There’s a suggestion, in John Kenn Mortensen’s Night Terror, of unified myth. Made up of single images and the occasional caption, the viewer is never given any contextual clue as to how these images are meant to relate; it’s in their proximity and their occasional shared detail that we come to understand that this might be the same dream world, home to any and all of our childhood fears.
Beings are often on the move, shuffling stolen children from some unknown place to another. The locations might very well be mammoth, decaying estates, their broken windows concealing hooded cultists. Each strange crew is somehow collated by vague terror – a trio of witches with a boy in a cage, a cadre of clowns carrying a box marked ‘kids to eat’. In one Nemo-esque image, a boy in a flying bed levitates over a group of beings made only of teeth and fur. Are these societies of survivors, adrift in an anchorless land of dreams? Or are these dreaming children on a constant, fretful trek, seeking some safe place or some soft wolfen being to guard them as they rest?
Occasionally, these creatures seem somehow friendly in their malice – misunderstood, perhaps, because their gifts are gruesome (as is the case with a clutch of hags, graciously offering up a pile of stray eyeballs), or because the terror of their presence is overlooked by others. Dreams are often misunderstood, after all, and only the most shocking aspects linger in the mind after waking.
Mortensen’s child dreamers sometimes seem more irritated than horrified, resigned to the looming presence of serpents on their wary way to school. Even those captured and caged seem put out instead of frightened, perhaps because there is a certain ever-presence of fear in childhood. That magical belief in monsters is only confirmed in Night Terror, and these children seemingly never arrive at their grisly ends.
Mortensen’s work is complex, packed with shaded detail, but it is also simple; all depth is created by parallel downstrokes. Everything is hatched but nothing is cross-hatched, which gives even the darkest and most haunting images a lightness, breathing room inside the claustrophobic blackness. The draftsmanship of the mundane aspects – the children themselves, their intruded-upon bedrooms – is clean, effective cartooning, making the presence of the gnarled and jagged creatures all the more unsettling.
Night Terrors isn’t a comic, and it isn’t a casual read. Instead, it’s a collection of images to sink into, each solitary image meant to be examined, mediated upon, and connected with. It is a book filled with familiar dreads, a refresher course of forgotten fears.
More often than fear, however, it reminds the viewer of the open adventure of childhood, the suggested mythology of an infinite world inviting exploration. We want to meet these horrors, to discover these spaces; we want to be reminded that dreams are a place of infinite whimsy.
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