"Beautiful Darkness" by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet

I don’t do reviews, but I do like to write about things that I enjoy. And I enjoyed the graphic novel “Beautiful Darkness” very much. Comics critic Rob Clough does a very good job describing “Beautiful Darkness” here. If you like that gorgeous book cover shown above, you should take a moment and read Rob’s review. I’ve read other reviews of this book as well, and I agree with the very positive responses it has gotten. There is one idea that I had about the book that I haven’t seen anywhere else, though, and that is the thing I’d like to contribute. Note: if you haven’t read ‘Beautiful Darkness,’ the following interpretation refers to events in the book that should be considered SPOILERS. My take on the book’s ending was this: The man who lived in the cabin, the man who Aurora goes to live with at the end, was the murderer of the dead girl in the woods. The elves and fairies and sprites that literally came out of the dead girl’s head at the beginning of the book were the hopes, fantasies, and dreams of the girl – her hopes for romance, her innocence -- as seen in Aurora -- and also her darker feelings, her doubts, fears, jealousies, meanness, etc. -- as embodied by practically all the other elves and fairies and animals. As the girl’s body decays, these non-physical remains decay as well. They come out lively, but they drop, they disappear, they die, one by one. At the end, Aurora herself kills off the last remaining bunch of them. It is fitting that Aurora kills off the others. Aurora has indeed, by then, been stripped of her innocence -- because she has become the moment when that rotting girl in the woods realizes that she is dead. That her life is over, and that everything has been taken from her. Aurora goes to “live” with the murderer. He is her ‘prince.’ But only because he stopped the murdered girl from being with anyone but him -- and from ever leaving that beautiful and deadly forest. It has been noted that “Beautiful Darkness” has elements of “Lord of the Flies,” "The Wind In The Willows,"and “The Borrowers.” I would add “The Lovely Bones” to that list in that it, too, depicts the last flickers of consciousness of a murdered girl.