Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Volume 1

Emil Ferris’ graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, is an incredibly complex narrative experience, both visually and thematically. The novel is presented as the personal journal of a 10-year-old girl, Karen Reyes, living with her mother, who is dying of cancer, and her older brother Deeze, in Chicago in the 1960s. Written and drawn in multiple styles, her journal is a portrait of a talented and intelligent, but ostracised and outcast young artist who is fascinated by the strange and monstrous, both in art and in life, and who portrays herself as a monster, a werewolf, in a world of otherwise human-appearing people. Her journal tells her life in graphic imagery, scenes from her everyday life interspersed with images of cover illustrations from horror comics and copies of classical art which her brother introduces her to on visits to the museum.

In between telling her own stories about her life and the lives she sees around her, Karen’s journal follows her investigation into the death of her neighbour Anka, a troubled Holocaust survivor, and one of her womanising brother’s many lovers.

In the midst of Karen’s drawings of imaginary and real life monsters, is an extended section illustrating a taped interview Anka gave to a young man not long before her death, a tape that Anka’s husband, jazz musician Sam Silverberg, plays for Karen. It is the story of Anka’s early life in Berlin. She recounts growing up in a brothel, the daughter of a sadistic prostitute who pits out cigarettes on Anka’s flesh. As a child, Anka is sold to a man who runs a child sex ring; she escapes by making herself indispensable to one particular pedophile who is willing to be her protector - until she grows too old to arouse him, when he gives her enough money to establish herself and find a job. But Anka is Jewish, and the Hitler years have begun, and it seems as though most of Germany has turned into monsters. Thanks to the patronage of her pedophile protector, Anka is saved from the camps, and manages to save a few young girls, but only through promising to set up a child sex ring herself and prostitute the girls to her protector’s circle of friends. In a world of monsters, only monstrous deeds can avert even more monstrous ones.

There is a sequence, sandwiched between two horrors, in which Karen, saved from threatened rape by a gang of school bullies by another outcast, a gay black man named Franklin, takes him to the art museum, and we see the paintings through his eyes - the ways in which the dresses, hairstyles and accessories in the portraits of women talk to him about their personality and power. But after this, they emerge into the reality of the news that Martin Luther King has been shot, and the racist responses from whites, and the rejection of Franklin as a brother by the black men around him because of his sexuality. Karen depicts Franklin as a version of Frankenstein’s monster. And slowly, we understand that one of the reasons Karen depicts herself as a monster is because of her own awareness of being a girl who likes other girls, a sexual outcast herself.

In many ways, this is a meditation on what we mean when we say something is monstrous - is it an external quality of appearance, is it a set of circumstances, or is it the mentality that enables violence and cruelty? Is a werewolf monstrous in the same way as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, or a murderer, or a government that tramples on the rights of its citizens, abuses and kills the most vulnerable of those it should serve and protect? What is truly monstrous, the outsider, or the society that demonises and oppresses her?

At one point, Karen talks about the ‘good monsters’ and the ‘bad monsters,’ writing in her journal that “... a good monster sometimes gives somebody a fright because they’re weird looking and fangy... a fact that’s beyond their control... but bad monsters are all about control... they want the whole world to be scared so the bad monsters can call the shots.”

Reading My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a powerful and thought-provoking experience, an exploration of the light and the dark, the best and worst of human nature, the twinning of creativity and monstrosity. It is sometimes inspiring, often harrowing, and ends with so much still unresolved - The wait fir Volume 2 is going to be a difficult one.

Lois McMaster Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi

Lois McMaster Bujold’s novella The Flowers of Vashnoi focuses on Ekaterin Vorkosigan. The Vorkosigan holdings include a large area, still dangerously contaminated with radiation from the Cetagundan invasion, when the city of Vashnoi was destroyed by nuclear weapons, killing hundreds of thousands. Though the size of the contaminated region has shrunk a little over the many years since the bombing, most of what was once a major metropolis is still radioactive at a level dangerous to human health.

Miles Vorkosigan is determined to find a way to clean the soil and make Vashnoi livable again. Ekaterin has joined firces with another scientist to breed insects that are not only resistant to radioactivity, but are capable of eating soil, plants, and other organic matter, extracting the dangerous isotopes, and depositing them in concentrated packets that can be collected and dealt with as radioactive waste, leaving behind clean matter that can serve as fertiliser.

But when Ekayerin and her team start on-site trials, strange events interfere with the testing protocols. Half of the ‘radbugs’ disappear, and further investigation reveals that a small group of humans have been living - and dying - inside the contaminated area. Mostly children born ‘different’ and abandoned in the unsafe zone - since the war, Barrayar’s people have had both a higher than average rate of children born with genetic defects, and a culture that rejects imperfect children - generations have been nurtured, protected, and buried by a bitter woman who chose exile in the ruin of Vashnoi over execution for and her own unborn child.

Ekaterin’s dreams of creating a garden where Vashnoi once stood entwine with her hope to save the last of the inhabitants of Vashnoi’s ruins in this latest installment in the Vorgosigan story that explores the roles of both technology and human tenacity in the struggle for survival and rebirth.

Dionne Brand: Love Enough

In Dionne Brand’s novel Love Enough, people cross paths in unlikely and tangential ways, creating and fighting for and losing relationships, finding their path through emotional tangles of past and present, obligation and expectation, all against the backdrop of the sprawling multicultural metropolis of Toronto. Indeed, the sense of place is strong enough to almost make the city one of the characters, the cycle of vignettes that illuminate the lives of the people also serving to illustrate the untidy diversity of the city itself.

The narrative swirls around its broken, struggling characters and the people who move into and out of their lives. June, a social activist who wanted to be a dancer. Bedri, one of June’s clients at the drop-in centre where she works, and his friend Ghost, petty thugs high on the aftermath of a violent carjacking. Bedri's cab-driving father, Dau'ud, a Somali immigrant who was once an economist. Lia, Ghost's sister, like him the survivor of abandonment by a drug-addicted mother, and a series of foster homes.

Characters that seek love, love enough to get by, at least. Or perhaps Brand’s title is an imperative, exhorting her characters, and by extension her readers, to love enough that the pain and rootlessness can be ameliorated, at least a little. Or a plea, a prayer, for love enough to overcome the distances between us.

The novel opens with an image of driving down Dupont Street - which is, truly, not anywhere near the prettiest street that Toronto has to offer - seeing it transformed by the vision of the sunset seen through the rear view mirror. Perhaps in that sunset, just enough beauty to alter the ugliness around it, is a parallel to the remembered touch of love, somehow just enough to keep us going through the night.

And the novel ends with these thoughts from June’s lover: “There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business, Sydney now suspects for the first time. It is hard if you really want to do it right.”