Today I want to talk about the guy who is truly the first person that comes to mind when someone mentions artists or illustrators in the horror genre. When I first started writing about books, he was the first artist to become familiar to me. His signature style, the use of dark yet transparent watercolor, quick, abrupt brush strokes, and the shocking detail that can be found in something that at first seems chaotic, is immediately recognizable to me. And chaos is, I think an appropriate word for his paintings and illustrations. The images he creates seem to have this odd, almost chilling sense of constant change about them, like things are moving around the surface in subtle, almost detectable ways, but remaining tantalizingly out of reach. Flashes from a half-remembered nightmare.

And the guy’s not an unknown by any means, even though he likes most often to swim in the indie pool with all the cool kids. He’s done work for and with greats such as Joe Lansdale, Clive Barker, and Stephen King, to drop the names of some of the most recognizable.

But he’s also done book covers for such indie greats as the following, to name a few out of literally hundreds (last I checked, more that 250): Lucy A. Snyder’s While the Black Stars Burn and Garden of Eldritch Delights, Michael Bailey’s Inkblots and Blood Spots, and Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Rust Maidens.

If you love Daniele’s work as much as Rich and I do, and you’re intrigued enough to want to learn more, check out some more of the gorgeous dark artwork he so graciously shared with us for this column and follow that link to his website to see even more. If you think you’d like to talk to him about a project you are, or will be, working on, there’s also a link right below our little slideshow that will take you right to his contact page. Click it. You want to.

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VISIT DANIELE SERRA ON THE WEB

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