Fabien Vehlmann & Kerascot have achieved something with "Beautiful Darkness" that I've never experienced before. They have created a truly melancholic horror book that offers something beautiful. For all intents and purposes this book pleases the eyes and disheartens the soul. It's an odd reading exercise that you won't soon forget, and its joyfully dejected tone doesn't make much sense. Yet, the entire thing works gracefully like a dance with death. I've read it twice now, and I fear what a third reading will do to my psyche. Read Full Review

This astonishing work seeps in slowly, settling you with Disneyesque anticipation. But the story's cued rules and social routine are upended into confusion early on and the situation quickly descends into panicked chaos, glancing horror, futile attempts at bravely re-establishing order -- these are themes that are revisited again and again in picaresque tableaus, acknowledged with only momentary befuddlement as you pass by, collecting imagery whose implications register only after you've moved onto the next interlude, received the next small shock. This is not your usual horror story - it is an illustrated fast-forwarded destruction ad decay. The closest that comes to it in feeling are the very darkest and most discomfiting of fairy tales, whose innocent and valiant heroes are expensed in the most clinically imaginative ways. Scenes of minute and intimate brutality are stumbled upon like bread crumbs, presented as if they were part of our natural world (and oh! shock! - they are!) - individual agonies are barely registered until you have settled into a quiet moment away from this work... then they are keenly felt, staining the edges of your unsettled consciousness. This is a shredded and muddied silk ribbon of the best storytelling. Brilliant, deeply moving and uniquely devastating. more