The Dancing Plague

Publishing Company:
SELFMADEHERO
Imprint:
Format:
ONE SHOT
Creator(s):

GARETH BROOKES (ARTIST / WRITER)
Number of Pages:

192
Cover price:

£ 17.99
Publication Date:

April 2021
Age:
Fiction/Non-Fiction
NON-FICTION
Key words:
Summary:

KEY NOTE
From “choreomania” to coronavirus: an utterly original graphic novel about a newly urgent subject.
DESCRIPTION
The Dancing Plague tells a true story, from 1518, when hundreds of inhabitants of Strasbourg were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance, from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of its witnesses. Prone to mystic visions as a child, betrayed in the convent to which she flees, then abused by her loutish husband, Mary endures her life as an oppressed and ultimately scapegoated woman with courage, strength, and inspiring beauty.

As difficult to interpret now (as a psychological reaction to social injustice?) as it was then (as a collective demonic possession?), the story of the “Dancing Plague” finds suitably extraordinary expression in the utterly unique mixed-media style Gareth Brookes has devised to tell it. The pioneering blend of his trademark “pyrographic” technique with sumptuously colourful (and literal) embroidery perfectly reflects, in a beautiful work of art, the enduring fragility of our human condition – from “choreomania” to coronavirus.

“Visually stunning … With fire and needle, Brookes crafts a book the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”
— The New York Times