Black House

Black Hause Sandro Dragoj Web

Technique: ink drawing
Size: 420 × 297 mm
Date: 21.3.2017
SOLD

How was the Black House drawing created?

Once upon a time, a poet from the Infernalismus art group introduced me to an ambitious writer named Dominik Fiala. He came up with the idea of asking if I would do a drawing that he could use as a cover of the massive collection of short stories called Behind the Curtain.

A little about the book and the author

The author has been writing basically since childhood, and Behind the Curtain is his third book (mostly issued by small publishers and partly self-published), not to mention a few short stories published in various magazines. It is the first comprehensive collection of short stories capturing both classic horror themes and features characteristic of the modern form of the genre. Often they flirt with other genres, as is usual with horror – especially fantasy, science fiction, or magical realism. Behind the Curtain consists of two quartets of stories that form the imaginary core of the book and are sometimes more or sometimes less interconnected – the remaining five stories are stand-alone stories, and the last sixth one is a kind of “parody” of the key features of the previous ones.

What is the Black House?

The penultimate short story in the collection is entitled The Journey Awaits Me and is a kind of a paraphrase of the classic haunted house motif. You might perhaps expect that, given that the title page of the book deals with a scene from this story, it would logically be about a haunted house. But no. The function of a medium cursed with negative emotions, which is partly how cursed houses come into being, is here taken over by a tool much more mundane and in a way closer to humans – a rifle. However, one cannot neglect the fact that from a pure genre point of view the concept is almost identical. The Black House artwork which adorns the collection and is featured at the beginning of the story has the strange aura, and which from the protagonist’s point of view “drips” and distorts in certain non-Euclidean geometry (also a reference to one of the masters of the genre, H. P. Lovecraft), is a reminder of what a sort of horror story this is. The horror genre as a whole includes, for example, stories of brutality and blood (so-called slashers), psychological stories where the supernatural might or might not be all in the protagonist’s head, and also those featuring cursed houses and other objects that can drain the emotions surrounding them, at times creating inexplicable and monstrous phenomena.

Fate of the artwork and the book

The Black House ink drawing didn’t wait long to find its patron, and today it has been in the private ownership of one of my occasional art collectors for years.

As for the book, it is currently sold out and only the author Dominik Fiala has the last few copies. If you are indeed seriously interested in the book, you can try to contact him at sedejpes@seznam.cz.

editing: Arianne Perrier
web design: Brbla

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