Dark
Art Gothica: A Horror Coloring Book.
By François Gautier. Plume. $15.
If you are in the audience for this book, you know who you are and need
no further guidance. Pretty much the same is true if you are not in the audience for this book: this
is certainly a specialty item. François Gautier
has here assembled, in intricate black-and-white renderings, many of the tropes
of horror art – as seen in still photos, videos, films, video games, assorted
websites, and more – and is offering them to would-be colorists without any
words or any attempt to explain just what the scenes are or what, if anything,
they mean.
Meaning is, of course, secondary in illustrations like these, where the
whole point is to present a mixture of gore and terror of unknown provenance,
rendered in detail that could be called “loving” if the word did not seem too
outlandish in this context. “Outlandish” actually is a good word for much of what Gautier shows here – and fans of
the horror genre who wish to participate in it through their own talents at
coloring will be very pleased with the outré material.
On one typical page, there is one of those proverbial ancient-looking,
highly decorated treasure chests, standing open, showing contents that include
a skull, some horns, a couple of eyeballs (which would long since have
disintegrated if the chest is ancient, but never mind), and miscellaneous
bones. Dripping over the front of the chest are streams of what presumably is
ichor, and plenty of it: the chest stands in a pool of the stuff. The whole
look is more-or-less Lovecraftian, as indeed are the appearances of many of the
pages here.
Some pages are more difficult to interpret. One shows an upraised
skeletal arm, a couple of bracelets wrapped around the bony wrist, with vaguely
mothlike or butterfly-like creatures flitting all about and a few landing on
the bent fingerbones. The flying creatures almost look pixie-like, but their
face-like fronts are blank. Their wings are highly individuated in shape and
pattern, giving artists plenty of opportunities to make the flying figures,
whatever they may be, distinctive in hue.
Another page centers on a realistic-looking heart, around which are
clustered, stained-glass style, 10 renditions of swords piercing other hearts,
the sword tips’ coatings then dripping into the central heart. Around the 10
sword scenes are portions of 20 additional scenes showing bones, skulls, and
the other usual appurtenances of horror. The whole page is a kind of
kaleidoscope of evil – and, again, is intricate enough to allow a colorist to
create a fascinating stained-glass effect, or alternatively to do the whole
scene in shades of red.
There are occasional more-or-less-human figures in these pages, but of course their appearance is uniformly unpleasant – or horrific, at the very least. There is a closeup of a head wearing what may be a crown, prominent eyes rolled back in an expression of, yes, horror, with fingers pulling at those eyes and the face in general as flowering vines grow through the face’s openings. There is a man, apparently a wizard, at the traditional podium within a vast library, his expression one of utter terror as vicious things with partial bodies swirl around him after emerging from the book in front of him. There is the disembodied head of a crowned man, presumably a king, the entire head surrounded by the coils of a cobra-like snake whose body passes through one of the eye sockets while the other socket sports an eye that may still be functioning and in any case is wide open, with the pupil rolled partially back. Humans tend not to make out very well in gothic horror and, therefore, in Dark Art Gothica. This is scarcely a book for all tastes, but for those whose interests lie firmly in a rather overdone sense of the exotically macabre, Gautier’s precise, meticulous renderings of horrible places and creatures certainly present an opportunity to make the scenes as horrifyingly multicolored as one might wish.
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