The outstanding synecdochic signifier for a revenant human dead is the skull—mind-seat now empty-eyed, memento mori, grinning, screaming. The nonpareil iteration of the embodied Weird is the tentacle, and by suspiciously perfect chance, the most Weird-ly mutable—formless—of all tentacled animals is the octopus, the body of which, a bulbous, generally roundish shape distinguished by two prominent eyes, is vaguely homologous with a human skull. The shapes are ready, and take little to combine: the Weird-hauntological monster is clearly a tentacled skull.
Print of China Miéville’s drawing for his text M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire in Collapse IV: Concept-Horror.
Digital print on archival art paper, 51 × 34cm. Edition of 50 signed by the artist.
Available in our shop.
