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A review by the23rdjoker
The Black Project by Gareth Brookes
4.0
Probably the strangest book I've read in many many years.
Almost certainly with regards to the story (a peculiar, anti-social young boy constructs homemade "girlfriends" out of everything from pillows and papier mâché, to socks and string).
Definitely with regards to Gareth Brookes' unique visual style (a gorgeous combination of handwriting, woodcuts, and embroidery).
The darkly comic, deeply unsettling, yet oddly and naively sweet nature of the protagonist's simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the female form (a worldview formed through a murky lens of early adolescence, the repression of a conservative small town, the only views of female sexuality being in male gaze-driven pornography, and our main character's ambiguous social difficulties) is what helps make The Black Project so fascinatingly, compulsively readable.
The story disappointingly kind of unravels in the final act, falling flat into convention and a too-easy conclusion.
But in spite of that, the book is worth a read simply for the mesmerising, early-Tim Burton-esque visual style alone, which when combined with the story's superlative strangeness, makes it quite hard to forget...
Almost certainly with regards to the story (a peculiar, anti-social young boy constructs homemade "girlfriends" out of everything from pillows and papier mâché, to socks and string).
Definitely with regards to Gareth Brookes' unique visual style (a gorgeous combination of handwriting, woodcuts, and embroidery).
The darkly comic, deeply unsettling, yet oddly and naively sweet nature of the protagonist's simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the female form (a worldview formed through a murky lens of early adolescence, the repression of a conservative small town, the only views of female sexuality being in male gaze-driven pornography, and our main character's ambiguous social difficulties) is what helps make The Black Project so fascinatingly, compulsively readable.
The story disappointingly kind of unravels in the final act, falling flat into convention and a too-easy conclusion.
But in spite of that, the book is worth a read simply for the mesmerising, early-Tim Burton-esque visual style alone, which when combined with the story's superlative strangeness, makes it quite hard to forget...