SOUTHERN LIGHTS: Artist Brom draws on nightmares, creepy thoughts for inspiration

Call Gerald Brom a man of two worlds. Outwardly, he is a 40-year-old professional, living quietly in the suburbs of Seattle with his wife and two sons.

But in his other world, he is nothing less than the Dark Side’s Norman Rockwell.

His legion of fans simply call him Brom. The monomial has a Gothic quality that complements his powerful, often disturbing paintings of things that go bump in the dark.

Brom’s art is famous worldwide. It has illustrated science fiction books, comics, games and videos. Filmmaker Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow," the computer game “Doom II" and the fantasy pursuit “Dungeons and Dragons" owe much of their popularity to his nightmarish imagery.

Yet on the telephone, Brom is anything but monstrous. His soft Southern accent, the product of an Alabama upbringing, adds to his politesse.

“People are always disappointed when they meet me because they say, 'Well, I thought you were going to have tattoos and dress in black and everything,’ " he chuckles.

“But you know -- I put all that into my artwork."

Brom is taking his sense for dark drama into new territories this fall with the publication of his first illustrated novel, “The Plucker." It combines his visual artistry with a surprising talent for the written word.

And again, it’s a marriage of two worlds, an adult book presented as a child’s tale. You might call it a “Velveteen Rabbit" from hell.

The story revolves around castaway toys that come to life in the dark. They and their owner, a lad named Thomas, battle an evil spirit loosed when the boy’s father brings home a ritual African “spirit warden" from a sailing trip to Nigeria.

Thomas’s African-American nanny, Mabelle, helps a heroic Jack-in-the-box fight The Plucker and his creepy minions, the Foulthings, which emerge at night from under Thomas’s bed.

Brom emphasizes that the book has an adult target audience. Its language and storyline -- and many of its frightening illustrations -- aren’t kids’ stuff.

But then there’s also the duality that marks so much of his work.

“A lot of the book came from my kids," he said. His boys, now 12 and 14, grew up on children’s classics like “The Velveteen Rabbit", “Winnie the Pooh", “Raggedy Ann and Andy" -- “all those stories where toys come to life," Brom says.

“And recently there was the movie 'Toy Story’ where the same thing happened. There’s a long tradition of that and I’ve always been fascinated by that idea and the power of your imagination."

A self-described Army brat, Brom moved all over the world with his family: Japan, Germany, Hawaii. He spent only two years in Tuscaloosa but he calls it his hometown.

“Both sides of my family lived there so every Christmas, summers and that sort of stuff were always spent there," he says.

His Southern heritage played a big part in what he calls a lifelong obsession with “the weird, the monstrous and the beautiful." He says he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t drawing monsters.

“My earliest memory of drawing is my grandmother taking me over to the Tuscaloosa library -- this is probably before I was even in the first grade -- and checking out all the dinosaur books I could get my hands on and coming home and drawing dinosaurs."

He filled his childhood sketchbooks with “monsters, witches and ghouls." Some of the creatures that continue to crawl from his adult imagination were born in his youth.

“Something -- rats, bugs, toads, snakes maybe -- had burrowed hundreds of holes" in the dirt walls of the basement of his grandfather’s house, Brom told an interviewer on an Internet site promoting “The Plucker."

“I knew, knew that horrible things, hungry for my small kid fingers, awaited just out of sight in each of those holes. It was those creatures I tried to recall when creating the Foulthings that populate the world of 'The Plucker.’ "

But if it’s often scary, there’s an element of the absurd in “The Plucker" as well.

“I feel that humor is a critical element to horror," Brom says. “There’s a lot of horror out there that’s just hack and slash, over and over. But to me, there’s something really creepy about something that’s supposed to be fun and silly but there’s an evil underneath it. It’s kind of like the Evil Clown syndrome.

“So a lot of the characters, even the bad monsters, they’ll like have bows in their hair and stuff. To me, that makes it funny. And it also makes it creepy."

Brom’s renown as an illustrator made it difficult for him to market his new book.

Although he says the mix of writing and painting stimulated his creativity -- “the elements just feed on each other" -- it left some publishers nonplussed.

“They said, 'We don’t know how to market this. It’s pictures and words but it’s not for kids.’ Some of them had me niched as just an illustrator.

“But Abrams, the publisher, just loved it and really got behind me and let me do my own thing."

Brom has been making the promotional circuit for the past few weeks and says “The Plucker" has met with a strong positive reception. He’s already got plans for at least two similar books. His next story will be set in Texas.

He has spent the past seven years in Seattle. But he says his boyhood in the South led him to appreciate the extremities and dualities whose frictions have always sparked the imaginations of artists that the region has produced.

“Sometimes the South is a little bit hard for me to live in because I feel like -- a bit different," says Brom. “And the South can be a little hard on people that are different.

“But having moved away from the South, I miss it so much. It’s a part of you that you can never leave behind.

“It’s so full of extremes. Good and bad … It’s such a rich culture to draw upon."

Part of that culture plays a prominent role in “The Plucker."

Mabelle, the story’s nanny, is a product of the Gullah culture of South Carolina. She recognizes the evil spirit unleashed from the Nigerian totem -- and she knows the ancient rituals that her ancestors used to harness it.

“Growing up in the South, I was aware of that kind of thing to some degree," Brom says. “But my wife grew up in South Carolina on John’s Island," a center of Gullah culture.

It was from her that Brom learned about the West African spirit world that slaves brought with them to the South

“Actually it’s hoodoo, not voodoo," Brom says. “Voodoo is missed with the Catholic religion but hoodoo is the pure root medicine."

He drew on painters such as Rockwell and fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta for visual inspiration, while authors like Steven King and Neil Gaiman shaped his literary style. He says my mother Kathryn Tucker Windham’s books of Southern ghost stories also influenced him.

The images that haunted him as child never left his imagination.

“I still have a fear of things under the bed," he confesses. “Everybody laughs at me because I’m supposed to be this person who purveys horror.

“But I think a lot of it comes just because I’m so superstitious, as a kid and as an adult. When the lights are out, my imagination sees things in the dark just instantly. If I hear a noise or something, my imagination starts clicking and it quickly turns into something that wants to sink its claws into me."

He laughs, perhaps a bit nervously.

“I can tell myself, as an adult, of course there’s not a green monster in the closet about to get me. But for some reason, there’s still a part of me that thinks there is a green monster in the closet."

That’s not really such a bad thing, given Brom’s chosen profession.

“Things like scary dreams are a wonderful source of inspiration. I kind of drive my wife crazy because if I have a spooky dream, I’ll get up and turn on the light and write down some thoughts or a quick scribble or something because I want to remember that, I want to use it."

A photo on an endpage of “The Plucker" speaks volumes about Brom.

Over the heading “Who is this creep," he sits for a formal dinner portrait that looks like something out of the mid-19th century.

He holds an oversized spoon in one hand. In the other is a big three-tined fork with a tuft of fuzz from the teddy bear on his dinner plate impaled on it.

“I want people to know that I take myself very seriously," Brom says.

Then he laughs. And it doesn’t sound dark or wicked at all.

Reach Editorial Editor Ben Windham at 205-722-0193 or by e-mail at ben.windham@tuscaloosanews.com