Review
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Title: The Desert Prophet
Author/Illustrator: Camilla Stark
Publisher: Self-published
Genre: Graphic novel
Year Published: 2025
Number of Pages: 167
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9798897045891
Price: $39.00
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
Camilla Stark’s debut graphic novel, The Desert Prophet, is remarkably accessible and deeply peculiar. Camilla’s great gift on display throughout the book, narratively and artistically, is mining the deep wells of Mormon esoterica alongside the desert of Utah and transforming that into something immediately emotionally legible for the reader. The book does this while conveying a depth of meaning that is felt, even if all the intricacies and complexities of the images and phrases used are not understood.
The gold-foil hardcover is beautiful, with the gold and black creating an appropriately striking and aesthetically pleasing book. The art is largely in black and white with fairly sparse color flourishes–mostly gold, but also some red and blue, and one more deeply colorful spread. Camilla’s style echoes her talent mentioned above–the characters are deceptively simple and straightforward, easily recognizable to the reader, but bringing with them strange details that feel potent with meaning, waiting for the reader to unlock them. For readers interested in some of the particular intent and process behind some of those choices and dialogue in the graphic novel, Camilla includes some annotations and references in the back of the book.
The Desert Prophet is a quick read, a compelling page-turner that I moved through in a little more than an hour. Yet, its themes and questions and ideas and images pleasantly haunt me still. I trust that the graphic novel contains the particular elegant simplicity of prophecy, that is, the truths it conveys feel immediately resonant, but as you return to its pages again and again, there are different insights and meanings that appear.
In an often bleak and hopeless world, burning to the ground all around us, The Desert Prophet dares to suggest that what we do does matter, and that that alone may be cause for hope. A hope against hope, perhaps even a haunted fool’s hope, but a hope nonetheless. Camilla Stark has given us all a gift in this deeply personal and deeply strange and deeply hopeful book. May we ponder and embrace the gift in the spirit in which it was given.