Demeter

Ana Juan. National Illustration Prize 2010 awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

A ship’s log, written by a Captain who is totally unaware that he is transporting – hidden in the hold of his ship – a coffin containing Dracula towards the coast of England: a secret cargo of Evil.

At dawn, on the 6th of August 1879, the tranquil English seaside town of Whitby is shaken by a strange shipwreck. A brig named Demeter has run aground on its nearby beach. The only person on board is the Captain, tied to the tiller, with a rosary and a crucifix.   In his pockets are various pages of a handwritten manuscript, perhaps the ship’s log, from which the coastguards hope to reconstruct what has happened.

Thus begins Demeter, Ana Juan’s new book.

At a time when vampires seem often to be portrayed as mysteriously fascinating adolescents struggling with complex love lives, this work returns to the roots of the Dracula legend and brings back to life a malevolent and evasive creature: an evanescent spectre, a furtive shadow that hovers – dumb and deadly – around his unsuspecting fellow passengers on-board ship.

With her black charcoal illustrations, Ana Juan magnificently evokes the nightmarish events surrounding the crew’s mysterious disappearance.

Ana Juan is an illustrator whose books are published all over the world – Spain, United States, Japan etc. She is well acknowledged for her original, melancholic, romantic and sometimes merciless interpretation of reality and her own stories. She is famous for her illustrations published in El País and featured on the covers of the New Yorker and of all Isabel Allende’s novels.

205 x 260

96 pages

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