Richard Upton Pickman is a Boston painter of unsettling genius whose canvases depict ghouls with photographic accuracy. His narrator friend visits a hidden cellar studio and, in the story's final lines, discovers exactly why the paintings look so real.
A compact masterpiece of single-revelation structure, it dramatises Lovecraft's theory that true horror must feel physically possible. Pickman reappears as a transformed figure in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath."