The central horror of Pickman's Model is, of course, the realisation that Pickman painted from life and that everything he painted was real, but I've been thinking about the story again, and I think I've caught on something I personally find more horrifying:
Pickman chooses not to be an active bystander.
I'll just pull out a few passages of things Pickman painted, which we learn from the end of the story to be real events he witnessed:
a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves [...] Pickman was shewing what happens to those stolen babesâhow they grow up
a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.
monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.
Pickman owns a gun. He canonically is willing to use it to defend himself when he is at threat.
Pickman also knows that the ghouls steal children and feed the child the meat of human corpses. He has seen ghouls attack people on the subway. He has seen them grinning in anticipation as they await the approach of a victim. But instead of saving the kidnapped child, helping the people on the subway, warning the victim, Pickman... chooses to use the scene for his art. He weighs his art above the value of dozens of human lives.
No wonder he ends up joining the ghouls.
