Humans have long maintained close daily connections with the faeries.  In centuries past, we've acknowledged them by many traditional names: boggarts, bogles, bocans, bugganes, brownies, blue-caps, banshees, miffies, nippers, nickers, knockers, noggles, lobs, hobs, scrags, ouphs, spunks, spurns, hodge-pochers, moon dancers, puckles, thrumpins, mawkins, gally-trots, Melsh Dicks, and myriad others.  Just as they have many different names, they appear to us in many different guises.  They are shape shifters, highly mutable, for no faery or nature spirit has a fixed body.  In their essence, faeries are abstract structures of flowing energy, formed of an astral matter that is so sensitive as to be influenced by emotion and thought.  In their most primal form, we perceive them simply as pulsing forces of radiant light, with a glowing center located in the region of the head or heart.  (In the more highly evolved faeries, the head and the eyes are more strongly defined.)  Responding both to mythic patterns and to human thoughts, these abstract forces delight in coalescing into wings and flowing drapery, taking on shapes that reflect the human, animal, plant, and mineral worlds.

© Brian Froud

Such images grow from my own [Brian Froud's] inner journeys and daily contact with the faeries.  By experience I [Brian Froud] have found them to be irrational, poetic, absurd, paradoxical, and very, very wise.  They bestow the gifts of inspiration, self-healing, and self-transformation...but they also create the mischief in our lives, wild disruptions, times of havoc, mad abandon, and dramatic change..../ In this book I [Brian Froud] have attempted to divide faeries into good and bad-- a convenient conceit for us humans, but laughable to the faery folk.  Faeries insist on being themselves, shape-shifting endlessly.  Good and bad coexist in some degree in all of Faery's creatures. --Excerpt from GOOD FAERIES/BAD FAERIES

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Good Faeries/Bad Faeries In this richly imagined two-in-one book, Brian Froud reveals the secrets he has learned from the faeries- Brilliantly documenting both the dark and light, GOOD FAERIES/BAD FAERIES presents a world of enchantment and magic that deeply compels the imagination. First published in October, 1998 by Simon & Schuster.