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.

Patterson’s stand-alone novels are hit or miss — you know, as if he wasn’t actually involved in writing them.  But this one started out with excellent promise and then just shit the bed and then set it on fire.  A serial killer is traveling the US, killing people and staging the murders so expertly to look like accidental fires.  An FBI researcher is hellbent on getting everyone to believe her that this man exists and they must find him.  Only, she’s so unpleasant a character, […]

Two graphic novels, but together because Catmull’s picture book is so sparse.  Incidents in the Night is the strange psuedo-autobiobullshitical adventure of a man discovering a mysterious pro-Napoleon newspaper in a French bookstore, which leads him down a crazy-ass rabbit hole.  Ghosts and Ruins is almost an adult picture-book akin to Edward Gorey where we get tiny capsules of horribly haunted places and dark and creepy illustrations to accompany them.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was this phenomenal project, a kind of steampunk X-Men — old timey children gifted with strange powers, protected in a time loop by a headmistress. Riggs took these found photographs and crafted a story around them. And I think had it stood alone, it would be have been marvelous.  But then they made a trilogy, which has just kind of worn out its charm.  I struggled through this story, which just sort of double-crossed and twisted itself into a […]

As my Discworld stack winnows, it’s kind of sweet to see what I feel are gentle goodbyes to my favorite characters.  And this particular story involves THE WIZARDS!  AND FOOTBALL!  And it’s kind of appropriate in how it handles the characters. Again, I prefer the early works, so while it was lovely to see Rincewind and The Luggage return, they were kind of shunted aside for Ridcully and Ponder Stibbons.  It’s like SNL reunions where the new cast mingles with these legendary performers of yesteryear. […]

Ah, Moist von Lipwig.  As I read through the last few Discworlds, I realize I pine for the older ones.  I miss Rincewind, and the elder Barbarians and the original three Witches.  The Lipwig books give Vetinari a chance to shine, and those are always worth it.  And they’re the Bloom County rut of the Disc.  I always enjoy the Discworld books, but never get as agog as some.  Only four or five left, I believe.