Beautiful Darkness

An incredibly haunting book. At first glance it looks like a fairy tale for children but after only a few pages in you realise it is quite a sinister tale and something much darker altogether. It is a very brave book I think and I’m not really sure how to categorize it other than it being very, very dark indeed.

This book is an exaggeratedly bizarre and macabre twist on fairy tales.

A child has died in the forest and the gnomes (if gnomes are what they are) who live inside the child’s body are abruptly evicted from their home as the body starts to enter a state of goopy decay. I told you it was bizarre. The gnomes don’t know the outside world and so survival in the forest proves most difficult.

The premise of this book is right up my alley. It’s too strange to resist. But it’s also adorable at times.  With artwork seamlessly ranging from realism… show more.

The best comics, graphic novels, bande dessinées, sequential narratives - whatever you want to call them - invite you into their world and if they’re successful, you’re carried by them, not as you would be by a literary encounter but as an immersive, sensory experience. You have to be open to their visual sensibilities, and perceptive readers will find far more than a fairy tale here. That’s how it begins but it very soon becomes clear that this is a story that expertly contrasts the delightful constructs of a childlike imagination with the damnable awfulness of the real world.… show more.