'Everything in space probably wants to eat you': Claire Scully explores galactic threats in Outer Wilderness

The third book in her Wilderness series, Outer Wilderness, sees Claire illustrate unusual creatures and deadly vegetation in a suitably lurid and technicolour style that harks back to pulp sci-fi novels and B movies. Her imagination and space documentaries also help to inform the illustrations, which build into a journey through a fantastical environment.

Just like the previous two books, Internal Wilderness (an introspective look into self-imagined places) and Desolation Wilderness (an illustrated examination of experience and memory), Outer Wilderness can be enjoyed on its own merits. Although if you're familiar with the other titles in the trilogy, then there's a deeper appreciation to be enjoyed too.

So what awaits us in the inky blackness of space? If the beautifully realised illustrations by Claire are anything to go by then, we can look forward to towering crystalline cliffs, ominous riverbed vegetation that definitely wants us for lunch, and a panorama of threatening craters swarming with deadly, tentacled aliens.

Drawn in her distinctive style that has seen London-based illustrator Claire work with the likes of Penguin, Random House and Harper Collins, to name a few, Outer Wilderness is printed on satisfyingly hefty stock and is deliberately sized to fit in your pocket. So if you ever find yourself on the fringes of the universe, you'll be able to take it with you and highlight threats accordingly.

Outer Wilderness will be published by Avery Hill Publishing in 2022 if it hits its Kickstarter campaign goal, so if you like the look of the artwork below, then be sure to head on over and sling a donation its way. And if you missed the first instalment of the Wilderness series, then fret not – it's available as a digital download.