Though Fabien Vehlmann receives solo writing credit on the cover, the title page credits Marie Pommepuy for original idea and co-story, translated in the new Drawn & Quarterly edition by Helge Dascher. Beautiful Darkness was originally published in France in 2014 as Jolies T én èbres. It’s rare to find such a horrifically eloquent concept executed so perfectly. Or she does until the borderless panels of her first page darken into rigid gutters as a surging Blob-like goo forces her and her cartoon companions to flee the child’s dead body and emerge into the most horrifying world of them all: our own. The authors focus instead on another Aurora, a lovely cartoon creature who lives in a fairy tale world of tea parties and princes. Aurora (we learn her name from the notebook strewn beside her) is not the focus of this graphic novel-or at least not this version of her. Over the course of the next few dozen pages, her body rots to bones.ĭespite the mysteries and plot questions evoked by the opening image-Who is she? How did she die? Is there a killer? When will someone discover her body?-the novel ignores them all. Her hair is splayed around her head, and although her eyes are closed and her body could be relaxed in sleep, she is unquestionably dead. The girl of Beautiful Darkness looks to be about ten-years-old. Poe misogynistically claims there’s no subject more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman (“ The Philosophy of Composition“), but since his wife was 13 when he married her, “girl” would be the more accurate term. I’m a parent and so especially susceptible to the horror of the image, but it’s more than that.

The sixth page of Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët‘s Beautiful Darkness is currently haunting me: a child’s corpse lying on a forest floor. They become afterimages, a kind of mental scar marring your visual memory.

Beautiful darkness fabien