In many ways I feel this is a dark coffee table art book with some words attached. I really like Templesmith's artwork and it really does fit the genre. It's always dark, it's unclear at points but it's frightening on a core level. The somewhat unfinished, unpolished look helps it terrify the reader. I'm using unpolished here to mean that there isn't a lot of tight linework with colouring precisely defined by those lines. Nope, here colours, textures and art materials are used to bleed into one another making things beautifully muddled. The bones are loose but the colour is tight. I really love what he manages with such a limited palette of colour.
Sadly, I found that it was the art to be partly problematic to the actual plot. While the art is so bloody cool the plotting and characterization needs to be next to perfect. With the art being kinetic and emotional I found that jumps in story and characterization to be slightly confusing. In fact I got lost a few times. It starts out strong but by the time the plot is halfway through there seems to be one too many massive jumps in plot that were kind of frustrating to read while remaining artistically strong.
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