The Restless Tarot is morbid, perhaps even sinister, yet I bet you won't be able to look away. The longer you stare at the characters in these cards the more they appear grotesquely lifelike. They seem to stare right back at you, pulling you down into their frenzied dystopian world.

When I first saw images of this deck I knew I had discovered something truly unique. This deck pushes the envelope in every sense of the word and these images are certainly not for the faint of heart. Upon further research I discovered that the creator of this deck, Winslow Dumaine, happened to live in my city. So for you my readers, I met up with him to discuss his story behind the creation of this dark and depraved deck.

Scarlet: Can you tell me what inspired you to make this deck?

Winslow: I would look at other tarot decks and think “how can we crank it to 11, how can we make it as extreme as possible?”

At its core, this deck is based around the end of an relationship. This deck came from a breakup with the woman I had known since childhood. The cover of the box has an illustration of my left hand with the ring finger cut off. On the back of the box that the deck comes in, it shows the ring that I wore when I was with her. In a morbid way, I’m trying to show that the experience of this breakup prevents me from ever thinking about relationships or marriage again.

When you experience trauma, you might think ‘I’ll make something out of this; I’ll use this pain to propel me into doing something cool with my life’ or ‘I’ll simply recover.’ I think that there’s not enough attention paid to how trauma can hamstring you and cause explicit distress. In all my work, I want to examine the experience of suffering, and how trauma changes a person's life.

Whenever I found myself in these intense, heated arguments with my former partner, I would find myself thinking “Well, this is it, this is what it is from here on out. The foundation is cracked; even if we make up, we’re just making cosmetic changes to something fundamentally flawed.” That sense of permanence is what helped to guide me to an eventual recovery. The way that I’ve explained it is that - You should look at your pain. You should look at your suffering, and ask, why am I here?