Nightmare Diaries Cover Art Reveal
Love is one thing, and horror is another. But don’t their ragged barbs feel the same, tracing down the knots in your spine? When I first encountered Selesnick & Kahn’s collaborative artwork, I felt the rusty tip of Cupid’s arrow jab between my ribs.
The duo created a tarot deck named The Carnival at the End of the World, which included an interpretive guide titled Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate. Beneath the mystical, dream-like images, this beautiful tarot deck addressed the real horrors of climate collapse, civil unrest, and unending pandemics. A bat-faced doctor in a hairy moleskin coat raised his pointed ears in a silent scream; a golem whose body was stacked from strata of city apartments staggered into claustrophobic life, animated by a storm.
I knew immediately that this was the art I wanted to feature on the cover of Moonstruck Books’ first anthology, Nightmare Diaries.
Artist Nicholas Kahn painted the cover art for this anthology on goat skin vellum; he prefers to work in this medium, he told me, because vellum “closely mimics the texture of human skin.” The central figure—an inverted, dreaming woman whose flame-golden hair reaches out like branched coral or lightning—is Goody Maude, a character in Keith Rosson’s story, “Animals, Convincing.”
Waking from a dream in which she hung upside down, her hair tracing strange glyphs in graveyard dirt, Goody Maude peered out her window to see witches, some hundred or more, floating about the air. It was this week past it had happened, and they had danced upon brooms, she said, cavorting in formed patterns and spinning about the eye of the moon, free of clothing or modesty both. They had then landed in John Benton’s pastures all in a single line without a sound being made and began their fornications, pale bodies writhing on the loam, Goody said, with the Devil in the distance prancing about with a book in his hand. Upon summation of their unholy acts the Devil had each of the bewitched sign their name in the book, a thing with covers bound in leather red as blood.
Kahn was drawn to this story in particular, and the imagery in Rosson’s story is amplified by images from Kahn’s own study of American witchcraft, the history of the Salem heresy trials, and the magical practices from that time. Broken crosses, berzerk celebrants, and airborne witches appear in the background of the work. Maude’s hair, animated by her unconscious visions, traces burning sigils into the pasture she floats over.
Sensual and unsettling, with the vellum’s texture still visible under Kahn’s vivid, petite brushstrokes, this painting is the perfect representation of my vision for Nightmare Diaries. Behold.
You can order your copy of Nightmare Diaries through the Moonstruck Books website. To learn more about the anthology and its table of contents, check out this post.
