Terrance Lindall - Further Illustrations for My "Bottomless Bottle of Beer"

Bottomless Bottle - The Cast

(aka The Castaways)

Terrance Lindall

Terrance Lindall, avant garde artist and intellectual provocateur, has sent me another illustration, which you see above. I'm very fortunate to have an artist of Lindall's standing take an interest in my story and agree to illustrate it. His visual creativity, literary erudition, and intellectual interests make him perfect for the role of illustrator.

The above cover is obviously intended as that of a comic book, one of the literary venues Lindall is considering. On this cover, we see several of the cast of characters, though not every one of them, e.g., Koroviev, Beelzebub, and Belial, among others -- but they will not be neglected. In fact, I have images of them stored on my computer, all by Lindall, of course.

As for the characters depicted above, many of them have already been introduced to readers who regularly visit this blog. The Naif and The Wife are unnamed in the story, but they're young college graduates with promising careers -- he works in an engineering firm and she in a law firm. They are the perfect postmodern, multicultural couple -- Yuppies for the 21st century. Mr. Em is a Mephistophelean character, so there's an influence from Goethe's Faust on him, but also from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, for he takes after Woland in having more dignity and shares an etymologically identical given name. Behemoth, Hella, and Azazello are borrowed entirely from Bulgakov and will be familiar to anyone who's read The Master and Margarita, though my version of Hella is more talkative. Not depicted here is Koroviev, who likewise is borrowed from Bulgakov and belongs to this band of demons, though Hella is not merely a demon, but something of a vampire, too, modeled after Lilith, the ancient night-hag who slips into the rooms of young infants at night if their windows are left open by careless parents, or so the old tales relate. Azazello also has something of the vampire about him, as his single fang suggests, and Lindall's depiction may have something of Nosferatu about it. As for Webster, he's borrowed from "The Devil and Daniel Webster," a short story by Stephen Vincent Benét. I also borrow heavily from Milton, particularly for the undepicted Beelzebub and Belial. There's even a borrowed beer from Neil Gaiman, along with a few allusions to his story "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar." As you can see, my story is intertextual.

I'll post more of these for the interest of readers as the anthology's publication date approaches, though most of the images are to be used in the book version, not in the anthology's short story version.

Until later . . .