A book that’s so deeply in love with language and the unseen doesn’t leave very much for an illustrator to work with. Culbard’s style is well-suited to this difficulty—it’s defined as much by what it doesn’t show as by what it does. Instead of laying on the Victorian gingerbread, Culbard creates spare, almost modernist tableaux.
How can a 140-page novella be a perfect H.P Lovecraft pastiche while simultaneously asserting itself as a spell-binding work of pioneering fantasy horror? The answer isn’t immediately clear, but by gingerly dancing between social commentary, high fantasy, and gripping prose, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, makes it look easy. He’s inventing a brand-new genre […]