Beautiful Darkness

by Fabien Vehlmann

Other authorsKerascoët (Author), Helge Dascher (Translator)

Hardcover, 2014

Genres

Horror

Graphic Novels

Comics

Graphic Novels and Comics

Description

Kerascoët's and Fabien Vehlmann's unsettling and gorgeous anti-fairy tale is a searing condemnation of our vast capacity for evil writ tiny. Join princess Aurora and her friends as they journey to civilization's heart of darkness in a bleak allegory about surviving the human experience. The sweet faces and bright leaves of Kerascoët's delicate watercolors serve to highlight the evil that dwells beneath Vehlmann's story as pettiness, greed, and jealousy take over. Beautiful Darkness is a harrowing look behind the routine politeness and meaningless kindness of civilized society.

Publication

Drawn and Quarterly (2014), 96 pages

User reviews

LibraryThing member kivarson

Beautiful, haunting and disturbing tale of wee folk living in the woods. Pageantry, joy and play exist in the shadow of a dead child...as the cookies left by the girl are eaten, pageantry and play turn to cruel survival. A few leaders emerge from the confusion, but is the most charismatic leader

the right choice for survival?

Show Less

16 more

LibraryThing member Mary_Overton

Traditional cultures tend to see death as a process. The body collapses and as it disintegrates the spirit/ghost/psyche lingers, often confused and jealous of the living. Add to that a Jungian notion of the psyche being not one entity, but a society of selves, and you have this eerie graphic novel

about “life” after death. The book is a terrifying blend of the unpredictable, yet inevitable, and makes this an entirely satisfactory modern horror story.
Thanks go to Caleb of Avid Books in Athens, Georgia for the recommendation.

Show Less

LibraryThing member mrgan

A masterpiece of creepy fairytale comics. Like the best of Japanese horror manga, it's unsettling and disturbing in a way that made it very uncomfortable for me to even hold the book in my hands, like the pages themselves would rub their misery and evil off on me.

To some, this will be an

anti-recommendation, and that's fine. This is a very upsetting book—don't start it if you're not ready for that. If you are, however, you'll find gorgeous art, tight and smart writing, and unforgettable scenes.

Show Less

LibraryThing member NeedMoreShelves

I don't think anything I've read for RIP this year has felt as perfect for the challenge as this slim graphic novel. This is Lord of the Flies in a fairy-tale world, it is eerie and creepy and unsettling and challenging. This is much less about the plot and much more about the layers of horror,

unwrapping before the readers' eyes. This is a gorgeous piece of art, wrapped around a completely terrifying story.

Like all good graphic novels, there is much to uncover behind the first glance, and this is the type of story than can be read many times, with the reader finding something new upon each subsequent visit to this dark world. I know I'm being vague, but part of the impact of the story, for me, was not knowing very much about what I was getting into when I started. More than anything I've read in the past couple of months, this is the book that has stayed in my mind, lingering in my thoughts, popping up in my dreams. It's good, scary stuff. Recommended for readers who can deal with dark.

Show Less

LibraryThing member nonesuch42

Beautiful Darkness. Well. It was certainly dark. I don't know what I was expecting especially once I found out that this was originally published in French. But still. It is a bright green book and has a little girl in a polka dotted dress on the cover. The watercolors are vivid and detailed. How

dark could it possibly be? Umm. Darker than I ever imagined. With graphic novels, I try not to read too much about the plot beforehand because they are so short already and I still like a bit of surprise in my stories. This was recommended as a 'dark fairy tale', and it was very much that. It starts off with the death of a girl, who apparently has a bunch of little people living inside her. (Do we all? That is the first of many unsettling questions raised by this book.) The little people struggle to survive in the forest and maintain some sense of civilization. But lack of resources and spread thin leadership take its toll and their little society becomes more and more savage. Hungry. Cold. Wet. These adjectives never lead to a happy society. And the little people, despite their best efforts, slip into darkness. Or maybe the darkness slips out of them. Murder. Betrayal. Slavery. Jealousy. Failure. As the little people do more and more to their world and to each other, you realize that they are not different from us regular-sized people. If something like the death of their girl happened to us, we would probably fall into savagery and darkness even quicker. The only hope is the girl in the polka dotted dress. She keeps trying to bring cooperation and peace to the community. Until the end. Even she reaches a point where the charade of civilization cannot be maintained. Man. This book was depressing. Are we really that close to uncivilized? Probably yes. However, I will maintain civilization as much as I can. The alternative is just way too dark.

Show Less

LibraryThing member michellebarton

It may look like a light and lovely fairy tale, but look deeper and you will see that it is not! From the very beginning few pages you may notice there is something a little off, a little different about this one, and both the artwork and the story have deeper levels, much darker levels, with a

touch of dark humor, drawing you in as you try to figure out what really is going on as these tiny people struggle to adapt and survive in their new and sometimes dangerous environment.

Show Less

LibraryThing member Smiler69

Loved this dark tale. At first sight, it seems like just another cute kids book with sweet characters playing around, but then you suddenly realize they are tiny creatures emerging from the corpse of a young girl lying dead in a field, though we’ll never learn how she got there. The little people

are just going about their business setting up camp in a quaint country setting among the local critters and the flies and the maggots as the girls corpse slowly decomposes over the seasons and some of the little people are progressively killed off, as what they are up to is not all such harmless fun and games. Troubling and fun and yes, definitely creepy, just like any good fairytale should be. Read it in the original French because I can and because the tone is best preserved that way.

For a truly great in-depth review that had me understand aspects of the "little people" and more I hadn't figured out for myself, see Eisnein's take on this book on Goodreads.

Show Less

LibraryThing member jen.e.moore

Well, that was messed up. (Tiny, completely amoral faeries living in the corpse of a dead child. Yep.)

LibraryThing member lissabeth21

This is seriously messed up... way too dark and deep for my tastes, but not for everyone. Gore and evil at the heart...I'm not ashamed to admit I don't even completely understand what this really is...the details were too gruesome to let me jump to the bigger themes.

LibraryThing member ShadowWhisp

Beautiful, dark, imaginative. I'd have liked more closure and clarity at the end, but either way it's an amazing graphic novel.

LibraryThing member wanderlustlover

Graphic Novel BookClub October:

Ho-lee-crap. This book is weird, dark and crazy. My eyebrows kept crawling into my hairline the whole time. It's like Lord of Flies meets Heart of Darkness, mixed in with some foreign, snowy, ice land horror story I haven't found yet. I remembering being truly

confused about caring in the first two-three pages, until that last page of the intro, when I suddenly went "....oh...uh....okay."

Then the tiny horrific thing started popping up but being normal. Not pushed out or changed. Not highlighted by the writing or the characters. There are still two pages of truly, awe-inspiring art work in the book (when the girl is waking up in the leaves, and when the man is at his work bench in the cabin), which makes it clear the artist is capable of stunning work and thus the art of this tale is a purposeful choice, though I am still uncertain to why at all.

Mostly I walk away from this one with a bizarre face (and a gratefulness that we were eating boozy ice cream while meeting over it).

Show Less

LibraryThing member francoisvigneault

A pitch-black examination of human nature as played out by adorable little cartoon characters, I fear to say more without spoiling things. It's fantastic and the art in particular is pretty insanely gorgeous, very lush watercolors.

LibraryThing member aratiel

Had to put this one down - it was horrifically disturbing, "allegory" or not.

LibraryThing member Velvet-Moonlight

This book has been like no other I have read. The title is a perfect pair of words to describe the intent of the author and illustrator, leaving me to feel like I am instead reading a growing nightmare. I wish there was more, even though the story ended well enough. There are a few ambiguities left

throughout, and I cling to those as meaning some characters have escaped and live a better fate than the rest. Definitely recommend for those who like a darker twist to their stories/visuals!

Show Less

LibraryThing member whitewavedarling

A gorgeously illustrated book, this tale wraps around and circles both its characters and its readers. It's easy to fall into and devour in one sitting, and the creepy moments are so incredibly tantalizing, it's hard for a horror-lover like me not to fall in love with this book. All that said, I

admit I have a hard time slowing down enough to really focus on the way graphic novels tell so much story through illustrations vs words, and require readers to put together so many pieces to connect the dots. Here, I lost the story thread a few times, and I suspect this is one of those books that may require a few reads in order for everything to be clear. I do wish it had been a bit clearer, in how everything fell together, but the book is such an experience and has such wonderful art, it's hard to complain.

I suspect I'll wander through this one again in the near future and potentially update my review then.

Show Less

LibraryThing member LibroLindsay

I'm not sure yet if I want to use this for my Reader's Advisory class, but I'm still trying to think in terms of how to sell this. How about the Smurfs meet Lord of the Flies... ???

Totally creepy, wonderfully quirky, grotesque, horrific, cute. I felt totally icky after but almost in a good way?

Whut.

Show Less

LibraryThing member thisisstephenbetts

Wow, this is one of the weirdest books I remember reading. Deeply creepy and macabre (it's not for the squeamish), but beautiful with it. A little of The Gashlycrumb Tinies mixed with Lord of the Flies, depicted in a fairy-tale pallet. But that still doesn't give an adequate sense of what to

expect. At heart, it's a slightly meandering story of how children behave in a group, with the kindnesses and loyalties and cruelties and jealousies that involved, with plenty of dark and deadly twists along the way. And the children are weird, tiny forest folk. I'm missing one of the most singular things of the book on purpose (and which you may well already know), because it actually has little to do with the plot, and also shapes expectations of the book so much that I feel like it is misleading to mention it. But you probably already know.

Show Less

Fewer