On more than one occasion I’ve had a dream where I woke up, got up from bed, and went to work. That’s it. That’s the dream. Nothing even exciting happens in my dream work day. You could call it a “nightmare” because when I really do wake up, I realize that I have to get out of bed and go to work for real. Or you could call it existential dread. My life is so uneventful even my dreams are boring.
Danish illustrator John Kenn Mortensen doesn’t have boring dreams. His dreams are terrifying. I wish I had dreams as cool as this. Although if I did, I’d probably never go back to sleep. In his latest art book, just put out by Fantagraphics, Mortensen has brought to the page some delightfully horrifying monsters from his dreams.
A clear inspiration for these drawings is Edward Gorey, though some of Mortensen’s grotesqueries might have even given him pause. The creatures of Night Terror live in a nightmarish fairytale landscape rather than the Victorian world of Gorey’s most famous work. Mortensen does include the periodic droll caption that also feels very Gorey to me. There’s also a bit of Maurice Sendak in there too, especially his monsters from Where the Wild Things Are. I can see hints of H.R. Geiger’s biomechanics as well.
There isn’t any type of narrative within this book’s pages. Each page is a drawing on its own. They are full of great detail, and Fantagraphics has made the pages big enough to allow careful viewing of the images. It is not a book one wants to flip through, but rather study and take in each drawing. Some images do pop up regularly. Terrible clowns show up more than once. As do creatures with light beaming out of their eyes. You’ll find houses so intertwined with tree branches and roots they look organic themselves. There are a lot of decapitated heads floating around the edges. Perhaps more terrifying than the monsters are the children that populate the page. They all look serene with faces that would make the Buddha proud. Yet they are surrounded by images that will keep me up at night.
Mortensen’s previous book, Sticky Monsters, was full of similar illustrations all drawn on sticky notes. The back 1/3rd of this book is filled with the same. They aren’t quite as details or full as the other illustrations, and they come with that familiar Sticky Note yellow coloring, but they are just as ghastly.
Night Terror is a gorgeous-looking book filled with images of unimaginable horror. They are beautiful, one might even want to put them in to frame. I asked my wife if we could hang one particularly striking image of some terrifying clowns gathered around a small child’s bed, but she didn’t like that idea. But I bet Stephen King is gonna get him one.
