There is something magical about nighttime. An unknowable, intangible essence out in all that dark that inspires the potential for flights of fancy, for dreaming both asleep and awake.
Laura Pérez’s Nocturnos is about that sense of magic, in all its forms. Breezy, ethereal, the book works in minute vignettes, like a flitting, omnipotent camera moving from instance to instance: a young cave person creating cave paintings in the light of a campfire jumps forward in time, framing that fire as the light in a modern apartment building. Before the book finds purchase on a narrative, it presents a flurry of disconnected images of people caught up in all the banal minor scenes of modern nighttime: train rides, bus stops, all-night diners, and friends passing joints in the park.
Fantagraphics
Nocturnos isn’t a concrete experience but one shot through with surreal, poetic imagery. The narrative isn’t a narrative in the traditional sense: it is a book of brief snapshots spotlighting uncanny but familiar experiences of night. Early on, a car is stopped in the road, headlights illuminating a deer that has been hit; a couple settles into a cabin but the young man is plagued by insomnia. Dream sequences play out with the same earnest reporting as waking moments: in the night, all experiences are valid and true.
Throughout this almost meandering, meditative illustration, there are islands of story in which we sink into a character with incredible intimacy: a surreal experience of a young boy is revealed to be that of an old man who had just revisited his youth in a recurring dream. Elsewhere, a lonely woman entwines herself into an emotional exchange with a chat AI, desperate for connection. A boy is haunted, though his specter is never seen. It is a flurry of profound, microscopic moments that the reader floats through, dreamlike themselves.
Fantagraphics
Laura Pérez is an artist whose work evokes this sort of hallucinatory wonder – she leads the reader through the lightly revelatory, as if emotional impact is best experienced in passing. These are transitory truths, evoking something deep in the reader that is as ephemeral as the stories themselves. In rich, dark blues and greens, she presents a landscape of mystery and magic that she very much wants you to believe in, if only just.
Nocturnos presents a series of moments that feel so uniquely familiar that they might very well be the shared dreams of the reader, captured and retold so that those readers suffer an unsettling deja vu, a near-miss of slumber and frustrated waking. It’s a book of poetry, rendered beautifully with lush illustration rather than verse. Never a horror story but slightly spooky, it’s a book that’s perfect for the autumn we’re now entering.
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