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Don’t Let It Win












About

Don’t Let It Win




The book "Don't Let the Forest In" by C.G. Drews left me in awe upon reading it. It follows the story of two best friends, Andrew Perrault and Thomas Rye, as they encounter strange anthropomorphic beasts in the forest by their school, soon learning that they are born from Thomas’ drawings. As they fight these man-made monsters, Andrew and Thomas suffer themselves, getting hurt physically and losing trust in their own eyes and bodies.

The writing style was incredibly floral, haunting, and descriptive. But hidden between beautiful language, detailed descriptions, and an unreliable narrator’s thoughts was the shocking truth: it was all a lie. The entire time I was reading, I felt as if I was missing a crucial point of the story. This absence of information made me doubt everything that was being said to me and tricked me into believing the narrator, as he was the only person whose thoughts were laid bare. When the truth is revealed at the end, I was hit with a sense of understanding and shock, as I, as well as the narrator, came to a sudden life-changing realization.

I wanted to explore the mind games played on Andrew and me through designing a card deck based on themes from the book. Card games tend to play into feelings of doubt, lying, and trickery to profit off of false truths, the same way the forest and the monsters were tricking Andrew into believing a skewed reality.
I explored the story through each suit: hearts were hands reaching for each other, fingers turning red; diamonds were bloody teeth opening wide; clubs were mushrooms, spreading their rot in increasing numbers; and spades were vines, growing up the person, until they were poisoned all over. I kept the color scheme simple with black and red, as both colors evoke a sense of darkness and danger, of humanness in writing and drawing as well as in blood and flesh.

Playing with the idea of missing information, I planned my cards to use a lot of white space. I find that white space can be incredibly provoking, as it leaves room that we usually want to fill up. It was important that the cards felt empty, evoking the same “yawning emptiness” Andrew felt when facing the truth (Drews 282). I pulled line drawings from the Public Domain Archive, both anatomical and floral, similar to Thomas’ fantastical sketches.With each suit, I matched a quote that aligned and included it on the ace of each set. For example, the ace of hearts suit was represented by hands reaching each other, fingers turning red with each uptick. The quote, “they’d be together forever, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration," calls to Andrew and Thomas’ obsessive tendencies and constant need for each other, symbolized by hands stretching closer together (126).

Truth, reality, and doubt are constantly tugged at throughout the book, alongside gruesome descriptions of pain and obsession and an eerie feeling creeping down the back of the reader’s spine. Converting the story into an interactive medium exploring the sense of being overcome by the forest, by darkness, by lies, was a way to exemplify our own ability to trick others and ourselves into believing we know the full truth when, perhaps, we are lying to ourselves the entire time.

Drews, C. G. Don’t Let The Forest In. Feiwel and Friends, 2024.
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