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<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nYou might have seen a dude by the name of Dimitry SkoLzki hanging around the gallery hereabouts<\/a>. He did these distinctive black-and-white sketches\u2014they have an almost almost wood-cut vibe\u2014inspired by characters and events in Blindsight<\/em> (and later, Echopraxia<\/em>). They impressed my Chinese publishers so much they bought the rights for their own Blindopraxia imprints. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Russian by birth, currently based in Cyprus (he got the hell out of Dodge just before Putin went full-on Goon Squad), SkoLzki has recently put out a heartfelt volume of\u2014I\u2019m not quite sure how to describe them, exactly. Certain cultural outlets<\/a> are calling it a collection of \u201cnoir fairy tales\u201d; others call it a graphic novel. Neither description is wrong, exactly, but neither really captures the essence of this surrealistic, horrific, old-time Russian Grimm-tales volume. Limasol Today<\/a> says that it\u2019s about \u201cthe author exploring his inner worlds and the depths of his personality through metaphors and symbols.\u201d Dmitriy tells me that it was forged against a backdrop of \u201clongterm depression\u201d (to which I can only say, Dude, if you could pull off something like this when you\u2019re depressed, I can barely imagine what you could come up with when you\u2019re ecstatic). The phrase \u201cmystical noir illustrated tales\u201d has been bandied about.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n What we\u2019re looking at is an interlocking series of nearly a hundred vignettes clumped together into five larger\u2014I\u2019m going to call them dream tales<\/em>\u2014across 227 pages. The balance between word and picture varies from leaf to leaf. Sometimes a mural sprawls across two facing pages with barely three lines of text to accompany it; other times a whole page of cramped handwriting has to stand on its own without so much as a stick figure for support. The balance between light and dark is a lot more consistent: darkness always wins, even in the happy bits.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The volume is titled Alevtina and Tamara<\/em>, but\u2014 while those two sisters are omnipresent throughout\u2014 the stories really orbit around their brother Lyonka. Lyonka dies pretty much out of the gate (he\u2019s a sickly child who likes beetles) but quickly resurrects and lives out the rest of the book as some kind of hyperphallic goat-human hybrid. A mother figure the size of a mountain breezes through the woods now and then; predators and prey are always prowling around at the edges of the page. Quests trivial and epic get wrapped up in a few lines of free verse, or abandoned halfway through when someone gets distracted by something shiny. A lot of time is spent in trees. It\u2019s a weird, dark, disjointed, strangely innocent<\/em> celebration of the macabre, East-European-mythic right down to the marrow, and I loved it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole thing is Dream Logic made flesh. I bet Lynch would be a fan. I bet Cronenberg would too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n