The stories in the book are often very short and more like notes on particular faeries. I don’t want people to just read my stories but instead be able to add to them, to elaborate on them in their minds as they read. Like creatures in our world, the faeries lives in different habitats. What were some of your favorite types of environments to explore?

Faeries of the Faultlines: Expanded, Edited Edition|Hardcover

Iris Compiet is the rarest of artist: That who invokes a complete and cohesive reality with every image she creates. Beautiful, powerful and contemplative all at once. -- Guillermo Del Toro Let me tell you about Faeries, let me take you away on a journey, an adventure.In all honesty the whole look and idea behind it was totally in line with the art itself. Nothing was really planned out, it was all very natural and it made perfect sense to create a book which people could take with them when they’d go out into nature. Something they could open up and read a bit then look at their surroundings and maybe see the creatures they’d just read about. I didn’t really have any book in mind when I created this one. I just knew I wanted it to be as close as possible to my own sketchbooks, that’s why I used a specific type of paper to print on, the finish of the cover—it all helps with the idea that this is my sketchbook and my journey. Iris Compiet: From a very early age I was intrigued by the world of faery. I was always reading stories and listening to fairy tales. When I stumbled upon the book Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee, I figured that could be my job when I grew older: paint faeries, be an artist. At first, things didn’t really work out because I lost touch with fantasy and the faery world as I grew older and went to art school. Fantasy was frowned upon in art school so I had to put it aside for a bit. Two staple books of most 70s 'right on' households were Rien Poortvliet's Leven en Werken van de Kabouter, known as Gnomes in English, and Brian Froud and Alan Lee's Faeries.

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The writing takes a while to get going, and I found it to be a bit on the repetitive side in the first half of the book. Here's a faerie, and it releases a smell, has a look, says a thing that will make a human drowsy/itchy/dead, and so on. She'll mention they have a complex social structure, but then never talk abiut that. Perhaps because the creatures described in that half are closer to the worlds of Faeries - it is when Compiet creates her completely own collections that her writing starts to spark. There are chapters on trolls, dragons and faerie-like witches. The chapter on witches gets quite dark, which I enjoyed. There is,for example the nykr, who lies in wait in ponds, hoping to snag a wandering child: The other issue I had is with the font used for the "written" portions of the journal. The font used was a super slanted and cramped cursive font that I struggled to read, especially on some of the faerie names. It would have been nice to have these parts in a more legible font. The last complaint I have is that a lot of the drawings in here were very unfinished feeling, they were just rough sketches. I enjoy more finished drawings, but that is a personal preference. Disclaimer: I received a free digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss+. All opinions in this review are my own and are honest and unbiased.) Connections such as talking about Michelangelo possibly using crushed faery pupae cement the Faultlines even more as a real place. Can you talk about developing those kind of touchpoints? Then again, I hear that the author has taken from previous books of the same nature and then expanded on those. Which might explain why the second half got better and had more details. Those, as far as I can tell, were faeries for which the author had invented the text herself.

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Aside from the above this is a nice "coffee table" book for anyone who loves faerie mythology or cryptozoology in general. I can't tell you how many times I read Faeries, as a kid. You'd find me hunched in some little nook of the house, listening to Enya on my Walkman.

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For me fantasy is reality, or reality is fantasy. To make fantasy real you have to root it in reality. There needs to be a link, a “what if” moment. The moment that sows a seed of doubt about the reality of the fantasy. As kids we can see a world that is magical. We look at really ordinary things with wonder and amazement. It makes sense that a certain stone just is a dragon egg. These are things we unlearn as adults. Fact and logic take over, but is it really fact and logic? Isn’t it much more fun to sometimes wonder about the possibilities that lie in the what if? I enjoyed that there were pencil sketches and full-colour illustrations for each type of faerie as well as their variations (presented as local incarnations). It gives the book that kind of field guide feel. The text is in italics, which sometimes makes it hard to decipher, but no doubt is also intended to reinforce that field guide feel. My guess is that artist Iris Compiet has a similar heartfelt connection to Froud and Lee's work (I mean, messrs Froud and Lee have written forewords for the book, so..), as she more or less has in this book made a sequel of sorts. Her art hewes close to Froud and Allen's style, but also builds on it. And the art is truly magnificent. (And it turns out she's Dutch, which is a fun coincidence.)Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got a copy of this book as a gift for Christmas last year. Those sketches turned into a book because I wanted to invite more people into the Faultlines, a world I’ve always known but wasn’t quite ready for until that moment, that day when I just made peace with myself and let it flow. The book is a collection of notes and illustrations on the many fae and faeries that Compiet has encountered on her travels on the Faultline, the space where the world of the Other and our world intersect. They can stay underwater for a very long time, rarely rising to the surface to breathe. When they do, only their glowing white eyes are visible, as their otherwise dark features hide them from sight. Their thin, dark, and long hair allows them to cover the water's surface, creating the illusion of solid ground. Once a child steps on this treacherous surface, they will find themselves ensnared in the dark tangle of the nykr's hair, choke, and drown."

Faeries of the Faultlines by Iris Compiet, Brian Froud

The field notes style of the book really pulls you into the world. What made you land on this particular presentation? Did any naturalists who documented our world inspire you? I did have some issues with this book. If you are looking for a story about faerie, this isn't that at all. It's chapters that go through different types of faeries, but even that isn't very well organized. I struggled at points to see how certain drawing of faeries really belonged in the chapter they were put in. In the end, I just had to kind of go with it and stop paying attention to what chapter I was in. This is fashioned to look like a sketchbook from a naturalist wandering in search of faeries. Oh, the lengths I had to go to to get my hands on this. Sadly, it didn‘t hold up to the hype/promise.if you’re looking for a fantastical book that will capture your imagination, Faeries of the Faultlines by Iris