Dark Grimoire

Dark Grimoire Tarot
Michele Penco and Giovanni Pelosini (Lo Scarebo, 2008)

Review
It can't all be worthy, serious mysticism, you know. Sometimes I like to curl up with a rubbish horror movie, and apart from the rubbish part, this deck fits the bill admirably.

It's a deck based on H.P. Lovecraft's writing, which means that Death is a massive door in the rocks that everyone's headed towards, and the Devil has definitely been having a long lie in at his house in R'lyeh.

Most of the cards occur at night, but even the daylight ones are so full of shadows and crosshatching that even the rainbows of Judgement look subdued. This, along with the horror themes that run so cheerfully through the deck, mean that it's probably not suited for a younger or more nervous readership.

Stand out cards are all the Aces. I'm a sucker for the kind of heavy leatherbound tome that looks as though it might be reading you back, and each brass-cornered tome clearly plans to nibble on someone's sanity. Though let's take a moment to admire the Nine of Swords, where a man sees in his reflection that he's become a monster. It both funny and horrible at the same time, and I'm immensely entertained.

But despite the temptation to write this deck off as nonsense, there's actually some lovely features going on here. The darkness of the cards allows the artist to indulge in the odd bit of chiaroscuro, and when was the last time I got to use a word like that in a review?