I've been waiting FOREVER go get my hands on this little creepy beauty! For lovers of Gorey and the Addamses, here is the grimdark inky-washed terrifying tale of Hansel and Gretel in all it's original frightful glory.
Hansel & Gretel
Neil Gaiman, illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti
ISBN: 9781935179627
This is a DARK story. Mattotti's illustrations are mostly thick opaque swaths of blackness, crowding across the page and looming over the chinks of light and the outline figures of our characters. Trees reach over and clutch, houses ooze darkness from the walls, rooms become wicker cages with tendrils of blackness twining to bar the light.
This is a DARK story. Gaiman does away with the attempts to lighten the mood - the kids are abandoned by their parents; mother and father conspire, and while father is not an enthusiastic participant, he is an active party. The story lingers on macabre descriptions of food, the bloody hanks of meat brought from the butcher, bejewelled with green flies and yellow wasps, the weak broth of old cabbage, the hard crunch of dry bread, the unabashed desire of the old woman for meat. Even Gretel is more purposeful and hardened - her defiant shove not a mad swing of inspiration and luck, but a carefully plotted and cultivated goal.
This is how fairy tales were - warnings against the evil of mankind, using witches and old women in the woods as allegorical threats to balance against the very real threats of cruel parents or desperate starving times.
Brilliant. A facet of obsidian lit by the last rays of a dying day, fierce in inky cold sharpness.
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