From Swedish Royalty to Pulp Trash

So maybe you’ve already heard about that creeptacular painting of the Danish Royal family. The one by Thomas Kluge pictured above. If not you can read about it here. Isn’t it something? It’s like every VC Andrews book cover I remember from when I was a kid.

When I posted this to Facebook and made the Andrews comparison I asked what was the appeal of her books, and what people told me was that she was basically “like Lovecraft for girls”. Here’s a blog post by the writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia on the subject. Which makes sense, as did my wife’s comment that when you’re 12, you seek out the trashiest stuff you can just because reading those books is like a badge of honor. Other folks talked about how those books addressed the fascination/revulsion teens had about sex or offered some catharsis for teens whose home lives were fucked up, but not that fucked up. So maybe there is a value to trash, especially when painted up as Gothic literature. Or maybe the shit was just fun to read. I never read them, as my trash interests were elsewhere.

But as far as royal portraits go, I think Kluge should do more of them.