What a weird and wonderful comic. This darkly comic fairy tale brings to life the unsettling world of childhood imagination, reminding us that the whimsical and the disturbing are two sides of the same coin. Here are childlike sprites whose play inevitably ends in gruesome violence, and an enchanted woodland populated by charming mice in tailcoats but also predators and grubs. And of course, there's a (somewhat understated) darkness at the center of this book—the sprites have tumbled out into reality because the young girl who dreamed them up lies dead in the woods.

I feel like many comics of this kind excel at atmosphere but fall short on plot, but Beautiful Darkness acquits itself well on both counts, with a pleasing, if unsettling, fairy tale arc. And the artwork is perfect—vivid, expressive, and with plenty of nods to Victorian children's book illustrators.

Recommended to fans of gothic comics and weird fantasy, and a readalike for Emily Carroll's Through the Woods. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Take some elixir of THC, pour yourself a drink, put maybe a Bach cantata on low, find a comfortable chair, turn on a good reading lamp, open the book -- and sink, slide into a very sweet, very dark fantasy. Aurora will guide you. She won't lose you; at least not right away. ( )

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). ( )