Through the looking glass

pages, I stumbled across the work of Gustav Dore.

It flicked a switch in my head that illuminated two signs: one, I think, said 'Welcome to the Wild Wood', and the other said something like 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here'.

Of course there've been artists far more terrifying than Gustav Dore "" Hieronymus Bosch, for instance, permanent resident and creator of a planet of nightmares "" but Dore straddled the divide between the familiar and the truly terrifying.

In one of the more famous sketches he made for 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', a ship dwarfed by a hostile sea heads helplessly towards its doom.

Dore has the furled sails exactly right, and conveys the suggestion, no more, of nameless monsters lurking beneath the waves.

In another work, Death inhabits his familiar skeletal form but has acquired a hint of sinew, muscle, flesh on the face, so that the dividing line between the Grim Reaper and a conquering knight of yore is unpleasantly blurred.

And when Dore's work is used to feed the imagination of a contemporary illustrator, artist and writer with an equally twisted mind, what you have is one of the most unusual works to emerge in recent times.

The protagonist of Walter Moers' A Wild Ride Through the Night is Gustav Dore, aged 12, propelled on a nightmare quest-journey through the world he created in his own illustrations, complete with solemn questing knights, damsels and dragons, monsters and always that faithful companion bearing his scythe. It's a truly, pardon the pun, deadly premise: take 21 of Dore's illustrations and construct a story around them.

What emerges, even through the blurred window pane of a slightly hesitant translation, is a hallucinatory journey that genuflects at the shrine of fable, subverts the standard quest story and teeters wildly between the safety of a childhood tale and the perilous dangers of adult allegary.

The starting point is provided by the kind of dream that any 12-year-old child might have "" there's Dore, the valiant, laconic skipper at the helm of a craft ploughing through perilous seas, knowing that his crew trusts only to the skills of their underage, undersized captain, confident that he will emerge on the far side of sleep's shores unscathed.

But the dream segues into nightmare, and the problem is that Dore cannot wake up into the safety of the real world until he's performed the Six Tasks set for him by Death in the dream world.

Moers wavers between horror and humour: Death's sister, Dementia, for instance, shifts from being the menacing hag of our worst nightmares to petulance and pouting within the same paragraph. Death himself is imposing, but also prone to wording his dread tasks inaccurately and therefore being summarily deflated.

Anyone who enjoyed the classic knight's tales and damsel-in-distress stories will probably have great fun with Moers' subversive take of the damsel versus dragon equation.

The dragons on the Island of Damsels in Distress are a fairly dumb and long-suffering lot: they are also the raw material for a thriving cosmetics industry where their blubber is used for suntan cream, their milk as a skin-rejuvenation supplement and their scales converted into combs.

As the young Gustav's steed, a double-dealing gryphon, comments: "And then, right on cue, along comes some snotty-nosed youth in shining armour who bumps them off. This place should be called the Island of Dragons in Distress, if you want my opinion."

The reason it isn't, explains the gryphon, has to do with advertising "" no ambitious young knight would arrive to rescue an overlarge lizard, though they'd turn up in droves for scantily clad young women!

Moers' imagination matches Dore's drawings panel for panel. We're introduced to the Last Jellyfish, which appears (free of charge) as the last sight for someone who's drowning.

Those who burn to death see the Last Butterfly, if you're wondering. Further on, young Gustav will meet his personal dream consultant (she was the cheese chicken who advised him to cough three times in a previous dream), a horse called Pancho Sansa (shades of Quixote here), and the Most Frightful Monster of Them All, which turns out to be number three in the list actually.

Anxiety used to be one of the best servants of Death, until the monster committed a fatal error: "The fact is, Anxiety was beginning to worry! Not a particularly clever move, my boy, I see that now..."

Some of his creations are less successful, like the Time Pig, which I can only presume was much funnier in the original German.

But as this wild ride through the night continues, you're tugged effortlessly into a world that belongs partly to Dore, partly to Moers and that finally becomes a place in your own imagination.

This is really an adult fairy tale, despite Moers' attempts to make it appealing to children; only a grown-up will get the full humour of the scene where Death sneers at Gustav Dore's illustrations of Death, and where the young Gustav slowly realises that this sternest of stern critics suffers from a grave handicap: being just a skull, after all, he is blind.

A Wild Ride Through The Night

Walter Moers
Vintage, Distributed by Rupa & Co
Special Indian Price £ 5.20
Pages:197