The narrative begins in a Boston restaurant where an unnerved narrator named Thurber recounts his past acquaintance with Richard Upton Pickman, a brilliant but deeply controversial painter of the macabre. Thurber explains to his friend Eliot why he abruptly cut ties with Pickman and why he can no longer bear to enter subways or cellars. Although the art community and traditional exhibition spaces rejected Pickman for his grotesque and morbid subjects, Thurber initially admired the artist's profound insight into the anatomy of fear and his uncanny ability to capture the terrifying overtones of the human soul.
As their acquaintance deepened, Picking shared his philosophy that true weird art requires the deep, accumulated memories and massed traditions of ancient slums rather than the artificial streets of newer neighborhoods. He boasted of maintaining a secret, dilapidated house in the historic North End, positioned above a network of colonial-era tunnels and an ancient brick well that once connected to graveyards and the sea. Driven by morbid curiosity, Thurber agreed to visit this hidden studio, located deep within the oldest and dirtiest alleys of the district.
Upon entering the secret studio, Thurber was confronted by a series of finished canvases depicting monstrous, bipedal creatures with canine features, rubbery textures, and indescribably grotesque faces engaged in gruesome acts of scavenging and predation. Unlike the works of other weird artists, Pickman's paintings possessed an unsettling vitality and stark realism, as though the monsters were living beings rendered directly from sight rather than imagination. One particularly horrifying canvas portrayed doglike creatures teaching a human child how to feed, implying a monstrous evolutionary linkage and the dark reality of changelings.
Moving deeper into the cellar studio, Thurber encountered even more disturbing modern scenes of the monsters overrunning contemporary Boston subways, cemeteries, and domestic spaces. Finally, Pickman revealed his largest and most terrifying work yet, a colossal canvas featuring a nameless, red-eyed fiend gnawing on human remains with a technique so intensely lifelike that it seemed to breathe. While inspecting this final masterpiece, a series of frantic noises and scrambling sounds echoed from the ancient well, prompting Pickman to draw his revolver and fire into the darkness while shouting about bloated rats.
Thurber escaped the labyrinthine alleys that night, deeply shaken but still uncertain of the full truth behind his experience. The final revelation came the next morning when Thurber discovered a small piece of curled paper in his pocket that he had absentmindedly plucked from the giant canvas. The paper was not a photograph of a painted background as he had initially assumed, but a photograph taken directly from life, proving that the horrific monster in the painting was actually modeling for the artist.
