Notes From the Shadowed City Expanded Edition

by Jeffrey Alan Love

192 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2025

About the author

Jeffrey Alan Love is an award-winning artist and writer. He is the author-illustrator of Notes from the Shadowed City and the recipient of a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I'm now completely hooked on the work of Jeffrey Alan Love. His visual style combines elements of silhouette, shadow puppetry, and linocut, all conveyed with stark black-and-white washes that are only rarely touched with red. Love's minimalist graphics pulse with the energy of mythology and ancient worlds that are lost to contemporary humanity.

In Notes From the Shadowed City the author presents a mysterious travelogue recorded by an unnamed narrator researching "lesser-known magical swords". Each full-page image is accompanied by brief text, and there is a sort of music in Love's succinct words, as with the caption for a portrait of "A rider of a creature who my guide tells me lives in thunderstorms."

Both the narrative and the visual elements of Notes From the Shadowed City leave plenty of room for the reader to weave their own daydreams around the unembellished structure that Love provides, and I for one took the bait and spent hours lost in a realm of dark whimsy. Absolutely great stuff!