A gothic adventure

“May God help a poor soul who is only trying to do his duty.”

Ana Juan returns to grapple with a classic of literature, this time in a faithful transposition, featuring intense, dense, suspense-dripping blacks: Dracula by Bram Stoker .

At dawn on August 6, 1879, the quiet English town of Whitby is troubled by a strange shipwreck. In fact, a brig named Demeter ran aground on the nearby beach. On board there is only the body of the captain, tied to the tiller, holding a rosary and a crucifix. In his pockets some handwritten pages, perhaps what remains of the logbook, from which the port police hopes to reconstruct what happened: the logbook of a captain who does not know he is carrying Dracula's remains in the hold of his ship, the non -dead, towards the coasts of England.

This book returns to the origin of the legend of Dracula, reconstructing the journey of Evil and returning us an evil and elusive creature: evanescent specter, stealth shadow, which looms mute and deadly on the people who, unaware, accompany it.

"A gothic adventure, a journey into the disturbing can only begin with carbon black pages, soft to the touch, due to the large amount of ink that wets the pages, a black in which the eye is lost, looking for the shapes of a dark forest battered by rain. And black is the color that always fills up the disturbing tables, scenes that exude the danger of an enemy with an iridescent shape even if almost never visible. [...] Ana Juan returns to the father of all vampires, Dracula, and with his black charcoal marks the trajectory that takes him from his homeland to Mina Murray, portrayed at the beginning of the book, in a photo dedicated to his beloved husband Jonathan, who has gone on a journey to the Carpathians, and re-proposed at the end of the volume with his eyes closed, while, sheet after sheet, she is swallowed by the count's changing shadow, in a series of splendid opaque tissues. " (Luca Ruocco, review published on the ingenerecinema.com website)

This hardcover edition, printed in one color, black - except for the blood-red cover and the trail of blood left by the ship on the paper that adorns the end sheets - also stands out for the insertion of special papers that enrich the experience of viewing and reading a plot, of a physical dimension: the hand lingers to touch and test the rough and opaque texture of the 4 tissues at the opening of the volume, with the stratified reproduction of a dark forest, of the 4 opaque tissues at the end with the disturbing and demonic image of the count with his eyes "focused" on Mina, and of the 4 tissues interspersed on the internal pages with the "reproduction ”Of a newspaper of the time in which the same events are narrated from another point of view. And while the hand touches the different textures of the papers, you can perceive the intense smell of the ink that generously covers up to soak the pages of the story, while the eyes are lost in pursuit of the details that emerge one by one from the black of the story. night, from the darkness of reason. Ana Juan's black charcoal beautifully recreates the nightmare that is generated around the mysterious disappearance of the sailors and kidnaps the reader in a synaesthetic, intellectual, literary experience that cannot leave indifferent.

L author and illustrator:
Ana Juan is a Spanish illustrator, writer and painter. Born in Valencia in 1961 and moved to Madrid in the early Eighties, she has numerous publications and exhibitions all over the world, from Spain to the United States, passing through Japan.Known for her original, melancholy, romantic, and sometimes somewhat merciless interpretations of reality and its stories, she has illustrated several covers for the New Yorker , articles for El País and the covers of the novels of Isabel Allende and of several classics of world literature
Winner - among other things - in 2005 of the Ezra Jack Keats Award for best illustrator (with The Night Eater ), and in 2007 the Junceda de Ilustración Prize (with For you are a Kenyan Child ), in 2010 he received the prestigious National Illustration Award conferred by the Spanish Ministry of Culture .