For lovers of Shakespeare and storytelling, I give you a work of art. The first portion of this lavish tale begins in the 1700’s and goes to the year 1900, illustrated beautifully and wordless like a silent film.  It tells the legend of the Marvels, a generation-spanning family of stage actors and artists.  The second portion of the story is in prose, set in 1985 London, and gives us a runaway finding his uncle.  It’s particularly Dickensian, and watching the two stories slowly come together […]

In any language, it’s fucking CHEEEEESE.  I continue my spiteful admiration for Stuart Woods, who writes his masturbatory fantasies every three months and makes it on to the NYT Bestseller Lists, because airports need books you can read in the time it takes to take a solid shit.  And a solid shit this is.  To explain the plot would be to jab a fork in your ear and swirl spaghetti from your brains.  Woods continues to Mary Sue and I continue to gorge on it […]

Finally a Tiffany Aching story I liked!  I shouldn’t say that. It’s not like I hate her stories, I just don’t like them as much.  And this one had a very strong plot and nice digs at what it means to be a community.  Maybe it’s hitting me harder now that I’m in the wilds of central Ohio, but family and community can have razor blades in them just as much as love.  And while this is the penultimate Aching tale, and the series ends […]

What a gorgeously fucked-up little fairy tale.  This graphic novel involves a kingdom that lives inside the corpse of a dead little girl.  If that wasn’t crazy enough, it then goes on to subvert all the tropes of the typical fairy tales — princesses, and hero girls, and princes, and friends, and sisterhood, and giants.  It’s really quiet haunting and cruel and beautiful too, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.  You twisted bastards would gorge on this like custard.