Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtowers

This is the paperback edition of a book that has already received a lot of attention, and accolades from Anthony Minghella, Alan Moore and Paul Gravett. Dunning provides a creepy tale of cosmic struggle against nebulous evil from another dimension, which features bizarre characters in familiarly weird situations – a haunted house, a freak show circus, and an isolated lighthouse. The human agent through which the evil hopes to do its worst metamorphoses into a fly, by means of a (thankfully off the page) slaughtered swan. The story never quite goes where you expect and provides the basis for Nikhil Singh’s black and white realisation, which is, at turns, compelling, funny (the forces of evil turn out to be finger puppets on a severed hand), ludicrous and disturbing; but always strange and fascinating. This is idiosyncratic, detailed illustration, with the feel of very elaborate doodling, sometimes intricate, sometimes bold and sometimes loopy and winsome, with a dramatic and imaginative use of the page.