book reviews

Sarah L. Taggart’s remarkable debut plays with being a psychological thriller, working in elements of a love story. Never patronizing or judgmental, what sets Pacifique apart is how Taggart writes about mental health.

Orwell, Joyce and Austin could barely get jobs, never mind publishing deals. Stephen Marche asks: “Why would it be any different for you?”

Visually distinct with a whimsical, costume-ish quality to character designs, there’s a comfortable tone of strangeness throughout Blind Alley that would feel at home in EarthBound or Twin Peaks.

Rolli’s poetic voice is often likened to e.e. cummings’ light verse, chiefly in how he toys with syntax and nonsense. But there’s a keen sardonic edge, too — think of Shel Silverstein and Hilaire Belloc.

The setting gives DeForge plenty to work with: the mechanics of a fungus-based internet; samplings of new lunar artforms; interplanetary and intercellular voyages. And of course, there are the birds themselves, in all their grand and ridiculous plumage.

Jon Claytor’s main conceit is to bleed his unfiltered self onto the page. He bounces between dark suicidal thoughts and folksy vignettes about cute critters he sees on the road, but the flow feels natural.

Queer Little Nightmares accomplishes what mainstream media has historically feared: placing queerness at the forefront to tell human stories of creatures that seek love, vengeance, autonomy, and the reclamation of their ugliest parts.

Westerns are populated with larger-than-life characters, but children are notoriously difficult to write convincingly. Kelly’s Chatter and his orphan companions are adult minds in small bodies, making grave enigmatic statements while stone-facedly witnessing the world’s cruelty.

While it’s poetic enough and creates a lush mood of grimy eroticism, leveraging Lardeux’s talent for capturing sensory detail, The Second Substance’s experimentalism wrestles with the musk of the overly familiar.

In space, no one can hear you complain to HR. Olga Ravn’s The Employees is a sci-fi parable about what happens when you can never leave the office.

Henry Doyle’s No Shelter is a plainspoken and authentic record of the grinding and unacknowledged quotidian battle with day labour, despair and displacement.

Geneviève Lebleu explores tense interpersonal relationships between several middle-aged women in a suburban neighborhood through the psychedelic imagery that so defines her lush illustration style.