Art You're Scared to Look At Directly

I have recently been going through a bit of a Fighting Fantasy trip, having found some old books in my attic roughly six months ago. I have all of the Sorcery! books on order from eBay (I only had The Shamutanti Hills in my possession) and plan to try to collect the initial run of 50. In my day it was a treat to be able to afford a book - most of my reading was taken from the shelves of the local library - so I had about ten in total. I'm hungry for more.

Anyway, one of the books I have is called The Talisman of Death, and last night I decided to page through it, not having enough time to give it a play through. And I was amazed to find an extremely powerful wave of nostalgia washing over me as I suddenly remembered its illustrations - pictures I had not looked at in at least thirty years and probably more, and which I had apparently totally forgotten about, all suddenly became as vivid and fresh to me as they had when I had first seen them all those decades ago.*

Is there a word for that feeling? I said 'nostalgia' but that is not quite right. What I mean is the feeling of suddenly encountering an artefact that triggers memories that had apparently been forgotten. I had not given a second's thought to these pictures for a considerable stretch of my life. But when I looked at them, I knew them - they felt as though they had been etched into my soul, and had just been waiting to be discovered.

A lot of the illustrations are just really great, in an extremely 80s sort of way:

But there is also among them a category of illustration that I vividly remember from my youth - art that was too scary to look at directly. You may know what I mean. You're nine years old. You have a vivid imagination. You're reading a book which has somewhat dark and 'grown-up' themes. And then you turn the page and see pictures like this:

These freaked me out as a young boy. It wasn't that they were particularly grotesque (although they are a bit). It is rather that they made me imagine things, and the things they made me imagine were terrifying. Looking at them made me afraid - not of what was in the pictures, but of what they made me imagine. I knew that to look at them would set my brain whirring, and that would set it off on a journey somewhere horrible indeed. 

Even the relatively non-grotesque art in this book has something of that quality. There is a generalised eeriness that is difficult to shake off. See, for instance, here:

To this day they give me a vague sense of unease. There is something horrible about them - 'horrible' I think being the appropriate term. They are not the stuff of conventional horror. But they are nasty. They make you feel uncomfortable and weird. You don't enjoy looking at them. They are creepy and odd.

Perhaps one has to be 9 years old to truly feel this way, and perhaps the reason I feel this way about them now is simply because I am channelling my 9 year old self. But perhaps I'm wrong. When was the last time you looked at art that scared you to look at it directly? Not because of what it depicted, but because of what it made you imagine? No adult-oriented recommendations, please - keep it clean.

*The illustrator for The Talisman of Death was called Bob Harvey. He died a few years ago, and it seems never had much of an internet presence, but he was apparently prolific.