Brian Froud

Pisces season wouldn’t be complete without a foray into the fantastical realms illustrated by Brian Froud, so I’m glad I scooped this strange little book by Alexander Theroux a while back and saved it until now. Ironically, the story is far less filled with faeries than I am used to from a Froud book, but it still holds a certain fey quality. Theroux tells a tale of a pair of star-crossed lovers that centres around the titular cloak given from one to the other, which later becomes a symbol for the plagues that wracked Europe during the Middle Ages. For all that the characters of the story contain a certain amount of comedy (quietly ridiculous names and funny turns of language abound), the tale of Master Snickup and his love Superfecta is darkly grounded in the harshness of the real world. Froud’s limited palette of naturalist colours suffuses the story with a grounded tone that carries our protagonists through their love affair, Superfecta’s forced marriage, and Snickup’s monastic exile with an essence that feels borderline Biblical. Mirrored by Theroux’s bardic voice that pushes together antiquated rhythms with the occasional modernist vocabulary, the resulting narrative is an exercise in strangeness that is still surprisingly successful. We are drawn in to the majesty of Master Snickup’s cloak and beguiled by the fey creatures who come to call him neighbour, and are left wondering at the fate of the now almost-invisible Superfecta as her place in the narrative is taken by her bombastic husband. The tale concludes in an epic fashion, with an inventive set of compositions by Froud, as Snickup’s death brings the Black Death to Europe and the village that he left is in turn brought to its knees. Is this the faerie story that I expected Froud to have helmed: no; but, the mythical overtones of Theroux’s carefully wrought morality tale that keep us one step away from reality were a strange delight, nonetheless.… (more)

What a delight this book is! Lovely photographs and humourous illustrations of crushed fairies abound.

Angelica Cottington is 16 years old when she finds a diary of her long-deceased older sister, Euphemia. Euphemia has photographed several fairies, and writes about her adventures with them in the woods. Twelve years later, Angelica is appalled by her sister's behaviour. Angelica detests fairies and squashes them dead in the very diary her sister left praising them.

As we read the diary entries and Angelica's notes, we come to understand what really happened to Euphemia. A lovely fairy tale indeed!… (more)