Similar to Knights, the idea here is to provide a sort of gloss of interesting stories involving castles. These are from myth and fiction — there is little interest here for a David Macaulay style look at real world castle construction. Through this, you get many of the same stories from Arthur’s court and the wars of Charlemagne and elsewhere in digestible summaries.

I feel like after a certain number of pages, one castle is going to be as interesting to look at as any other castle, especially with so few paintings featuring the people who live in the castles. That’s kind of true, but Lee’s watercolors are sort of endlessly inviting to the eye. So yes, stones, piled high, with some walls, page after page, but there is variety here, enough that I’m always happy to flip through it.

My favorite painting in the lot though has nothing to do with castles. It’s the portrait of Meliagante, dressed in the only suit of platemail to rival the creepy awesomeness of Mordred’s suit in Excalibur (1981). Seriously, look at that helmet! The demon pauldrons are great (the influence of Froud, no doubt) and that hellmouth shield, too! What a villain!

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Faeries is presented as a sort of naturalist’s field guide of the fay, chronicling Froud and Lee’s direct observations of the creatures (it reminds me more than a little of Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters, to be honest). There is a ton of intriguing material here – redcaps and hags and Unseelie Court assassins, magical flowers and sunken kingdoms – and I mined quite a bit of it over the years for my D&D games (if you’ve picked up my module, Hags of Black Woods, now you know where I got that door in the side of a boulder from, something I, frankly, entirely forgot until flipping through the book again for this entry).

Here’s something I just learned: this book formed the basis for a not very good animated TV movie by the same name that released in 1981. While that has gone on to be largely forgotten, both Froud and Lee wound up doing conceptual work for a number of famous films: Froud was a key designer for Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, while Lee worked on Legend and Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films. The visuals for all those movies have since been reabsorbed into fantasy lit and roleplaying games, helping define how we see fantasy today.

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This, and other books in the same vein, were sort of a print version of In Search Of…, the documentary TV series dedicated to mysterious phenomena hosted by Leonard Nimoy from ’77 to ’82. Golden Book covers everything from sea serpents to witchcraft to ESP to lost civilizations in just 140 pages.

What sets Golden Book apart is the art. It is fully illustrated by Alan Lee, who you probably know best for his work on Tolkien’s Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Lee here hasn’t quite transitioned into the melancholy, fog drenched style of his later work, so you get a lot of bold contrasts and less impressionistic compositions. He’s also not afraid to get menacing, as you can see in particularly in his ghost and Baphomet illustrations. There are a lot of weird, atypical Lee subjects in the book – my fave is the stranded spacemen surviving in a cave.

But let’s talk about that werewolf. How often to you see a depiction of the black magic version of a werewolf? 95% of the time, lycanthropy is a curse visited on some unlucky soul. Alan Lee’s werewolf, though, he chose the path of the fang and made dark pacts in order to get it. Seems like a good thread for a Ravenloft adventure…

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