Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Keruscoet

HAUNTING images from Fabien Vehlmann and Keruscoet's Beautiful Darkness still linger in my mind days after I put the book down.

I ordered the 'anti-fairy' tale with very little idea of what to expect and set to reading it blissfully unaware of the dark trip the creators would take me on. 

A truly unique, exhilarating and at times harrowing read, Beautiful Darkness caught me off guard mere moments into my first reading with a splash page that would have knocked me off my feet had I been standing and one which well and truly set the tone for the dark, hallucinatory story set to unravel in front of me.

It's a comic which defies definition in a lot of ways, and at the very least is a challenge to talk about without spoiling the experience for someone who hasn't read it, with frightening twists and turns often so unexpected the impact of knowing what was to come would surely take away from the experience.

And reading Beautiful Darkness is an experience, a thrilling one.

It is masterfully crafted in every way, from the lush artwork that sets the scene so perfectly, to the superbly considered character designs which add that deft touch of cute to better juxtapose the macabre nature of what unfolds, to the brilliantly realised voice and personality of a whole host of characters, introduced and understood to varying degrees in sometimes just a few choice pieces of dialogue and in at least one case, with barely a word uttered. 

One of my first instincts after reading Beautiful Darkness was that I desperately wanted to talk to someone who had read it too, to unravel it more, because this is a book with depths, and peeling back those layers reveals more and more of the craft that went into creating it. 

The simplest reading highlights the use of juxtaposition, in the title itself, but most obviously in the look of the characters - who appear essentially as children albeit of various size - set against their behaviour, which ranges from playful and naive, to malevolent, brutal and violent.

But that's too simple really, and while it's true that Vehlmann and Keruscoet wield that particular literary device like a blunt object, there is so much more here; the deconstruction of the fairy tale itself, and particularly the tropes of female characters in that genre, the unspoken subplot lurking in the background, the Lord of the Flies-like commentary on pack mentality within a disintegrating community.

As the book progresses, the tensions mount, and nature, both human and the natural world, descend in on the cast, peeling back their cute outer layers to reveal something uglier, but still frighteningly believable and familiar.

Cruelty emerges easily and it's all the more disturbing for the casual way it is enacted by the books cherubic players.

But by then it's too late to look away, you couldn't if you tried. You're invested and you know you have to see this through. 

And so you do, and what you see will stay with you.

Not to say that Beautiful Darkness leaves a bad taste in your mouth, because it doesn't, the creators are too clever for that.

Their resolution is tidy, and while the book asks as many questions as it answers, leaving some threads open to the readers imagination, it's satisfying to the end.

Beautiful Darkness is a comic I will not forget in a hurry. It is truly beautiful and so very, very dark. 

Books like this (although truly, there are no other books quite like this) are love letters to the medium, revelling in the form, while at the same time, breaking the boundaries of what a comic can do, what it can ask of its audience, and the depths which it can achieve.