Nicholas and Edith by Dan Berry

A DARKLY beautiful ghost story, that is both powerful and evocative, Dan Berry's Nicholas and Edith, has a lingering quality, perfectly hitting its storytelling beats throughout to craft something like a narrative palindrome and a true masterclass of the mini comics short form.

That it was created in under 24 hours at this year's Lakes International Comic Art Festival just makes it all the more impressive and marks Berry as a must stop for any collector browsing tables at future festivals.

His artwork recalls Quentin Blake. It's simple and elegant and gives his cast a fluid form, allowing then to be strong and fragile, brutal and vulnerable, and finally ethereal and dreamlike, as they turn into shapes our mind reaches to make sense of, but can never truly focus on.

In his backgrounds and settings too, there's a hazy fairytale-like quality that could place the story anywhere and at anytime.

Berry uses colour sparingly but precisely throughout Nicholas and Edith, letting an almost monochromatic palette calling to mind the faded sepia tones of old photographs and adding to the tale's timeless aspect.

Those colours are given even more power over us when they wash over the page and flood the scene - whether that's in one of Berry's evocative seascapes, or later and more ominously in the book's more violent moments - heightening our emotional response to the story and letting us share in the young lovers romance and drown with them in their tragedy. 

Nicholas and Edith - even in its title - has the feel of a parable, like a tale to be retold over and over, throughout the ages, perhaps with changing names and locations, but with the same charcters, never quite escaping the vicious circle of their own savage and ill-fated love.

Berry's narrative grasp is deft, and in his hands we always feel assured that he has a beginning, a middle and an end, and when we reach that end with him we will have learned something, about the characters in his story, but hopefully, also, about ourselves.

Beautiful, passionate, filled with longing and sadness, cloaked in brutality and violence, tense, perfectly paced and expertly crafted, Nicholas and Edith is a book I know I will come back to, because it's a story that has already taken up residence in my imagination.

Dan Berry is an illustrator, designer, cartoonist and lecturer who has produced a number of small press comics available to buy at www.thingsbydan.co.uk. He tweets at @thingsbydan.