Beautiful Darkness

by Fabien Vehlmann, Kerascoët (Illustrator), Helge Dascher (Translator)

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.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics, Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Adult

94 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2009

About the author

Usually uses the pseudonym Vehlmann

Fabien Vehlmann est comme son héros : pétillant, engagé et plein d'humour.

Après avoir patiemment suivi les cours d'une école de commerce nantaise, Fabien Vehlmann réalise que sa voie est ailleurs. Bien décidé à se lancer dans la bande dessinée, il se consacre à l'écriture de manière intensive durant une année entière. Il empile les projets et inonde scrupuleusement la rédaction du journal Spirou. Sa ténacité est récompensée : il y fait ses débuts dans le courant de l'année 1998. Dans les pages du beau journal, il apprend son métier en scénarisant des animations, puis ses premières séries dont le fameux "Green Manor" avec Denis Bodart.

Curieux et enthousiaste, Vehlmann touche à tous les genres : humour, science-fiction, aventure, conte,... Il multiplie les collaborations avec des dessinateurs aux styles aussi divers que Matthieu Bonhomme ("Le Marquis d'Anaon"), Frantz Duchazeau ("Les Cinq conteurs de Bagdad") ou Bruno Gazzotti ("Seuls"). En 2006, il réalise une première aventure de Spirou et Fantasio avec Yoann : "Les Géants Pétrifiés". Quatre ans plus tard, les deux compères reprennent en main la destinée du plus célèbre héros des Editions Dupuis...

Les albums de Spirou qu'il emmènerait sur une île déserte : Le Nid des Marsupilamis, Le Voyageur du Mésozoïque et Virus.

Source: http://www.dupuis.com/catalogue/FR/au...

Reviews

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is without a doubt the darkest, sickest, most jaw-droppingly insane graphic novel i have ever read.

which is me paying a compliment

it's a book that explores that old philosophical thought experiment: if a little girl dies in the forest and no one is around to see it, do little fairytale characters crawl out of her head??



and if so, do they then find themselves with no idea where they are or what they are meant to do now and suddenly confronting many dangers from plants



animals



and each other??



oh, it's a chilling scene, man...don't get attached.

it's a relentlessly grim book, and much more intense than i had anticipated since the artwork is all cutie-pie wide-eyed and sugary



and every time something grotesque or startling happened i would think, "well, surely that's the most horrible thing that will happen in this book, right?"



and i found myself proven wrong



time



and time again



page after page. no joke.

everything starts out all nice and cooperative when these tiny creatures are first thrust into the world wandering dazed, unmoored and bewildered, but things quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies-style anarchy, selfishness, manipulation and rapid desensitization; from casual cannibalism to equally casual live burials and even the best-intentioned are ultimately forced to acclimate themselves to the harsh world by accessing their most primal survival instincts.



i'm gonna drop some words now, and those of you who have read the book will remember what they correspond to and we can all have ourselves a little shudder together:

slurp plop plop

revolting.

but revolting in that way that totally rejuvenates me because i love knowing i can still be horrified.

i really want a sequel to this, or a rec for a book that is as gorgeously repellent, horrifyingly alluring, beautifully dark.

so hit me with 'em.

come to my blog!

[XenofoneX · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful Darkness
(Spoilers Ahead.)


Vehlmann and Kerascoet have created a fully-painted, sugar-coated nightmare. It's an anti-fable, reminding us that underneath the beauty, life is pointless, brutal and absurd. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it's my kind of fun. People seem fairly split on the merits of 'Beautiful Darkness', which is to be expected; but the contents are all succinctly summed up in the title, as artist & writer seek out beauty in death, decay, the subterranean depths of human nature, loss & utter despair. There's no real moral to this story, no shiny little wisdom you'll want to save or pass on to the kids. In fact, it's probably best you keep your kids away from this poisonous little wonder... unless they've been boring lately, and you think lightly traumatizing them might help. There's a nihilistic singularity where the heart of this tale should be. It's got no helpful or instructive lessons, but there's truth in every panel. The kind of truth that Prozac and heroin were made for.



As the corpse of a young girl decomposes, a group of tiny refugees flee her rotting brain. They are the fragments, figments and facets of the young girl's personality; they are the complex, conflicting and still-evolving qualities that once added up to a child named Aurora. Watching these fragile and miniscule creatures struggle to survive in their deceptively dangerous new woodland home, standing in for the world in general, has painful allegorical associations. Watching these characters die, we are seeing the child die, from an angle our eyes struggle to make sense of. But what these ignis fatuus phantasms exactly are, how they became manifest, and who or what is responsible for the death that serves as a grotesque, mystical genesis... these are questions Vehlmann leaves unanswered. Instead, he follows the increasingly desperate fate of these delicate, not-so innocent characters. The protagonist shares a name with the dead girl - Aurora - and might be the most fully-developed facet of her personality. Unlike her fickle, self-absorbed boyfriend Hector, Aurora has a nascent conscience. She takes the initiative, providing some of her idiotic and often helpless friends with food and shelter. But beneath the adorable, oxytocin-triggering façade, most of these ungrateful little freaks are borderline psychopaths, particularly the selfish, mercurial Plim, and the cruel, devious 'Princess' Zelie. The sweeter and gentler kidlings die off quick. Scissor-wielding Jane is the exception. Clever and diffident, she wants nothing to do with the rest. She's the closest thing to an adult in this tale -- the untethered shadow of Aurora's stunted maturity -- with the exception of the enigmatic 'Giant'. His ramshackle cabin seems to be just a short hike from the body... and that's judged from the perspective of characters with two-inch-long legs. He appears to be a recluse who enjoys tinkering with scrap machinery, and the only reason for suspecting him is proximity. We learn he kills his own dinner, meaning he wanders the forest daily hunting game; so how could he have failed to stumble onto the girl? How could he have failed to notice the smell? Perhaps he did find her body, but fear of being blamed, or fear of having to face people again, led him to ignore the discovery...



The disturbing convocation of maggots and flies and beetles eventually turns the body to bones. As autumn closes in on winter, the games become savage and mean. Aurora's attempt to throw a party with the kidlings and their woodland 'friends' has disastrous results; most of her pals don't show up, and the ones that do get carried off and eaten when the beasts turn beastly. Getting stood up by her obnoxious peers and pissed on by a rude hedgehog leaves Aurora disillusioned with the world, and her kindly spirit is crushed when the malevolent 'Princess' Zelie steals her boyfriend, making Hector her 'Prince'. Aurora gives in to her anger, taking it out on a dapper mouse undeserving of such treatment. She leaves the surviving members of the fucked-up little corpse community behind, and finds a home with Jane in the Giant's cabin. The ending is suitably bitter; there's no resolution for the 'real' Aurora, no answers regarding the Giant's identity: was he an agoraphobic hermit? A murderous, simpleton pedophile? Or an analog for the modern-day 'god of the gaps', aloof & uncaring, uninterested in the child's life, her death, or the emissarial emanations of her abbreviated persona? For Vehlmann and Kerascoet, it's almost irrelevant. The physical remains of the dead girl become a setting, somewhere between landscape and architecture. The last violent ignition is strangely satisfying, however, wrapping this gorgeously toxic package up with a melancholic ribbon.



Fabien Vehlmann seems hard to pin down and label as a writer: moving from the solidly mainstream BD ‘Seven Psychopaths’, his ‘Dirty Dozen’-type WWII thriller with the solidly, stolidly mainstream artist Sean Phillips; to his collaboration with Norwegian 'indie' cartoonist Jason, ‘Isle of 100 000 Graves’; and now giving us something very different with ‘Beautiful Darkness’, this time engaging in a triune cartoon communion with the two-person artistic entity known as ‘Kerascoet’. So... yeah. Vehlmann's kind of all over the place, creating bespoke scripts (as Alan Moore was famously known to do), stylishly & stylistically tailored to suit the unique graphic language of the artist he's working with, and with 'Beautiful Darkness', followed by the brilliance of 'The Death of Stalin', he's established himself as one of the best European writers working in the medium. As much as I love Jason’s artwork, ‘Beautiful Darkness’ is definitely the best of Vehlmann’s work I've encountered to date (alongside 'The Death of Stalin', which came later); it's like an episode of Fraggle Rock directed by David Lynch, or a Smurfs album scripted by Garth Ennis... but better than either of those things. While Vehlmann’s story deserves much of what plaudits it's thus far received, however, it’s probably Kerascoet who's worked the hardest to earn their rightful two-thirds of the credit. If it weren’t for the gorgeously macabre cover, the vibrant watercolor pages give the impression of a children’s book. But once you start reading, the ugliness beneath the leaves suddenly becomes clear.

From the back cover: “(…) Join princess Aurora and her friends as they journey to civilization's heart of darkness in a bleak allegory about surviving the human experience.” Seriously? Come on... no one survives the human experience.

In a very real sense, every written & unwritten biography begins with an infant & ends with a corpse. Far too many of these stories are tragic for their brevity: adolescence & adulthood abridged by Time & Circumstance, editing lives without mercy, without any feel for storytelling. All these forgotten biographies leave us with is the almost tangible, glimmering, hummingbird-winged flight of Potentials, Possibilities, Probabilities & other spirits of that ethereal quantum ilk, cousins of the Fae & other such extinct fictions. There's beauty in unrealized, unfettered Potential: it's a nigh-infinite superposition of lives wonderful & sad & lovely & terrible & radiant, with no one there to open the box & collapse the wave-function. The box of possibilities forever sealed; possibilities forever/never possible; there is beauty inside that darkness.

[Kelly (and the Book Boar) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

Beautiful Darkness begins with Prince Hector and Princess Aurora enjoying a spot of tea when all of a sudden the roof starts dripping all over them . . .



If you’re anything like me you begin to wonder what the hell kind of house are they living in that has a roof that leaks splooshy red shit all over??? You then immediately regret asking that question . . .



What the F*!?!?!?!?!



The synopsis sums things up quite brilliantly. Beautiful Darkness is indeed an “unsettling and gorgeous anti-fairy tale.” Nearly every page is filled with breathtaking watercolor illustrations detailing some sort of delightful squickyness via a plethora of characters who literally come pouring out of the corpse. Terrifying little characters like this . . .



and this . . .



and these . . .



and ones who goes from this . . . .



to this . . .



via this . . .



Charming, right? *shudder*

All of those characters had me thinking maybe that creepy child killer had the right idea and saved us all from the second coming of Satan.

This gets 5 Stars for the sheer f*&^ery of it all (and because Mitchell said he would hurt me if I gave it less).

[Erik B.K.K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't get the positive reviews. I thought the graphic novel had awesome ideas - but it was very poorly executed. The novel does NOT have a story, it does NOT explain, it does NOT have an ending & it does NOT satisfy.

I waited months for this (the translation) - and was deeply disappointed... This is only enjoyable if you are easily satisfied by art and some horror 'quirks' that lead to nowhere.

I give this three stars, only because I did see potential and felt the love of the author for his work.

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice in Wonderland meets Lord of the Flies!

I LOVED this horrifically DARK fairy tale where adorable ragamuffins turn on one another in an effort to stay alive (or occasionally, just for the hell of it!)

Never has murder, cannibalism and vengeance been so fetching! Or so gorgeously rendered!







I honestly can't think of anything I've ever read that's been so utterly charming and so wholly disturbing. In case you missed it before - this is DARK. Very, very DARK! (So don't come crying to me if you have nightmares.)

But for those of you who have an appetite for the strange and unusual and for those of you who can't help wondering just who will survive WHEN CUTE THINGS ATTACK!, well, then . . . this is the book for you.

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not often that I personally characterize something as both excellent and nauseating.

[not my high · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book killed something inside me

[✘✘ Sarah ✘✘ (former Nefarious Breeder of Murderous Crustaceans) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh and stuff. If there had been an actual story here, I might have slightly enjoyed this graphic novel a little more better. But there wasn't (because no, a succession of supposedly horrific occurrences does not a story make), so I didn't.



P.S. Don't trust my so-called friends' outrageously generous ratings for this book, they all read it very terribly wrong.

[Seth T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can you say about a work you can’t be sure you understood, a communication garbled in translation? Would it be fair to judge such a thing at all? If I see a movie but am mystified as to what happened in it or what it meant, it’s hardly fair for me to say either that it was great or horrible. I might as well talk about how I felt about the latest Takeshi Miyazawa piece despite the fact that my cataracts[1] make actually seeing the work with any clarity impossible. If I don’t understand the thing, I am entirely incapable of judging its value, its ability to succeed at what it attempts to accomplish.

The temptation of the everyday consumer-critic, filling Amazon and Goodreads with 5- and 1-star ratings and more than their share of exclamatories, is to complain that the work was not made accessible enough. If I the reader, viewer, appreciator cannot grasp its meaning, then the creator failed the task of communication. Obviously I’m sympathetic because we all like to imagine we’ve acquired the acumen to properly understand any reasonable thing. Also there does exist the possibility that a particular author, through a mismanagement of storytelling, simply didn’t do it right. Eleanor Catton recently and properly, I think, took aim at this notion:

These days, the idea of being a “good reader” or a “good critic” is very much out of fashion—not because we believe that such creatures do not exist, but because we all identify as both. The machine of consumerism is designed to encourage us all to believe that our preferences are significant and self-revealing; that a taste for Coke over Pepsi, or for KFC over McDonald’s, means something about us; that our tastes comprise, in sum, a kind of aggregate expression of our unique selfhood.

So while the potential exists that a work fails in its goals and so is confusing, very very often the problem is instead within us—because we imagine ourselves to be wise, intelligent, and critics and our tastes to be objectively Good. Caution, therefore, is merited. And this is especially more often the case when authors show every instinct toward being talented enough to say exactly what they intend to say.



I’m going to be up front on something that concerns one of my favourite comics from the last fifteen months: I don’t understand Beautiful Darkness. I loved it, but I don’t get it. Not yet at any rate. Maybe some day. When I’m older, perhaps. Or maybe later this afternoon when everything just suddenly clicks and I’m left wondering how I could have missed something so obvious. But likely, I won’t ever discover the depth of its purpose without some sizable assistance—perhaps some focused conversation with like-minded friends, hashing out details and proposing interpretations.

So then how can I justify my rating of this book? If I don’t know what it meant, or even necessarily what happened, can I reasonably tell you that you should read and enjoy this book even as I did? Perhaps not.

But all the same, I did enjoy Beautiful Darkness. I was entranced while reading. It held me rapt with its grim and lushly vibrant sense of itself. So instead of justifying why a person should enjoy Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s book, I simply talk about why I did. At least for now, while I fail to understand it.



Artistically speaking, Beautiful Darkness is a tremendous exhibition of the illustrative craft. I first encountered Kerascoët’s work in Miss Don’t Touch Me , which was lovely and wild and inspired me to pick up the present book. However grandly I felt toward Kerascoët, reading Beautiful Darkness was revelatory. The artist flits between cartooning and realism deftly. His colours paint a world very much like our own. Warm, cool, sinister, cozy. Just taking a moment to flip though Beautiful Darkness infects the soul with the sense that people are amazing, that wonderful things are afoot. It’s possible that there might be a more visually splendid comic released in 2014, but probably not super likely.

The writing is funny, and its Hunger Games-style[2] storyline evolves at brisk enough a pace that readers will never have the opportunity to grow bored. The situations presented are morbid and darkly humourous. I laughed and gaped at several points—a rarity for me.



It’s the other aspect of the writing that I can’t be certain about. The part about What Happened. On the surface, it seems pretty straightforward. A young girl dies in the forest and a host of tiny, often grotesque people emerge from her corpse and struggle to survive in the woods. But it really isn’t that simple. There is more there, sometimes under the surface and sometimes squirming on top. I found the publisher’s descriptive text unhelpful and probably actually wrongheaded.

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.

None of this reads like someone who actually grokked the work. At least not closely. I may not understand Beautiful Darkness completely, but I do understand that the above reading is incompatible with the text as revealed. Aurora is not a princess. The idea that this is an allegory for human survival against the instinct for societal self-immolation fails to fit the available information. Other reviews invoke Lord of the Flies (which is fine, I guess) but leave it there with William Golding’s critique of the natural human spirit as being essentially depraved (which is not fine, and actually lessens Beautiful Darkness as a mere derivation of a common observation).

I don’t wish to be too contrarian because it’s likely that these readers didn’t understand the book any better than I did.[3] Making too much of something, going for the facile interpretation—it’s an easy trap to fall into when one feels as though they have to say something wise, intelligent, or insightful about a book. I feel that pressure a lot. And I’ve fudged things before as well. So it’s not like I’m blameless. I think I just wished for better criticism because I love this book and want to understand it.



I love this book for what it appears to be. I love this book for the promise of what it might be. I love this book in the same way a sixth-grader might have a world-shattering crush on the girl two rows back in World Cultures. She is seen and heard but ultimately only known tangentially. But still, she is a fixation—and adored. That is Beautiful Darkness to me. It’s lovely and amazing and probably the most perfect thing ever created. Just like that girl in sixth grade you never spoke to and whose real identity remains a mystery to this day. Unattainable and foreign: the perfect crush.
_______

[Review courtesy of Good Ok Bad.]
_______

Footnotes
1) Note: I don’t actually have cataracts. Just a minor and 100% glasses-correctable astigmatism.

2) Or Battle Royale if you’re so inclined. I know I am.

3) My Interpretation
My guess works well sometimes and less well at others. I think that, likely, these small creatures are miniature incarnations of the many facets of Aurora The Dead Girl’s personality and that Aurora The Little Creature is just one of those facets (and perhaps the one most commonly associated with Aurora The Dead Girl). I think the feral one is probably the facet that represents Aurora’s terror in her demise. And still, barrels-full of questions remain.

I don’t understand why they’ve bubbled to the surface. I don’t understand what it means that they eventually weed themselves out until, Highlander-style, there can be only one. I don’t understand how Aurora was to have died (she was surprised by her death but there were no wounds or blood on her corpse). I don’t understand the place of the Man in the story, whether he bears some connection to Aurora The Dead Girl (and hence to Aurora The Little Creature). I don’t understand why Aurora’s body is left to decompose, with the Man so close at hand (certainly he would see or smell her as he passes close enough to nearly step on Aurora The Little Creature). If he killed her, why not hide the body? If he didn’t, why not recover the body? Is Aurora really literally dead at all? Is it significant that the Man has a broken doll? What is the man working on so diligently?

[Jan Philipzig · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess this is supposed to be the disturbing and darkly postmodern deconstruction of "happily ever after." The story has its moments (the utterly ruthless behavior of the self-absorbed bully princess), but overall I found it a bit pointless. Does "happily ever after" really still need to be deconstructed?

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

From The Brothers Grimm to Disney, fairy tales have been sanitised to appeal to all ages - family-friendly entertainment! - except, as most people know, they had very dark origins. Stories like Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel featured “grown up” themes even though fairy tales, until the 19th century, were consumed mainly by adults.

Beautiful Darkness is writer Fabien Vehlmann and artist Kerascoet’s subversive take on the well-defined genre as little people living inside a young girl escape when she dies and try to survive in the woods. But life in an increasingly harsh environment overwhelms any fairy tale niceties and the unpleasant side of human nature - prejudice, lies, and taking advantage of innocence - takes over their charming society.

Kerascoet’s watercolours and childish/cartoony art style is perfect for Vehlmann’s increasingly dark tale. It starts off making you think this is some fluffy kid’s book and then before the title page we see the corpse of a little girl - and THAT’S where our characters have been living?! There’s also something sinister about seeing the many horrible things the characters go through via the prism of this cutesy art.

A character, hungry, sneaks into a bird’s nest thinking the mother bird will believe she’s one of hers. The bird does and sticks her beak way down into the character’s throat but it’s too big and the character’s insides are punctured, blood welling in her throat until she dies. Later another character is carried off by some ants and gets buried alive. A deformed character, who’s also a transvestite, is killed for being different. One character is eaten by a larger one. And all the while the art looks perfectly sweet and suitable for kids - but the story isn’t!

Kerascoet’s art really is gorgeous. The sunset landscape page is stunning and when he draws humans, it looks almost photographic it’s so real. The colours too are very vivid and the comic as a whole looks very impressive.

While this book’s not badly written, I did wonder what the point of it was. A Tom Thumb/Borrowers-style story but messed up - ok, and? It also gets predictable once you notice the characters’ world falling apart and pretty one-note too. By the end, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to take away from it - people can be dicks to one another, fairy tales can be edgy? I’m not sure. If it was just to entertain, it only half accomplished that.

Beautiful Darkness is an ok comic but definitely not the best work from either creator. Vehlmann’s best remains the brilliant and underrated Green Manor series, and his 7 Psychopaths book with Sean Phillips (of Criminal/Fatale/Incognito/Sleeper fame) is worth checking out too. Kerascoet’s best remains the Miss Don’t Touch Me books.

Beautiful Darkness is a pretty book with some interesting scenes but the post-modern fairy tale has been done to death at this point and this comic doesn’t have anything new to add.

[Hosein · Rating 5 out of 5]

معمولا ترسناک‌ترین آثاری که بهشون برخوردم، اونایی بوده که کمترین ایده‌ای نداشتم قراره توی ژانر وحشت باشن. مثلا همین گرافیک ناول Beautiful Darkness رو تصور می‌کردم یک کمیکِ کودک خیلی ساده‌ست، یه چیزی مثل کارهای اسلایس‌ اف لایف انیمه‌ای. ولی خیلی اشتباه می‌کردم. این گرافیک ناول یکی از خشن‌ترین و تاریک‌ترین کارهاییه که تا الان خوندم، در حدی که بعضی وقتا حس می‌کردم زیاده‌رویه.

داستان سر راستی هم داره، خیلی بی‌دلیل شخصیت‌های داستان کوچیک می‌شن و خودشونو توی جسدِ رها شده‌ی یک دختر بچه وسط جنگل پیدا می‌کنن. مجبورن که یک جامعه‌ی آخرالزمانی (؟) تشکیل بدن و سعی کنن توی این دنیای جدید زنده بمونن. جسد دختر و فاسد شدنش توی کل داستان داره روی زندگیشون تاثیر می‌ذاره، تمام شخصیت‌ها همینطور که جسد به مرور از بین می‌ره، اخلاقیاتشونو از دست می‌دن و هر بار که حس می‌کردم از این بدتر نمیشه، می‌شد.

یکی از مدل‌های کمدی تاریک اینطوریه که بخش کمدی به حدی تاریک و اذیت کننده می‌شه که وجودش یک آیرونی مسخره می‌سازه که حتی باعث تاریک‌تر و خشن‌تر شدن بخش دیگه می‌شه. این یکی از هموناس.

مخصوصا شخصیت اصلی داستان، قهرمانی که قراره آدم خوبه‌ی داستان باشه، اصلا با هیچ کدوم از اون معیارهای قهرمان جور در نمیاد. مطمئنم اگه جوزف کمپل این گرافیک ناول رو می‌خواد احتمالا چند دقیقه به خاطر استفاده‌ی عجیبش از سفر قهرمان جیغ می‌کشید.

در کل، یکی از بهترین گرافیک ناول‌های وحشت بود. بدون شک پیشنهادش می‌کنم.

[☾❀Miriam✩ ⋆｡˚ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, let's put it like that. Have you ever read Lord of the flies? Imagine it illustrated by a childrens' book illustrator and you have this book. This was unsettling to say the least.



And even though I liked the idea and the artwork very much, I think this book lacks in cohesion, and it disturbed me how everything seemed just thrown there.



Characters appearing out of the blue, disappearing and reappearing without need; different sizes of people (??), many of them drawn with different artstyles - making the art non cohesive either -, different perspectives appearing for just a few pages, and some disturbing stuff appearing without context. Which, I supposed, was ment to be unsettling, but just felt out of place.



Honestly, I believe this book could have been much better with a little bit of editing.





I mean, I love the watercolour art, and even if the characters felt a little "lazy" compared to the background (I get that it's a stylistic choice, but still it just made the whole messiness feel worse), I liked them too. It's just, this book could have been much better with a little more work put into it. I am curious to check out more work by the same artist though, because he definitely has talent.



I would give this book three stars for the idea, two stars for the story and four for the artwork, so I decided to give an average rating of three. Still worth checking out, in my opinion.

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm trying to figure out how I feel about Beautiful Darkness. It's like Lord of the Flies with illustrations that disarm you with charm and then blindside you with gruesome.

The story features a cast of characters that make up the imaginary world inside a young girl's mind. Within the first couple pages, the characters are evicted, and are forced into the real world. At first, the naivety with which they explore their new world is cute, but soon their childlike exploration turns dark as the characters either die through circumstance (like becoming a bird's snack) or through the actions of another character (like one character burying another alive for a game). Sometimes I felt like I was watching a kid pluck the wings from a dragonfly.

I found the illustration style appealing but the content repulsive. I haven't had that kind of push and pull in a reading experience in a while. That said, it's not an entirely enjoyable feeling and for that, three stars is as high as I'll go.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billed as an anti-fairy tale, but only if your fairy tales are written by Disney. The original Grimm's fairy tales are every bit as macabre and dark as this is. It's about a bunch of Borrower or lilliputian types who live in the shelter of a dead little girl. The simple watercolor art is a nice juxtaposition to scenes of wholesale murder or nature existing without a moral compass. This suffers from a lack of overall story. It almost feels like a series of vignettes or even a comic strip that has been collected with little one-off stories of people being awful to each other or nature doing what nature does.

[Books with Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought provoking.
And dark.
And disturbing.
And unsettling.

[Melina Souza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vídeo resenha: http://bit.ly/2K9WpOd
Como diz Taylor Swift "I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream", essa graphic novel começa muito bonitinha e fofa mostrando um casal tomando uma xícara de chá quando o teto do local onde eles estão começa a cair. Mas não é um teto comum e sim uma "gosma vermelha".
Bom, esse casal estava dentro do cadáver de uma garota que está caído na floresta.
Sem dúvida uma das histórias mais perturbadoras que li. Me fez pensar no Senhor das moscas (mesmo sem ainda ter lido esse clássico) e me deixou bem chocada com várias situações.
As ilustrações são maravilhosas e, em vários momentos, assustadoras como a própria história.
Definitivamente não é um livro para crianças (por mais que a capa e as três primeiras páginas possam parecer que é).

[monica kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The artwork for this graphic novel is stunning and whimsical, but the story itself is dark and gruesome. Definitely one of the more disturbing stories I've read. However, the message and critique of polite society are clear, and it'll have me contemplating the meaning behind the ending and various scenes for awhile.

[Raina · Rating 4 out of 5]

mmmkay, this is something else, people.
It's a sweet little story that snaps your head off at the end.
It's a disarmingly charming world that flips into some very dark places.
It's definitely not for kids.

These cute little beings are horrifying to each other. The forest is a brutal place. You can make your home in the most repugnant locations. Just because something is adorable does not mean it is not capable of the worst.

The execution is beautiful - it really goes well with the mood of the piece. The more I think about this, the more I respect it.

Unique.

[Liz Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The process of reading this book:

OMG!!! Look at all the adorbs!!! AWWWW...........


What the hell is this?


I am having nightmares tonight......


MUMMYYYYYYY!!!!!!!


That was such a nice comic... Hey mama! You gotta read this!

[Steve Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kerascoët, French illustrator duo Marie Pommepuy (b. 1978) and Sébasten Cosset (b. 1975), started drawing comics in 2002 with a couple of Donjon Crépuscule stories by Sfar:





They then began Miss Pas Touche in 2006 with Hubert and a clearer line:





In 2009 Jolies Ténèbres came out, and artistically it marked a further move toward claire ligne with coloring sometimes substituted for line-shading:



By the way, I have confirmed that the Plim character above far-right is not, in fact, an eyebrow-shaven Crayon Shin Chan:






This graphic sensibility would later be distilled and codified in their incomparable 3-volume Beauté (re-teamed with Hubert) where the line is crystal clear and often replaced by clean color degradations:












(these are just random images from the first volume. The next two raise the standard even higher)

As interesting as Jolies Ténèbres is artistically in this context, for me the story and ideas behind it are what make Jolies Ténèbres great. It's tempting to concentrate only on the fact that these characters are living in and around the cadaver of a young girl, and there is an off-handedness to some of the macabre elements:



Then you realize that Aurore's death has given free reign to the archetypical or actual friends from her life, and that their deaths throughout the story represent the gradual dissolution of her mind alongside that of her body: the story is charting the path of a young girl's consciousness post-mortem.

I recently got a peek at Paper Dolls, Kerascoët's 2014 artbook release, and it blew my mind. It made me determined to revisit the high points of their career. Jolies Ténèbres is quite good, and re-reading it in context made me realize that I'd seriously underrated it after the first read.

[ліда лісова · Rating 5 out of 5]

милий пиздець 🪺🍄🦔🪽🍃

[Susana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este pequeno conto lê-se em meia-hora, e até podia ser em menos tempo, se não fossem as frases em que apetece demorarmo-nos e as ilustrações que nos prendem o olhar.

Recomendado a toda a gente, incluindo jovens.

SPOILERS (citações) a seguir (após releitura, dois dias depois):



"Afinal uma pessoa também pode dizer coisas sem ser com voz de falar. Foi a primeira descoberta assim estranha que eu fiz nessa noite duma bendita, bonita, falta de luz."

"Um mar, afinal, é só um deserto molhado, em vez de homens e camelos, tem peixes e canoas a passear nele." (esta lembrou-me o Afonso Cruz)

"Naquela respiração, eu sabia, havia um pensamento pendurado. Não fiz nenhum ruído para não sacudir esse pensamento."(e esta, o Mia Couto)

"Um dia perguntaram à minha avó Dezanove o que era a poesia. Primeiro ela ficou muito tempo calada, então pensaram que ela não tinha resposta. Mas ela depois falou: a poesia não é chuva, é o barulho da chuva." (não sei se é original, mas é genial)

"Os barulhos esquecem-se rápido. Ainda bem que os cheiros ficam bem presos na nossa memória das recordações." (este livro também fica bem preso na memória)

[Berfin Kanat · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ne desem bilemedim, çok rahatsız edici ama bir o kadar da gerçekçi. Sonu yok, başı yok. "Bir varmış bir yokmuş" dercesine yazılmış, zaman yok. Okuduğum en farklı şeylerden biri, bu yüzden hoşuma gitti. Ama bitirince vay be ben ne bitirdim demedim, sadece tuhaf bir şeye tanıklık etmiş gibi oldum. Daha önce hiç anti-masal okudum mu hatırlamıyorum, Karanlık Güzel'i okurken kirlenmiş bir masalı okuyor gibiydim. Sevdiğim bir alana müdahale edilmiş gibiydi, bu yüzden kitabı zihnimin hatırlamak istemediklerim kısmına kaldırıyorum. Böyle dedim diye çok çarpıcı bir şey olduğunu düşünmeyin, evet farklı ama Happy Three Friends de farklı. (Biraz benziyorlar.) Üzücü bir yanı var, en etkileyici kısmı bu bence; kitaba Karanlık Güzel ismini veren melankolisi."

Demişim iki sene önce. Kitabı o zamanki okumama göre çok daha başarılı buldum. Çok farklı, çok hoşuma gitti. Okuyun, okutun.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A post-apocalyptic tale rendered in sweetly childlike images, but only at first glance, as upon closer inspection even this sweetness is thoroughly tainted with rot and evil and infectious swelling.

My wife bought this for my daughter but when she looked closer she decided it was for me.

A playful family interior scene is suddenly disrupted by dark red blobs oozing from above, which continue to ooze engulfing the entire space. The family evacuates, and then it’s an entire community, an entire population of people evacuating, scrambling out from the nostrils and mouth and ears of a dead girl in a forest. A lord of the flies scenario ensues, though more chaotic, and rendered in barely connected episodes, with offhand violence and grossness – murder, maggot eating, cannibalism, etc. – contaminating what looks at first (due to the lovely fairy tale art) like an idyll of survivalism. Everything degenerates as a sole optimist attempts to salvage a vestige of civilization. It can read as an allegory of humanity’s inherent evil and destructiveness, or as simply a representation of the objective cool inherent “viciousness” of nature. Whichever, it’s chilling, and as beautiful as a 6 year old girl with an impish glint in her eye.

[Melissa Chung · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know what I just read, but I liked it. The illustrations were lovely. The story itself was dark and tragic.

Beautiful Darkness is about a group? Community? These little humanoid creatures not much bigger than ants live and gather in the forest. They have emerged from the corpse? Cadaver? A child dead in the forest. They use the things they find around them. Some from the girls backpack, some from the dead girl herself. They forms smaller groups. Our main character is named Aurora and she wants to be the helper. She feeds, clothes and shelters the people. They grow spoiled and selfish. Soon turning their backs on her. Another girl creature...a beautiful “princess” wants all the attention and turns the people away from Aurora. How will she cope?

Very strange and sad story. Dystopian in nature. Twisted yet realistic. Highly recommend.

[Brandon Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m upset I broke my book buying ban over this 😂 The art style is pretty, but I thought it was very disjointed and almost jarring how it went from one scene to the next.

Also, from other reviews, I thought it was going to be sick and twisted, and it was very PG-13. That’s not me being edgy or anything, there was maybe 3 unsettling panels and some creepy imagery throughout, but nothing like I thought I was gonna get (esp after the opening- the rug was instantly pulled out from under me but nothing really topped it).

The contrast of the cutesy art style and minor creepage was interesting, but again I’m just upset with myself I spent money on it.

[Sesana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just couldn't get into this, and it ultimately felt pointless. I don't think that books in general need to have a point, but I did feel like this one was trying mightily to make one, and failing utterly.

[Farel Dalrymple · Rating 5 out of 5]

this might be the best comic have read so far this year.

[Inna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Мила кріпота або Як людям взагалі спадають на думку такі ідеї?🤯😅