I recently wrote about building my own personal curriculum to better understand 1) the ideas and concepts around the term “hauntology,” and 2) wrap my head around Julia Kristeva’s writings. But it occurred to me that I’d be terribly remiss if I didn’t mention my own books in terms of creating some courses for self-learning!
I put together a (hopefully very shareable) slideshow of graphics about how each book might assist in studies of the arcane & esoteric, the darker side of life, and the fantastical, and how you shouldn’t skip the visual component when you’re deepening your understanding of this, that, or the other thing. (Coming from a rather lazy student, I mean obviously more pictures and less words is the way to go hehehe.)
Building Your Personal Curriculum: Where My Books Fit
If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen people talking about “personal curriculums,” essentially, self-directed courses of study built around whatever you’re genuinely curious about. Instead of following someone else’s syllabus, you’re creating your own path through a subject, pulling together books, films, essays, art, music, whatever feeds your particular obsession.
It’s a beautiful way to learn, and it’s having a moment because people are hungry for depth, for expertise that comes from genuine interest rather than algorithmic recommendation. You get to be both student and curator of your own education.
I love this concept because it’s exactly how I’ve always learned: following threads of interest across mediums and disciplines, building connections between visual art and literature and history and folklore. It’s also, not coincidentally, how I approach curating my books. (It’s also a good reason to buy new notebooks!)
Which brings me to this: if you’re building a personal curriculum, here’s where my Art in the Margins series fits.
Studying the occult, symbolism, or esoteric art history?
The Art of the Occult belongs in your visual studies. From theosophy and kabbalah to the zodiac and alchemy, from spiritualism and ceremonial magic to the elements and sacred geometry—this book brings together artists who have been drawn to these unknown spheres and created curious artworks that transcend time and place. Whether you’re learning tarot, diving into the history of magical practice, or exploring Hermetic traditions, you need the visual language that goes with it. These works stem from a soul-deep desire for truth and awareness, revealing the hidden rules of nature and our world through imagery that has haunted and inspired across centuries.
Exploring Gothic aesthetics, melancholy, or the beauty of darkness?
The Art of Darkness is your visual companion. This book celebrates artists who have been obsessed with darkness throughout history—creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight, and play on our innermost fears. From dreams and nightmares to matters of mortality, from depravity and destruction to gods and monsters, these artworks indulge our greatest fears while asking: what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? If you’re studying Victorian mourning culture, exploring Gothic traditions, or simply trying to understand why certain aesthetics speak to something deep within you, this is your sourcebook. Denial of our darkness leads us to fear it….better to create a connection with our shadows and revel in all the inspiration and wonder we may find there!
Deep-diving into fantasy worldbuilding, mythology, or the fantastic?
The Art of Fantasy gives you the visual language. Artists have explored imaginary worlds and fantastical creatures for centuries, expressing the unreal and impossible, the mystical and mythical through paint and illustration. This book presents a compendium of artworks inspired by myth, fantasy, and the unreal—from beasts and beings to forgotten realms and wonderlands, from dreams and magic to faith and philosophy. If you’re studying folklore, reading epic fantasy, learning about mythological traditions across cultures, or working on your own creative worldbuilding, these visual flights of fancy and imagination show you how artists have conveyed the vast swathe of hopes and dreams in our collected hearts. Fantasy is not simply an escape from reality…it is the irresistible impulse that reveals hope and wonder in us all.
Why Visual Art Belongs in Your Curriculum
Whatever you’re studying, visual art deepens your understanding in ways that text alone cannot. It shows you how ideas manifest aesthetically, how concepts become tangible, how symbolism operates visually. The artists in these books are thinking deeply about their subjects, creating work that’s in conversation with history, mythology, spirituality, and culture across centuries.
If you’re building your own curriculum for any of these subjects, please don’t skip the visual component! These books are resources, and they’re meant to be referenced, returned to, absorbed alongside whatever else you’re studying.
And if you’re building a curriculum around something else entirely? Tell me about it. I want to know what you’re learning, what threads you’re following, what obsessions are driving your self-directed education. That’s always been my favorite kind of conversation!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
If you have spent any time in the darker corners of the internet where contemporary artists share their work, you may have already stumbled into Nona Limmen’s world without quite knowing how you got there.
The Amsterdam-based artist has spent years filing dispatches from a mysterious place whose existence remains unconfirmed, a vast kingdom obscurely bordering our own, wrought of shadows and secrets, its towering cliffs and dark caves and veiled inhabitants glimpsed only in the grain and blur her analogue techniques produce. Her photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, specific and sourceless; impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget.
Limmen’s world has a way of finding its people. If you already speak the language of crow-black skies and candlelit staircases, of fog-eaten landscapes and figures who belong to no particular century, her photographs will locate you with an almost uncanny precision.
As it happens, my own gaze tends to linger on portraits and landscapes that produce a specific unease, the shadow amongst summer trees, the figure glimpsed at the edge of a landscape, the beautiful thing with something occluded at its center. Limmen builds entire worlds from exactly this trembling, tenebrous material, and inhabits them with solemn reverence and indefatigable devotion.
Limmen’s visual vocabulary is immediately recognizable. Dusk light, deep and livid. Candlelight guttering against absolute dark. The ash and pewter of deep winter. Gothic spires piercing a roiling dark that resolves, on closer looking, into a thousand wings. Skeletal trees reaching into skies so dramatically violet they read as verdict rather than weather.
Stone and shadow, iron and fog, the overgrown gate with ivy reclaiming its archway, the castle glimpsed through a cloud of birds at twilight. Her settings carry the same weight and intention as any figure she places within them, as present and purposeful, as steeped in the work of the image. You are always, unmistakably, somewhere in Limmen’s midnight country.
Nearly every image Limmen makes is poised at the edge of something. The ghostly figure on the staircase landing, five candles held aloft, neither ascending nor descending, the darkness above and below equally absolute. The dancing figures in an open field beneath a sky gone the color of cold embers, mid-movement, mid-ritual, caught in a moment that feels both ancient and unfinished. The castle swallowed by dusk, its towers readable only as interruptions in the dark, secretive and permanent and sealed.
Her world exists in this suspended state permanently, always on the verge of some disclosure that never quite arrives. The haze and sediment of her darkroom sorcery holds the tension in place, the veil of her process keeping each image at precisely the distance where mystery remains intact.
The figures who move through Limmen’s photographs are not drawn from the sweeter registers of fantasy. Witches bearing torches, wresting the fire from the hands that once burned them. Vampires and succubi baring fangs, wings aloft, their power radiant and hypnotic and terrifyingly gorgeous. The exiled queen. The witch of the wood. The horned figure on the dune, blade in hand, commanding a landscape that receives her without question.
These archetypes have spent centuries as cautionary tales, as monsters, as the one must escape or defeat. In Limmen’s hands they are are feral and free and fully realized. She photographs them the way you would photograph anyone fully at home in their own skin, which is to say, with total and unselfconscious ease. The dark feminine here is simply sovereign. Ancient and absolute.
“When Night Comes” its brooding Gothic towers and swarming bats suspended against a sky of inky damsons, fresh figs on inky velvet, of violet-studded plum, is the image I included in The Art of Darkness, though I had been following Limmen’s work for years before that, summoned to it time and again with the insistence of a sentiment that speaks directly to the parts of my heart that live in the dark.
She has described her work as visual love letters to the night, and I have yet to encounter a more honest or more beautiful accounting of what she makes. Limmen has spent years in devoted correspondence with the dark, and her photographs are the proof of that fidelity: dispatches from a profoundly haunted kingdom that has perhaps begun to dream of her in return.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
We covered a lot of ground: my strange, sideways relationship with goth subculture, the heavy metal origins of my particular flavor of darkness, how symbolist and decadent art first found me through my mother’s tarot collection and album covers, the building of the Art in the Margins series, and some fumbling attempts to articulate what the occult in art means to me. There’s also some talk of what’s coming in 2026. I hope you’ll give it a read.
Art in the featured image includes Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon, Chet Zar, Unica Zurn, Joseba Eskubi .
The new Wuthering Heights adaptation seems to be generating a frenzied onslaught of overblown responses. Early reviewers are calling it “lust worthy,” a “god-tier new classic,” a “beautiful mess of passion, destruction, lust, revenge, and unhinged behaviour,” praise that swells toward “explosive toxic desire.” The words weirdly float free of the thing itself; the reviewers can’t say what happens, so they’re throwing adjectives into the void, doing the best they can within the constraints of all they can’t yet say.
As I’m digesting this, thinking through this hyped-yet-hollow praise that lacks the substance to anchor it, I find myself returning to an image I featured in The Art of Darkness: Laurie Lee Brom‘s Cathy’s Ghost. Brom’s vision carries a somber intensity entirely free of sensationalism. When you stand before Cathy’s Ghost, you encounter a woman behind the diamond-patterned pane of an impregnable old window, her eerie luminosity against the gloom. Frost or mist obscures her form, yet she remains visible, more visible perhaps for the obstruction. Her gaze is piercing, direct, and the weight of that presence settles into you. Trapped behind glass. Held at the threshold between worlds.
Laurie Lee Brom, In the Flames
Laurie Lee Brom, The Gaze
Whether Laurie Lee Brom is painting a literary ghost or a woman in a 1960s kitchen, a figure contemplating a crystal ball, or a woman smoking behind rain-streaked glass, you don’t know what any of them are thinking. And yes, I’m aware of how that sounds. The unknowable woman. The eternal feminine mystery. Etc, etc. But really, who knows anyone, anyway? Here we’re looking at women who exist in their own right. Solid and real, not a projection, not a mystery to be solved, not invented to satisfy your desire.
In Cathy’s Ghost, that solidity is what terrifies me. Her gaze cuts through the frost. Her fingertips press into the glass in a way that makes it feel insubstantial, like it’s yielding to her. She’s looking straight at you, and you have no idea what she wants, what she’s capable of. The glass between us feels like the only thing keeping me safe…except I’m not even sure it’s doing that. Maybe I’m fucked anyway. Maybe she’s getting me regardless.
Laurie Lee Brom, Carol
Laurie Lee Brom, Reflecting
Laurie Lee Brom, My Little Friend
In some of these paintings, the women occupy the edges of ordinary domestic life. A woman in a groovy psychedelic dress, vivid with orange and green and neon pink, standing behind rain-streaked glass. Another smokes a cigarette, bouffant insouciant, looking for all the world as if she’s about to meet her lover, Casanova Don Draper. A third gazes downward at a spider suspended on its web, her bright blue eyeshadow catching the light.
They could be contemplating the texture of their own existence, or they could be thinking about what’s for dinner, or the way their underwear is cutting into their bum, or an Alice in Chains song stuck on loop in their head, the one they’ve rewritten so it’s about their yappy dog now, “yeahhhh she wants to bite the roofers, oh yeahhhhh.” Brom doesn’t tell you which. She just paints them there, solid and present, their interior worlds as dense and unreachable as Cathy’s behind frosted glass. The settings are ordinary. The interiority is not.
Laurie Lee Brom, Swamp Bride
Laurie Lee Brom, Contact
Laurie Lee Brom, Queen of Night
Elsewhere in Brom’s work, she loads her women up with supernatural flair and costumes them in excess within a brooding, fantastical atmosphere. Vines and branches crown their heads, flowers cluster and wind through hair, ghostly hands reach from shadows, peacock feathers and stars and crescent moons adorn them. Gold and crimson and cobalt saturate the fabric. It’s lush and dark at once—ornamental but eerie, decorated but shadowed. Every surface blooms with magic and strangeness.
Their eyes roll upward, turning inward the way you do when you’re contemplating deeply, searching your heart, taxing your memory, listening to your gut. Lost in your head. As these figures seem to be lost in theirs. All that ornamentation surrounding them can’t hold a candle to the landscape of their own thoughts, the interior worlds that exist only for them.
Laurie Lee Brom, Spectre
Laurie Lee Brom, Beyond the Veil
Brom portrays women’s interiority as constant and irreducible across all aesthetic registers. Whether she dresses them in gothic finery, domestic ordinariness, or fantastical excess, the core is always the same: a woman who is present, conscious, thinking, and fundamentally unknowable to us. This unknowability isn’t mystique. And maybe this isn’t about women’s mystery. It’s simply the human condition, the basic fact of human consciousness: private, impossible to fully reach. After all, no one can ever fully know what’s happening inside another person’s head.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Now that I’ve spent December celebrating everyone else’s books, it seems only fair to mention my own. There are still a few shopping days before the holiday, though I can’t guarantee anything will reach you in time.
But if you’re shopping for friends who trace sigils in the margins and dream in symbols, the family member who gets lost in museum rooms for hours, who collect visual obsessions like other people collect recipes, or if that person is absolutely, unquestionably you sitting there right now thinking “yes, actually, I do deserve something gorgeous and weird that rewards endless returns”—here’s my trilogy.
The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic is where sacred geometry meets spirit art, where witches conjure alongside alchemists, where astrology and Kabbalah and ceremonial magic all get their visual due. Over 175 artworks spanning centuries, organized into The Cosmos, Higher Beings, and Practitioners. Artists driven by that soul-deep hunger to reveal hidden truths, to make the invisible visible, to show us the secret shapes underlying everything. Essential for tarot readers and Hermetic scholars, for anyone who’s ever traced a sigil or stared into a crystal ball, for those building occult study curriculums or simply hungry for imagery that transcends the ordinary and reaches for something vast and glimmering and strange.
The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre is nightmares and plagues, mourning art and murder ballads, the monstrous feminine and supernatural beings, memento mori and existential dread. Artists who understood that darkness carries weight and beauty, that our shadows deserve attention, that facing our demons might actually comfort us. Over 200 artworks across centuries asking: why are we drawn to the macabre? What happens when we stop denying our darkness and start reveling in it? Essential for Gothic souls and Victorian mourning enthusiasts, for anyone who’s ever felt more at home in graveyards than crowds, for those who understand that beauty and horror often share the same face.
The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal is beasts and forgotten realms, myth and impossible landscapes, artists building entire worlds from imagination alone. Dragons and wonderlands, magic and philosophy, hope made visible through paint and illustration. Fantasy isn’t escape—it’s that irresistible impulse toward wonder, that refusal to accept reality as the only option, that hunger for what could be. Essential for worldbuilders and folklore scholars, for anyone who’s ever needed to see how you make the impossible feel real, for those who understand that imaginary worlds deserve our fiercest attention and deepest study.
You can find these wherever books are sold, or order signed copies from me directly. I can’t promise they’ll arrive in time for your Hexmas gifting needs as the postal gods remain mysterious and unknowable, but I promise to get them in the mail today. Receiving a book in January when you’ve half-forgotten you ordered it feels like a gift from your past self anyway—an extended holiday, a little magic arriving precisely when January gets bleak, and you need it most.
The Art of Darkness gathers over 200 artworks across twelve chapters, musing on why artists have always been drawn to shadow. Symbolists and Surrealists making visible our inner landscapes, Pre-Raphaelites staging psychological dramas, artists like Goya painting his nightmares, Munch exploring anxiety and fear, Kahlo transforming pain into transcendence.
And the contemporary creators: Marci Washington‘s ghostly figures in rotting wallpaper. Dylan Garrett Smith rendering fauna and flora in ash and chalk. Caitlin McCormack crocheting delicate birds and skeletons. Darla Teagarden building surreal photographic narratives. Becky Munich‘s sly-humored sirens. Susan Jamison‘s luminous egg tempera paintings steeped in ritual. Rachael Bridge capturing twilight in impossible palettes. Stephen Mackey‘s dreamlike twilight worlds. Aron Wiesenfeld’s liminal thresholds. Caitlin McCarthy‘s spectral beauties and sibyls. Alex Eckman-Lawn‘s surreal collage portraits. Ruth Marten’s absurd alligator-laden interventions. Laurie Lee Brom‘s ghost stories. Bill Crisafi‘s woodland ritual. Amy Earles’ autumn daydreams. Nightjar art of Adam Burke‘s misty wilderness. Aleksandra Waliszewska‘s haunting nocturnal visions. Santiago Caruso’s darkly romantic illustrations. Gerald Brom‘s mythic creatures and feral witches.
We all experience the full spectrum of human emotion. The uncomfortable parts don’t vanish when we ignore them. But when we encounter them in art, something shifts. There’s richness in shadows, depth in contrast. These artists give form to feelings we couldn’t name otherwise.
This book is for… October book clubs looking for something visually stunning to discuss ❈ Libraries creating seasonal displays that celebrate the atmospheric and eerie
❈ Bookstagrammers, BookTokers, BookTubers building creepy nonfiction TBRs ❈ Anyone who starts their spooky season decorating in April
❈ Bookish eleven-year-old oddballs and the adults they became
❈ Art lovers discovering contemporary creators alongside historical masters ❈ Gift-givers seeking something thoughtful for the art lover, the goth, the perpetually curious
A pale face emerges from a writhing, slithering mass of beetles and larvae, yet Jana Heidersdorf’s macabre portrait mesmerizes, not disturbs. In her cover art for the gothic metal project Wurmpalast, inspired by Poe’s Ligeia, insects arrange themselves into baroque adornments around serene features while a lone specimen makes its pilgrimage across her lips. The beetles become ornamental headdress transforming infestation into coronation. Decomposition, but make it elegant devastation.
When I was curating The Art of Darkness and later, The Art of Fantasy, Jana’s work found its way into both collections. She finds genuine beauty in traditionally unsettling imagery and tenderness in decay. Her approach to the darker things feels emotionally vulnerable rather than gratuitous or manufactured for shock.
Consider her mermaids, which she’s created by the dozens. The Queen of Eels pulses with inner light in crushing ocean depths, her elongated form more alien than human, while serpentine creatures coil around her in devoted attendance. She commands these deep-sea dwellers through presence alone. Jana paints underwater realms in midnight blues and greens where strange creatures generate their own light. Her mermaids feel genuinely otherworldly and more than a little terrifying, closer to what such beings might actually be if they ruled kingdoms we can’t fathom.
Her fairy tale reimaginings reveal similar subversive instincts. In “Wolfwood,” the beast has grown large enough to encompass entire forests within its dark fur, each strand housing shadowed trees and hidden paths. His luminous eyes burn like twin moons above a tiny figure in red…but this isn’t the cowering child of familiar stories. She stands her ground in the starlit clearing, neither fleeing nor advancing, her posture suggesting curiosity and wonder rather than fear; she’s genuinely interested in this encounter. The blue-gray mist shrouding the trees gives it a dreamlike quality, and we’re not sure if this is a nightmare, but we’re also not afraid to find out.
There’s a ritualistic quality to many of her pieces that speaks to deeper mythologies. “Dreambird” captures a covenant sealed in crimson, not violence but offering, as a small brown bird pierces a ghostly palm in one clean swoop. Each feather rendered with medieval manuscript devotion, the creature becomes both communion wafer and consecrating priest. The blood that wells speaks not of wound but willing sacrifice, each ruby drop a prayer offered up. Against mottled jade darkness, the pale hand becomes altar, the bird transformed from woodland creature into mystical messenger.
“Spider’s Cradle” continues this theme of sacred exchange. Death extends jewelry with a grandmother’s care, skeletal fingers cradling web-work as if spun from moonbeams. Each dewdrop caught in the strands gleams like baroque pearls while a white spider bears a ruby birthmark – the crimson sigil of small sovereignty. The phantom face veiled in green shadows suggests inheritance rather than transaction, ancient wisdom passed from bone to the eight-legged makers of delicate snares.
Not everything dwells in shadow. In “Apparition,” the night sky’s dreams of swans takes wing in luminescent clouds. The ethereal bird materializes from stardust, its form shifting between solid grace and celestial vapor as it glides through velvet darkness. Below, a solitary figure witnesses from their balcony – summoner or blessed observer, we can’t tell. It’s the artist at her most hopeful, yet mystery persists even in gentler visions.
Her book cover work demonstrates how these sensibilities translate to commercial projects. For Don’t Let the Forest In, a formal portrait fissures along organic lines as wild roses and thorned branches spill through tears in the photographic surface. A pale butterfly settles among the chaos. A crimson stain spots a collar. Violence and fragility. Blood and wings.
“Tears,” created for Month of Fear 2018, captures a nocturnal being that could be timeless elemental spirit or simply someone out past their bedtime. The question hovers in wide, unblinking eyes – one of which nestles a tiny white spider like a glowing moonstone. What slumbering spirits is she communing with? What midnight magics is she calling forth?
In “Make a Devil Out of Me,” elongated fingers curve into a shape that could be horns – or is it just the way pale hands twist in darkness? Each fingertip sharpens to wicked points while rose vines coil around bone-thin digits. Above, lurid red eyes glower from shadows. Are we seeing transformation, or just the power of suggestion? The pose suggests both invitation and challenge – someone who already feels monstrous finally showing us what they see in the mirror.
Jana finds the sacred in decay, the tender in transformation. Her creatures don’t exist to frighten but to reveal something true about change, about how what we fear might actually offer gifts, how the grotesque can reveal hidden forms of grace, how what repels and disturbs us, what we instinctively avoid might be precisely what we need to see. Through her art, Jana proposes that wisdom often wears frightening masks, that beauty and horror might be closer companions than we’d like to admit. That perhaps our discomfort is a compass, pointing toward the truths we’re not yet ready to face but desperately need to find. That change isn’t something to endure but something to embrace, that our deepest growth might come from the very deepest, darkest places.
Below are a few more of my favorites among the dispatches from the dark corners of Jana’s imagination…
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Hello there, weirdos and lovelies! To my longtime readers who’ve been following my musings for years—you know all this already, and I adore you for sticking around through every obsession and existential spiral. But for those who’ve recently discovered me through my Ghoul Next Door column in Rue Morgue magazine, found my Midnight Stinks perfume reviews on TikTok (no longer updated in that space, but I’ve been writing about perfume since before TikTok was born and continue to do so literally everywhere else), or stumbled across this blog through some strange artsy rabbit hole mystery revolving the lost and found cover artist of an iconic children’s fantasy book, let me introduce myself properly. I’m a published author. Three times over, in fact.
I’ve spent nearly two decades balancing corporate drudgery with creative pursuits that would make my HR department deeply uncomfortable. (If I had one, if I wasn’t, in fact, the HR department.) While documenting my obsessions with fragrance, fashion, and all things fantastically macabre here on this corner of the internet, I’ve also been working on a trilogy (soon to be a quartet!) of art books. Apparently, I decided that years of research into dead artists and occult symbolism would be a brilliant use of my free time. My bank account remains unconvinced.
The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mysticwas my first foray into published territory, a visual feast exploring how artists throughout history have been drawn to mystical realms. From theosophy and kabbalah to alchemy and sacred geometry, this book examines why creators are perpetually pulled toward the esoteric. If you’re the type who finds tarot cards aesthetically compelling even if you can’t tell a death card from a grocery list, who gets shivers from Hilma af Klint’s automatic drawings, or who’s ever wondered about the symbolic mysteries hidden in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, this one’s for you.
The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre followed two years later, diving headlong into humanity’s eternal fascination with mortality, fear, and the grotesque. This isn’t about glorifying death but rather examining why artists from Hieronymus Bosch to Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo to Louise Bourgeois have found beauty in darkness, comfort in confronting our demons. If you’re someone who finds Victorian mourning jewelry beautiful, who appreciates the sublime terror in Goya’s black paintings, or who understands that sometimes the most profound art emerges from our deepest fears, this book speaks your language.
The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal completed the trilogy in 2023, celebrating the impossible, the imaginary, the utterly fantastical. From Blake’s visions to contemporary illustrators conjuring digital dragons, this book asks why artists are compelled to create worlds that never existed. If you’re enchanted by myth and magic, if you’ve ever lost yourself in a museum gallery full of surrealist paintings, or if you believe impossible worlds can reveal unexpected insights about our own, this collection will bewitch you.
The links above will direct you to the Amazon page for each book. However, if you’re in the US and would like a signed copy (and a bookmark!) for your collection, you can order directly from me here.
Want to dive deeper before committing? I’ve written extensively about a handful of the artists and themes in each book—you can find behind-the-scenes stories and detailed features under the corresponding categories right here on my blog.
Here’s something you might not know about me: more than writing books, I’ve always dreamed of selling them. Picture me in some dusty, overstuffed used bookshop, surrounded by towering stacks of forgotten treasures, helping fellow bibliophiles discover their next obsession. While I don’t yet own that quaint little shop (my retirement plan, wheeee!) I’ve found the next best thing.
My Pango bookshop has become my virtual version of that dream. It’s where I sell my carefully curated collection of used books: horror novels with deliciously creepy covers, poetry collections that make your soul ache, esoteric volumes on tons of weird shit. These are books I’ve loved, books that have lived on my shelves until space demanded difficult decisions, books that deserve new homes with readers who will appreciate their particular magic. Also, I am running a 20% off sale right now!
Browsing my bookshop feels a bit like wandering through my personal library, which, in a way, it is. You’ll find first editions alongside well-loved paperbacks, academic texts on occult symbolism next to vintage horror paperbacks with lurid covers. These are books I’ve loved, books that have earned their place through great writing, beautiful design, or sheer oddball charm.
My day job is in jeopardy, which has me scrambling to shore up my side hustles. After nearly 20 years, losing that steady paycheck means these passion projects need to start paying actual bills. It’s terrifying and liberating in equal measure; my fight-or-flight response can’t decide if this is a disaster or an opportunity; I am simultaneously puking and turning ecstatic cartwheels. I’m a fucking mess.
Your support, whether through purchasing my books, browsing my virtual bookshop, or simply sharing a post that resonated with you, helps keep this strange little corner of the internet alive. It allows me to continue exploring the intersections of art and the occult, beauty and darkness, the real and the fantastical, without the pressure of advertising or sponsored content diluting our conversations.
Ways to Support This Work
Not sure which book might speak to you? Are you drawn to mysticism, spirituality, or the esoteric? Start with The Art of the Occult.Do you find beauty in melancholy, comfort in confronting mortality?The Art of Darkness is calling your name. Are you enchanted by myth, magic, and impossible worlds?The Art of Fantasy will transport you to realms beyond imagination.
Beyond purchasing books (though that’s always appreciated), there are many ways to help keep this creative work flourishing:
Leave reviews if you’ve read my books—your words help others discover this work
Share posts that resonate with you across social media
Request my books at your local library
Engage in the comments—your thoughts and reactions inspire new ideas
Browse my Amazon affiliate links when you’re shopping anyway
Your engagement matters just as much as financial support. Every comment, every share, every moment you spend in this space contributes to keeping it alive and thriving.
Whether you decide to add one of my books to your collection, discover a treasure in my virtual bookshop, or simply continue reading these midnight musings about the beautiful, the dark, and the strange, know that you’re part of something special. You’re supporting not just me, but the entire ecosystem of independent creators who choose to work in the margins, who believe that art and beauty and weirdness matter.
Original cover art by Richard Bober of Stories To Be Read With The Lights On
Ever since we solved the mystery of the Wrinkle in Time cover artist, I’ve been itching to share more of Richard Bober’s work here. His art pulses with an otherworldly luminescence – sometimes veiled by murk and shadow, sometimes blazing in full ethereal splendor.
In his horror work, this shimmer peers through layers of gloom: take his cover for an Alfred Hitchcock collection, where the master of suspense sits at his desk in an eerily shadowed room. The exquisitely blown glass lamps and lanterns suspended from the ceiling cast their glow through a heavy atmospheric haze, while behind him, the stark silhouette of an upraised arm clutching a knife cuts through all that diffused glitter – a perfect contrast of light and shadow, sparkle and threat.
Richard Bober, ” Belly Up to the Bar”
Richard Bober, Mustapha and His Wise Dog
Richard Bober, Portrait of an Orc
This radiance struggles through a different kind of murk in his pulpy sci-fi pieces, wading through cosmic morass and alien atmospheres. But in his more fantastical works, that same light breaks free entirely – illuminating visions of impossible beauty. Take this utterly bizarre bar scene: at first glance, it’s teeming with aliens of every imaginable variety, but look closer, and you’ll find it’s set in what appears to be an old-world gentleman’s club, all dark polished wood and traditional elegance, complete with a figure in a powdered wig – yet overhead hangs a disco ball, transforming this stately space into some kind of interdimensional nightspot.
On the cover of Esther M. Friesner’s Mustapha and His Wise Dog, a dragon is emerging from what can only be described as a posh fantasy spa-castle-pagoda onto a balcony where regal figures blithely recline in a hot tub overlooking an iridescent sea.I have never read the book, and I don’t know what it’s about, so there’s no doubt that my description bears not one iota of relevance to the actual plot!!
Anyway, even his portrait of an orc – traditionally the most brutish of fantasy creatures – finds a balance between that shadowy murk and shimmering dignity. Ugly but make it fashion, as they say.
Richard Bober, “Lady Vampire”
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle with cover art by Richard Bober
I discovered these pieces in reverse, really. First came his portrait of an aristocratic vampire lady while I was researching The Art of Darkness – a piece so captivating I desperately tried to include it in the book. Then there was that infamous 1976 Dell/Laurel Leaf paperback cover of A Wrinkle in Time, with its red-eyed specter and improbable winged centaur. That cover had lived in my memory since childhood, and when I began work on The Art of Fantasy, I knew I wanted to include this piece of beautiful nightmare fuel.
But I’d been down this road before – previous searches for the artist’s identity had led only to dead ends. By the time my hunt began again in earnest, my book was already at the printer’s, and my blog post about the mysterious cover artist had exploded across social media.
Richard Bober, A Hangman’s Dozen (the executioner is actually a self-portrait of Bober!)
Richard Bober, 12 Stories for Late at Night
Richard Bober, Stories Not For The Nervous
I had no idea then that the two pieces that had independently captured my imagination – the elegant vampire and the cosmic horror of the Wrinkle cover – sprang from the same artistic wellspring. Amid the avalanche of suggestions and theories that poured in during the investigation, there were these quiet, prescient hints – my friend Keith mentioned Bober’s name in my Facebook comments, and on Twitter, Wallace Polsom pointed out those distinctive sickly greens in Bober’s Hitchcock covers.
Adam Rowe of 70’s Sci-Fi Art, whose expertise in this era of illustration is unmatched, lent his considerable knowledge to the investigation. When Endless Thread took up the mystery (a whole story unto itself), their investigation would eventually prove these subtle clues significant, unraveling the threads that connected these works I’d loved for such different reasons.
Richard Bober, Alive and Screaming
Richard Bober, 12 Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV
While most of Bober’s work focused on the fantastical and the eerie, he occasionally turned his eye to still-life compositions with delightfully macabre results. The cover for 12 Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV showcases a gleefully sinister collection – a bundle of dynamite, a bullet, a scorpion, a bottle of poison, some sort of firearm (a musket? I don’t know guns, okay?), and a skull with a lone eyeball rolling grotesquely in its socket.
It’s a vignette that, as it turns out, hints at an artistic legacy carried forward by his nephew.
Matthew Bober, Performance 4
Matthew Bober, Wanderer
Matthew Bober, Requiem
Matthew Bober, Wind-Up Cat
As noted in the Endless Thread interview, Richard’s nephew Matthew remembers the Wrinkle in Time cover as the first book he had read that his uncle did the cover for, talking about it in school. He would later spend time in his uncle’s basement, where paintings were stored around a pool table, and eventually helped digitize Richard’s slides – an informal archive of work photographed on 35mm film.
But most meaningful were the countless nights spent watching his uncle work: “He would always let me sit there and watch him paint. So, many, many, many, many nights, I got to sit there and just watch him work on a cover or whatever he was working on. So I learned an incredible lot from that — to see the profession, what it meant to be a professional, you know, and just watch that. It’s… I can’t even describe what that meant to me.”
Matthew is an artist himself, and scrolling through his Instagram sends me into absolute paroxysms of demented glee. His hyper-realistic still lifes feel like the most perfect gatherings of misfit treasures – think of those sad little ceramic creatures you sometimes find in thrift stores, the ones with slight chips or haunting expressions that make other people pass them by, the forgotten mechanical toys and vacant-eyed dolls that seem to be asking for someone to take them home and give them new life.
In Matthew’s paintings, these precious oddities come together in the extraordinary gatherings. Porcelain doll heads with empty, searching eyes commune with clay skulls, while owls, bunnies, elephants and the most beautifully unsettling clowns gather for what feels like the coziest of strange tea parties. Wind-up alligators and other odd little mechanical toys peek out from the edges, each one seeming curious and somehow alive, as if caught in the middle of their own secret adventures. He captures every worn edge and chipped surface with such loving attention, transforming these overlooked treasures into something magical through sheer technical precision and an absolutely infectious sense of joy.
Every time I look at one of his pieces, I discover some new detail that makes my greedy little goblin heart do shriekingly clumsy cartwheels of delight.
Richard Bober, Happy Deathday
Bober was famously private and perhaps a bit of a technophobe – he had no cell phone, no computer, not even long-distance phone service. His agent, Jane Frank, called him a recluse; in nearly 30 years of representing him, she only met him once, often accepting awards on his behalf at conventions while assuring people he wasn’t merely a figment of her imagination.
For a fascinating deep dive into Bober’s artistic philosophy and his complex relationship with tradition and modernity, I highly recommend this illuminating profile from the summer before his passing: Richard Bober: Gift of the Old Masters.
Bober, With Fiends Like These
Richard Bober, Woman in Black Dress
Richard Bober, Phantom of the Opera Study
What truly enchants me about Bober’s work is its shimmering, glittering quality – a sort of luminous magic that infuses even his darkest artworks. Looking at these pieces, I want to gather up all of Bober’s paintings and stitch them into the most extraordinary ballgown – imagine the sweep of that skirt, each panel flickering between horror and beauty, between the mundane and the cosmic.
The bodice would be crafted from his Hitchcock covers, all those sickly greens and oceanic blues swirling together. The full skirt would be a phantasmagoria of his fantasy works – that hot tub dragon scene forming a shimmering border, while aliens and orcs and vampire aristocrats dance across the fabric.
And there, right at the heart of it, that nightmarish Wrinkle in Time centaur would spread its rainbow wings across the waist, its companion’s red eyes glowing like rubies in the folds of fabric. It would be a gown for a masquerade at the end of the universe, where all of Bober’s creations could finally meet and mingle.
Richard Bober, Hathor Egyptian goddess of love
Richard Bober, College of Magics
Richard Bober, No Body
Richard Bober- Wizard in Purple
I harbor this slightly ridiculous dream: that someday, The Art of Fantasy might go into a tenth-anniversary edition. Let’s be real – my books about weird, dark art are probably far too niche (and, I suspect, so far under the radar as to be subterranean) to ever be bestsellers, but wouldn’t it be something if that haunting Wrinkle in Time cover could land among its pages?
Not that it matters much – Bober’s art is out there now, inspiring new generations of readers and artists, no longer anonymous but celebrated for the strange and shimmering legacy it is. Still… a ghoul can dream!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Art in the Margins book trio photographed by Maika
Happy birthday to my three beloved art books, published in Septembers 2020, 2022, and 2023!
Let’s take a moment to appreciate these visual feasts that explore the mystical, the dark, and the fantastical.
The Art of the Occult contents pages, art by John William Waterhouse
✨ The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook For The Modern Mystic (2020)
A journey through the esoteric and spiritual in art, from theosophy to sacred geometry. This book showcases how artists have been drawn to the mystical, creating works that transcend time and place.
“The Art of the Occult crosses mystical spheres in a bid to inspire and delight, acting as a light introduction to the art of mysticism.”
The Art of Darkness contents pages, art by Leonora Carrington
✨ The Art of Darkness: A Treasury Of The Morbid, Melancholic & Macabre (2022)
Dive into the shadows with this exploration of how artists have grappled with the darker aspects of the human condition. From the haunting to the horrifying, this book asks: what comfort can be found in facing our demons?
“We deny our inner darkness at our own peril. This book invites us to sit for a while with these shadows – from the safety of our armchairs.”
The Art of Fantasy contents pages, art by Alphonse Mucha
✨ The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal (2023)
Embark on a magical journey through the realms of imagination. From mermaids to mythical creatures, this book celebrates the fantastical visions that have captivated artists throughout history.
“Our most madcap adventures and extraordinary flights of fancy – this is the fabulous realm of fantasy, and the spectrum of fantastic art is an abundant, richly diverse wonderland to explore.”
These books are more than just curations of art – they’re gateways to other worlds, invitations to explore the depths of human creativity and imagination. Whether you’re drawn to the mystical, the macabre, or the magical, there’s a book in this trio for you. Find them here or grab a signed copy hereand join me in celebrating these weird little art goblins and the windows they open into extraordinary realms!
