[Watch the video if you like. Read below if you don’t want to watch!]
I want to show you something that freaked me out as a kid, and still kind of does.
It’s from this book, the legendary Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. Yes, the same Alan Lee who did a lot of the Lord of the Rings illustrations and designs for the movies.
So this particular picture, “The Spirit of the Birch Tree”—this one’s by Alan Lee. [reading from book caption] “…is called the One with the White Hand. If the hand touches a head it leaves a vivid white mark and inflicts madness, but if it touches a heart it is the touch of death.”
Yeah. Those fingers, and that face—that freaked me out. And I used that in my book Lava Red Feather Blue, where our heroes go into a fae forest full of birch trees that are inhabited by whitefingers, which are very dangerous; can cause madness or death if they so much as touch you with their long, creepy, white branch finger things. And that is a direct influence from this book [Faeries], as are a lot of the fae in my stories, because I love Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s vision for fae so much.
One review said, after reading my book, “Ten out of ten, I’m now scared of trees.”
My work here is done.
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