Review: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1 by Emil Ferris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s taken me five months to get through this, and I don’t regret a day of it. I’d heard such great things about it that I doubt I add much in saying this is the finest graphic novel I’ve read in the last few years and quite likely the greatest graphic novel I have ever read. (OK, Maus. Maybe Maus is as good.)

It’s rare for me to find myself in such agreement with the consensus on something, especially when everyone admires it so much, so I’m enjoying the experience. It feels like walking out of a concert with a couple hundred people sharing the same buzz.

Others have described the overall story here, and everyone seems to note the beautiful, haunting illustrations. Ferris is so flat out gifted that it’s stunning to see the way she can move from full-color Art Institute hand-drawn reproductions to near stick figure work. All of it works. She’s like a skilled director as she moves her camera from place to place.

The one thing I’d want to add, as partial explanation for why it took me so long to read this, is the incredible consistency here. Years ago, I went to the Grand Canyon. I was impressed, of course, because it was as massive and magnificent as I’d heard, but I was also moved because it had so much stunning detail. I expected the size, but I didn’t expect the tens of thousands of facets to it. Every time I shifted my view, it looked beautiful in a fresh way.

In that same way, this is the Grand Canyon of graphic novels. Pick almost any page and it will be striking. Sometimes it’s the line work. Sometimes it’s the layout. Sometimes it’s the juxtaposition of styles. And sometimes it’s the remarkable way she moves her narrative forward.

As I read, I did wonder if I’d ever finish, and I wondered what it would be like to have something less overwhelming to turn to at night. Now that I’ve finally gotten to the end of Book One, though, I find I’m Googling information on when Book Two will be out. I saw a review that suggested we haven’t had anything like this since Art Spiegelman brought out the first volume of Maus and made us wait four years for the second. I have the same feeling.

I guess it’s time for me to start something else tonight, but I’m going to feel the specter of this one for a long time. And that’s a good thing.


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Review: Draft No. 4

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review of John McPhee’s Draft No. 4

So I was at that point in my own work of extended nonfiction writing – the point where I can’t decide whether I am essentially finished or need to start over with chapter one – when it seemed like a good idea to talk my troubles over with someone who’d been through them before. And who could be better than John McPhee, arguably the premier nonfiction writer of the last generation?

The good news is that McPhee talks here about wrestling with some of the same things that are weighing on me now. In his chapter on “Structure,” for instance, he talks about a kind of base, architectural sense to a prose piece. I get it, I think, and I feel good about myself for getting it. He’s letting me (us) in on technical talk. It’s esoteric, but that’s OK. We’re in the same business. If we were guitarists, it might be a matter of unusual tunings. If we were tailors, it might be about the nature of inseams.

And there is a lot of that good news. Just about every one of these chapters has something to offer. He talks about the nature of facts in nonfiction, siding with me (and with every serious thinker on the subject I know save a single writer who led a workshop I was in) that, if you know you’ve invented anything, or even if you suspect you’ve gotten anything wrong, then what you have is fiction, not nonfiction. It’s often fun to hear him talk about the various lengths his New Yorker fact checkers would go to determine whether the plaque on Sylvia Plath’s old apartment is the color and style the author declared or whether a World War II Japanese fire balloon really landed on the roof of the facility where they worked on the Manhattan Project.

I have gotten a decent splash of what I wanted when I picked up this book. It’s comforting to think about how I might abstract the organization of my own manuscript – about the geometric shape I could use to sketch it. It’s comforting as well to think about the matter of “omission.” There are great nuggets that just don’t fit. And it’s inspiring to hear him talk about the nature of interviewing subjects; I can see how talk show hosts do it, but it seems a different art for writers like him (and maybe like me). One good tip: you know the nuggets when you find them.

Given all that, I feel grateful that this book has come out at just the moment I need it. I have, in fact, set a record for least time between discovering a book in the New York Times Review of Books and then reading it in full: three days.

But, I have to throw a little shade, too. In tone here, it feels as if, hearing my questions (and my questions are implicitly the questions his students and other would-be writers ask) he feels license to go in whatever direction his mind takes him. He’s the one who says he’s writing about writing, but it often drifts into memoir. That, in itself, is fine – I wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t from the great John McPhee. (And that’s not sarcasm even if it sounds a bit like it.) But there are times when the self-references seem to assume more familiarity with his life and oevre than I bargained for, when it feels as if he’s walking down the hall and assuming I’m at his heels hanging on his every word. It’s a privileged tone, and I guess I prefer a less condescending one.

In one of the later chapters, he talks about frame of reference, mocking himself and other writers for assuming that readers will get references that may be out of date or obscure. In many instances, I have that reaction to his stories. At times he describes an editor or writer from the New Yorker in detail; at others he presumes we know someone or that we recognize the standing of one mid-century magazine versus another.

Overall, I’m happy to forgive that mild self-centeredness. The lessons he has to impart are the product of an idiosyncratic career as a writer, so I’ll accept them idiosyncratically. I’ll also appreciate the digressions and stories that grow out of and give prelude to those lessons.

Still, as a Midwesterner who lived in New York only briefly – not long enough to adapt to the omnipresent bustle – I feel a bit removed from the wisdom here. Every story and every writer is different is a cardinal principle, and I endorse it. But sometimes here I feel as if the experienced man who’s helping me is also reminding me that his world is so different from mine that I’m going to have to solve my writing problems on my own.




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Review: Sandman Slim

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I find I have accidentally stumbled into a run of a genre I didn’t know existed: the hardboiled theological quasi-horror fantasy novel. There’s Ian Tregellis’s Something More than Night and Brian Evenson’s Last Days, and there’s this. All three are surprisingly good – especially the Evenson – and I wonder how such a niche came to be. Something in the zeitgeist, I guess.

As with those others, I doubt I’d have picked this up if I’d known how much it depended on a conventional heaven-and-hell conception of the universe. As with those others, though, I couldn’t have counted on Kadrey’s skill to overcome such a flat background and provide an innovative and compelling take on fantasy and the hardboiled. (To be fair, Evenson is in a different class, but Tregellis and Kadrey are plenty of fun as well.)

Our protagonist, Stark, is a magician, a guy who simply has a knack for picking up power. He’s cocky, and he rubs the rest of his circle the wrong way, prompting them to banish him to hell. A decade later, after he’s survived everything the demons and fallen angels throw his way in the gladiator pits of hell, he escapes and sets out to kill the ex-friends who sent him there.

That’s an over-the-top premise, again, one I wouldn’t ordinarily trust, but Kadrey finds the perfect mix of fantasy, humor, and the hardboiled. To take an early example, Stark tracks down one enemy and, in a swoop, slices off his head. The wound isn’t fatal, though, and he keeps the head around for a while, taunting it and getting information from it. Sometimes he gives the head-in-the-closet a drag on his cigarette, sometimes he subjects it to a stream of television infomercials. And the banter is always great – Kadrey does dialogue in a big way.

There are other shots of humor here, too, including an ongoing bit about Stark’s inability to understand how the internet has emerged in the decade he’s been away, and another about his propensity for burning through whatever clothes he happens to be wearing.

Side by side with that surprisingly consistent comedy, Kadrey commits to the genre. He passes up many opportunities to get sentimental or saccharine. Stark really is “Sandman Slim,” a bogeyman of the hell-crowd. There aren’t easy answers or happy-ever-afters. He’s a creature of hell, and hell is trying to break through, and none of that is finally a joke. As he deals with it all, though, Stark never gives into convention, never plays the assigned part. It’s a hardboiled trope, but it’s one that only the good writers can manage.

Without spoiling the end, I have to acknowledge – again, it seems – my frustration with the final chapter or so. Kadrey and/or his editors must have seen he was onto something good, so he’s added a chunk that invites and sets up the sequel, eventually, says audible.com, a series of sequels. This one is plenty of fun, and I’m on board for more Kadrey, but I find it irritating that this strong novel has to be distorted in the service of what feels like marketing.

This is certainly a lot of fun, though, and I will be looking for more from Kadrey – maybe even, sigh, the next Sandman Slim.


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