by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 15, 2010

"Wolf ran over the hills, lean, mean, and always hungry."

This book has the secret ingredient that's missing in most children's books: mystery. The cryptic illustrations have a slick, stylish simplicity. Etienne Delessert has won 12 gold medals from the American Society of Illustrators, according to the book's jacket, and a retrospective of his work was shown at the Louvre museum. Etienne Delessert, it adds, "has been translating his and the world's ideas, passions, fantasies, and nightmares into the visual language of books, posters, animated films, paintings, and sculptures for many years."

Delessert's approach to this story is very original - and fascinating. On the first page, the wolf is shown wearing a cap like a Viking helmet, with strange pagan black-and gold stripes on the horns. They match the gold tints on a distant hill, and the dark silhouette of the one behind him. And in the drawing on the next page, the moon's dark side is red, while the bright side takes the shape of a face. It's the midnight moon, and soon (the text tells us) the wolf had grown even taller than the moon.

In the illustration, he's dangling a rabbit by its ears - and on the next page, the whole sky has turned an orangish red. The unusual illustrations only match the book's odd description of its antagonist. "He slept late, sang so loud that rabbits ran in circles, mice and moles jumped into their holes, birds tucked their heads under their wings, and cows' milk turned sour." It's an unmistakably dark story, almost savoring its descriptions of the predator's viciousness. "When Wolf wasn't hunting he was making spending hats with the fur of animals he had gobbled down…"

"His head was so large that he needed the skin of seven cats to cover it."

It's like a weird poem, or an act of children's picture book surrealism. Birds fly into the wolf's mouth to pick the food from "his gruesomely shiny teeth". Other animals have formed armies against him - the beavers once tried to drown him, and "crows pelted him with walnuts." The fox worry's he'll outgrow the planet, and then two clever cats come up with a scheme.

And they're going to use three adorable little pink pigs as bait!

It's not until the second half of the book that the story becomes familiar - though even then, the straw huts and twig huts are actually assembled by the entire animal kingdom. In a way, it's even more satisfying, since in this version of the story, the wolf is a much bigger menace. This re-telling might be too dark for some readers, but I personally appreciated the way Delessert gave a fresh take to the old familiar fairy tale.

By the book's last page, that intriguing wolf has finally leapt, wailing, out of the brick house's chimney, and ends up circling the planet in the sky, just as bright as a shooting star…

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