The Last Demon

A horned shape sits on the crest of the hill, small enough that you might scan right past it, dark against a pale evening sky. Below, down where the ground flattens into scrub and shadow, a single spot of orange marks something living: a figure in a red coat, perhaps, or a light left burning beside a track. Everything else is worked in charcoal and smudged pastel, the strokes rubbed and dragged so the hillside feels more like weather than rock. The title tells you the odds. One demon left, one small human witness, and a lot of empty country between them.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist and author best known for picture books like The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia, and for the short film The Lost Thing, which won an Academy Award in 2011. His trademark move is exactly this: dropping something impossible into a landscape that otherwise looks completely ordinary, then refusing to explain it. Tan has spoken about growing up on the outskirts of Perth, where the suburbs simply stopped and the bush began, and that edge shows up again and again in his work. His tiny signature, a lowercase "tan", sits in the bottom right corner, about the same size as the creature on the ridge.