Little Lost Children: A Story for Henry Darger – by Alan Reed

Reed’s masterful and finely-articulated minimalism, which in their novels Isobel & Emile and The Benjamenta College of Art infuses and verges an insistent reality with subtle magic, is applied here in the other direction. In this heart-rending, chapbook-length tale of innocence, cruelty, and rebellion, set in the world of Henry Darger, a decidedly and darkly magical dreamland is brought to a state of implacable, terrible presence which both manifests and transcends Darger’s corpus from which Reed’s tale springs.

“I stumbled deeper into the woods and Henry sat hunched over at his kitchen table. He drew these things happening to me. He spent whole days and entire nights here, bent over, working. There was just this one light, this one bulb, and his hands moving carefully over blank pieces of paper. He still did not know how to draw. He traced the pictures of children that he found and he painted them the colours he thought they should be. That is how he made us. Me and all of my friends, and all of the children who had lost hope and all of the children who had died.

He dipped his brush into an old, thrown away mug, to wet it. He painted with watercolours, the kind that a child might have. He dabbed bright and beautiful colours onto the suffering of children. He knew that what was happening to us was terrible. It saddened him to see it happening. His hands moved slowly, carefully, gently, even, over every horror that befell us.”

33 pgs on folded letter, w/full-colour cover. Sept.A.Da. 106. (2022 Anti-Vulgar)