A pale drummer boy mindlessly plays on as a candle drips wax over his head. A grimy man cocks his trumpet like a gun, the canister on his back ready to suck away the happy dreams of children. A skeletal, eye-less giant enters a house, then exits carrying a sleeping child on its back, bed and all, before disappearing into the night. This is not a book about happy endings. This is the Nightmare Factory, a place where the worst nightmares you can imagine are created.
From Danish horror legend John Kenn Mortensen, comes the third of his eerie picture books to be translated into English by Fantagraphics. Just in time for Halloween, Nightmare Factory is a darkly comedic picture book filled with over thirty poems depicting children’s worst nightmares. Whether this is a raspy, whispering puppet calling out your name, being eaten alive by a disgusting human-spider hybrid or witnessing the severed limbs of a child hanging from a laundry line, these terrifying pen and ink visions are more than enough to send shivers up readers’ spines.
Splayed across double-page spreads in painstaking detail, Mortensen’s Nightmare Factory is chilling in its attention to detail. Black, winding trees grasp out like clutching hands, whilst their trunks depict markings that, on closer inspection, look like thousands of watching eyes. The out-of-proportion terrifying bodies and limbs of the creatures from the Nightmare Factory are only exacerbated by their faces; teeth bared in malevolent grimaces, eyes wide, some staring right through the confines of the page and directly at the reader.
From rhyming couplets to rhythmic iambic pentameter to blank verse, Mortensen’s melodic wordplay is just as wonderfully experimental as his illustrations, equally able to conjure visions of horror and disgust. The words of the poems stand luminous against the black and white backdrop, whilst the illustrations fade away to black at the edges of the pages, forcing the reader’s focus onto the terrifying visions that are depicted before them, no distractions. The allusions to famous cult horror films were subtle, but enjoyable for those who recognised the staples, like Coraline’s twisted portal to another world or the terrifying little-girl ghosts in Stephen King’s The Shining.
Most spooky, perhaps, is not the pages in which Mortensen depicts the unwitting children as being horrified by the otherworldly creatures surrounding them, but those in which the child seems unfazed, actively joining in the monster’s revelry; the child who looks almost bored whilst reading the writhing book of the dead, or the dancing child at the very back of the terrifying clown parade. Colour is used only once throughout the entirety of the picture book, and Mortensen picked his moment well. The bright red string which a little boy grasps onto and follows is an eerily simplistic choice for Mortensen’s one strike of colour. Seldom does the boy know that the string is leading him directly into the clutches of a gang of terrifying spectres: “A little boy follows a string that’s bright red. When he gets to the end, he’ll sadly be dead.”
Hauntingly reminiscent of the musicality of innocent children’s nursery rhymes, Mortensen’s dark collection of poems and accompanying nightmarish illustrations is a gothic treat for horror lovers. Nightmare Factory is well worth picking up this October.
John Kenn Mortensen (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $29.99
Buy online here
Review by Lydia Turner
