The Dark Paintings

by Hugh Fleetwood

Wealthy, depraved and hugely gifted, Luigi Teramo likes to think of himself as a cross between a pagan fertility god and an evil wizard. Luigi has deliberately rejected his youthful talent for art in favour of making money, and of spending his fortune on young men and drugs. But he cannot bring himself to destroy the fruits of that rejected talent - his early paintings. And as the years pass, it starts to seem that those paintings possess a terrible power. A power that will cause Luigi's life to spin out of control, will destroy almost all who get close to him, and will end by involving him in blackmail, and murder. The Dark Paintings is both a thriller and a black comedy - entertaining, shocking and profoundly disturbing. 'A tinge of the supernatural, a titillating whiff of the perverse, and - topping it off - a compelling miasma of creepiness' - Books To Watch Out For

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Hugh Fleetwood was born in England in 1944. At the age of 18 he went to live in France; at 21, he moved to Italy, where he remained for the next fourteen years. He had his first exhibition in 1970 at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto; in 1971 he published his first novel, A Painter of Flowers, for which he also designed the jacket, as he did for his second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. His fifth novel, The Order of Death, was made into a film starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon (Johnny Rotten). His most recent one-man show, at the Calvert Gallery in London, coincided with the reissue of six of his books by Faber & Faber’s Finds series. In 2012, he was cited in David Malcolm’s The British and Irish Short Story Handbook as a key figure in the development of the English short story; his most recent publication, “How the Story Ends”, will appear in the anthology Speak My Language in November 2015. Hugh Fleetwood currently lives in London.

-Valancourt Books

Reviews

[M.D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read most of Fleetwood's novels and I have been meaning to do a proper re-read and rundown of his more neglected works for quite sometime.

Contrary to the one review posted here, I've always held "The Dark Paintings" in high regard. It's simply one of his best. I don't frequent review sites often, so it's a bit of surprise to me that more people haven't discovered this book by now.

There's some sidetracking from the narrator in this one, which works well for me, as his tales are steeped in the magic, lore, and history of his Italian milieu.

I found those tracts to be just as interesting as the main plot, which is something I can't say for novelists who have made similar deviations.

That said, I'll be needing to revisit the novel at a later date to give it a proper rating and review, but there is much in the way of imagery and characters to be found in here that have been burned into my mind since I initially discovered the book. And like the best Fleetwood's novels, some of it beautiful and poetic, and some of it grim and disturbing.

[Michael Flick · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a "thriller and a black comedy" there certainly isn't much of a thrill or a laugh here. And if this is "contemporary horror," there isn't much terror, either. Still, the book isn't altogether terrible. Just a little boring (the first-person narrator is really into himself and not much else) and, as far as the "evil" involved, banal. This isn't literary fiction, so it must fall into some genre. Perhaps rural noir. Or gay Gothic. Whatever, I won't be searching out other books of the same kind. Nor will I be reading the other five (!) books in which this author tells the other side of this same story.