explore this scratchy look.

This is a nice addition to Arts Unknown, most of us will never find or afford A Retrospective.

[Jeff McIntosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Pulp Macabre" is the story of the last few years in the life of Lee brown Coye, and his work for Carcosa House and Whispers Press. Coye worked with Karl Edward Wagner and Stuart David Schiff in providing art for their respective volumes.

Short on text - long on reproductions by Coye.

A great companion volume to Ortiz' "Arts Unknown".

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

LBC love you man but why do you keep cross-sections of real human faces in a folder just labeled "MISC" in your research files like think of the poor researcher trying to understand ur brain dude. cmon. I do appreciate the scavenger hunt for the desecrated Civil War crypts though that was fun

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous works of art -- and youthful photos of Karl Edward Wagner make this an amazing volume.

[Rick Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic and quick read. The illustrations are horrifying in their simplicity. It is easy to see why he was king of his time.