Wayne Barlowe is a painter who writes, and if you read the novels without knowing that you will come away with the wrong impression of both.
He is the son of two natural history illustrators, he trained at Cooper Union, and he spent his twenties painting paperback covers before publishing Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials at twenty-one. That book did something nobody had done: it treated the aliens of science fiction as though they were real animals, with ranges, biology and behavior, presented in the format of a field guide. It was nominated for a Hugo and an American Book Award and it has been in print for over forty years.
Then he found Hell, and has been painting it ever since, which is where most of the Wayne Barlowe books come from.
The thing to understand about the Wayne Barlowe books before you buy one is the ratio. Barlowe’s imagination is extraordinary, his worldbuilding is dense and internally consistent, and his imagery is among the best in the field in any medium. His plotting is simple. His characters are functional. The novels are enormously worth reading and they are worth reading for the world rather than the story, and pretending otherwise sets a reader up for disappointment.
He has also designed creatures for Hellboy, Blade II, Avatar, Pacific Rim, Harry Potter, John Carter, Aquaman and The Rings of Power, so you have almost certainly seen his work without knowing it.
I’ve read both novels. I’ve said so.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Buy Barlowe’s Inferno. It is the best horror art book anyone has made, if art book is even the right category for it, and it is where everything else comes from.
Then God’s Demon if you want the novel, and go in for the imagery.
The Hell Books
Three art volumes across twenty-three years, and they are the reason the Wayne Barlowe books matter to a horror reader.
Barlowe’s Inferno (1998)
An illustrated vision of Hell as a place with a geography, a climate, an architecture and an ecology, presented as though observed rather than imagined. Introduction by Tanith Lee.
It is not illustration in the ordinary sense. There is no story being served. Each painting is a report from somewhere, with a caption, and the accumulation builds a coherent underworld: cities constructed from compressed souls, buildings that are alive and in pain, demons with a rigid political hierarchy, and a landscape that is itself the punishment.
The lineage is explicit. Blake and John Martin’s Pandemonium, filtered through a natural history illustrator’s discipline, so the demons look like organisms with an evolutionary history rather than like symbols.
If you have any interest in horror as a visual tradition, this is one of the essential objects.
Brushfire: Illuminations from the Inferno (2001)
The second Hell book, and it is where the world gets its architecture.
Where Barlowe’s Inferno is a gallery of figures, Brushfire builds the place. Fortresses assembled from the bodies of the damned. Industrial landscapes. Armies on the march. The Wall. Structures that are visibly made of people and are also functioning masonry.
The paintings are darker and larger in scale, and Barlowe has said the two books were conceived as a single project that grew.
The commentary is minimal, which is the right decision. He supplies names, ranks and a sentence or two, and the reader assembles the political order from the images.
This is the volume that made God’s Demon possible, because the novel’s Hell is not invented in prose, it is described from paintings that already existed.
Out of print and expensive secondhand, which is the recurring problem with all three.
Psychopomp: The Art of Hell (2021)
The third and most recent, published in 2021, and it collects two decades of Hell work including material from the two earlier books alongside a great deal that was unpublished.
It is the best-produced of the three. Larger format, better reproduction, and Barlowe includes preparatory sketches and studies alongside the finished paintings, which is genuinely instructive if you are interested in how he builds a creature.
There is also more text than in the earlier volumes, including notes on individual works and on his sources, which run from Bosch and Bruegel to medieval doom paintings to nineteenth-century anatomical illustration.
If you are buying one Hell book, buy this one. It is in print, it is comprehensive, and it does not require the other two.
The title refers to the psychopomp, the figure that conducts souls to the afterlife, which is a role several of his creatures occupy.
The Novels
God’s Demon (2007)
I’ve read this one, and you buy it for the imagery, no surprise from one of the best creature designers alive.
Hell here is a fully realized civilization with a geography, an economy, an architecture and a political order that has been stable since the fall. Souls are the raw material. They are processed into masonry, tools, furniture and weapons, and Barlowe describes the industrial sequence in detail, and buildings are visibly made of people who are still present.
Sargatanas, a general of the fall, has sickened of Hell and set himself a project no demon ever conceived: fighting his way back into grace.
The theology of the attempt is the interesting part. Whether redemption is available to a being who fell knowingly, and what would have to be true about God for it to be.
My reservation: thin story, functional characters. An extraordinary world crossed by an unextraordinary plot, and the honest grade lands square in the middle.
Also on religious horror.
The Heart of Hell (2019)
The sequel to God’s Demon, twelve years later, and it continues Sargatanas’s campaign directly.
Hannibal is in it. The historical Hannibal Barca, damned, and Barlowe treats him as a competent general who has spent two thousand years in a place organized around cruelty and has adapted.
The world-building expands considerably. More of the geography, more of the political order among the fallen, and more of the industrial process by which souls become material.
The problems are the same ones the first book had. The prose is functional, the characters exist to move through the setting, and Barlowe is a painter constructing scenes rather than a novelist building people.
A third volume has been discussed and has not appeared.
If God’s Demon worked on you this continues it competently. If the thin characterization was what put you off, nothing here addresses it.
Read the art books first regardless.
The Science Fiction Art Books
Before Hell there was the other career, the one that made his name at twenty-one.
Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials in 1979 was a bestseller, went through multiple printings, and is still the reference point for illustrated speculative xenobiology. Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy followed in 1996, doing the same job for invented creatures from Tolkien, Peake, Moorcock and others.
Both are structured as field guides rather than as art books. Each creature gets a full-page painting, a physical description, notes on habitat and behavior, and a scale comparison to a human figure, and the format is the reason they worked.
His parents were both natural history illustrators for the American Museum of Natural History, which is the entire explanation for how he approaches this.
Expedition is the third and it is his own world rather than somebody else’s.
Expedition (1990)
His own planet, invented from the biology up, published in 1990 as a field guide by a human expedition to Darwin IV in the year 2358.
The premise is that the planet’s animals evolved without eyes. There is no light-based vision anywhere in the ecosystem, so everything navigates by sonar, by heat, by chemical trace, and Barlowe works the consequences through every organism.
The creatures are the best things he has designed. Arrowtongues, gyrosprinters, emperor sea striders that stand two hundred feet tall on stilt legs and are visible from orbit.
The text is a naturalist’s report, illustrated with field sketches and finished plates, and there is no plot and no characters.
Discovery Channel adapted it in 2005 as Alien Planet, with Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku commenting, which is a strange object and is faithful to the designs.
It is his masterpiece in either medium and it is out of print.
Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979)
Published in 1979 when he was twenty-one, and it made his name immediately.
Fifty aliens from science fiction novels, each given a full-page painting, a physical description, and notes on habitat, life cycle and behavior, presented as a field guide rather than as an art book.
The selection is the pleasure. Clarke’s Overlords, Herbert’s sandworms, Niven’s Puppeteers, Weinbaum’s Tweel, Lem’s Solaris ocean, Vance, Blish, Simak, Tiptree. Barlowe read the source texts and built each creature from what the author actually specified, which almost nobody had done.
The scale comparison to a human figure on every plate is the detail that makes it work as a reference rather than as decoration.
It went through many printings and is still the standard for illustrated xenobiology.
Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy followed in 1996 and does the same job for Tolkien, Peake, Moorcock and others, and is the weaker of the two.
The Film Work
He has worked as a creature and concept designer on a substantial number of films and most people have seen his work without knowing it.
Hellboy and Hellboy II with Guillermo del Toro, Blade II, Pacific Rim, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, John Carter, and Avatar, where he worked on the Pandoran fauna.
Del Toro is the significant relationship. He has spoken repeatedly about Barlowe’s influence, used him across several productions, and the two share a source list that runs through Bosch, Goya and medieval religious painting.
Barlowe has said the film work funds the painting and that he finds design-by-committee difficult, which is why the personal projects matter to him more.
The relevant point for a reader arriving from horror is that the aesthetic in God’s Demon is not literary. It came out of thirty years of designing things that had to be physically buildable, and it shows in how solid the Hell of that novel is.
Where to Start
Buy Barlowe’s Inferno or Psychopomp and treat it as the primary text, because with Barlowe it genuinely is.
Then read God’s Demon, knowing that you are reading a world rather than a story, and that the world is worth it.
And if the Hell material grips you, Expedition will show you that the same discipline applied to alien biology produced something equally extraordinary and considerably less bleak.
The older end of the shelf is on my horror classics page. God’s Demon belongs with my religious horror list, in the hell-as-place tradition.
