Darkness Slipped In

This innovatively designed picture book consists of a poem of nine rhyming couplets strung out in dancing configurations across its double page expanses. It concerns the response of a young girl alone in her bedroom as darkness, personified as a humanoid slick of glossy black ink, slithers into her room and eats up all the light. The child confidently advances upon the rather menacing figure and pulls him into a welcoming dance.

Probably designed as a reassurance to children afraid of the dark, the book’s most striking feature is in its combination of jaunty verse with a lamination technique that embosses tangible and reflective blackness against a conventionally schematic and pastel representation of childhood. Alongside the playful text, this visual-tactile element should certainly provide a captivating stimulus for children’s curiosity about books and how they are made.