Edifice
By Andrzej Klimowski 
SelfMadeHero, Paperback, £16.99

DEMONIC eyes staring from the window of a bookshop in Ealing: this was my first encounter with the work of Andrzej Klimowski. His cover for the Picador edition of Peter Carey’s Bliss was a grotesque and baffling image realised through rotation, shade, juxtaposition and the use of sombre colour. Deceptively simple, disquieting and powerful.

Klimowski – who had already produced striking and enigmatic posters for cinema and theatre – went on to create covers for books by Harold Pinter, Milan Kundura and Dennis Potter. In the 1990s, he branched into graphic storytelling with his dark and dreamlike novels without words (The Secret and The Depository) and his graphic adaptations of stories by Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem and Robert Louis Stevenson. 

Later, there was Horace Dorlan, a mixed-modality narrative in which text-only chapters are followed by sequences of wordless graphics. It’s a bravura fantasia involving an academic’s attempts to meld art and science while his sense of reality is under threat.