Quite possibly the most beautiful script that’s ever been produced

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay
by J.K. Rowling
Arthur A. Levine Books
2016, 304 pages, 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.7 inches, Hardcover
$15 Buy one on Amazon

There are more readers and writers today thanks to J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter books instilled a love of reading in kids and adults. The movies brought Rowling’s characters to life, spreading the joy of the series worldwide. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay has the power to introduce people to reading and appreciating screenplays.

Make no mistake, this is a script. It’s formatted like a script, which could be a bit odd to unfamiliar readers, but what’s wrong with odd? It has jump cuts, high wides, and montages. I’d argue that this is quite possibly the most beautiful script that’s ever been produced. Each page has ornate 1920’s style detailing, and scene breaks have little ink illustrations between the pages. This book about magicians feels magical. There’s also a handy little guide that explains the film terminology you will find throughout.

Don’t read this before watching the film. See the movie, appreciate that for what it is, then read the script. Then for the full experience see the movie again, to see how the script translated onto film. I think that this book can help demystify screenwriting, and possibly inspire a generation of young screenwriters to take a stab at writing something of their own. If you’re a fan of Harry Potter, or a budding screenwriter, you’re going to want this book.

– JP LeRoux

December 28, 2016

A Wild Swan plucks at familiar fairy tales with a voice that’s sardonic, salacious, or brimming with empathy

A Wild Swan and Other Tales
by Michael Cunningham (author) and Yuko Shimizu (illustrator)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2015, 144 pages, 6.4 x 8.5 x 0.7 inches
$16 Buy a copy on Amazon

A few pages into A Wild Swan and Other Tales we’re stopped short by a narrator who is either supremely cynical or just brutally honest: “End of story. ‘Happily ever after’ fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.” But that abrupt point of stoppage, it turns out, is the vulnerable moment onto which Michael Cunningham can graft fresh possibilities. In this case, he builds on Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Wild Swans” by imagining a trajectory for the least fortunate swan-brother, the one whose incomplete coat of nettles transformed him back into a man but left him with a “linty, dispiriting” wing where his arm should be.

In this collection of eleven stories, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Hours plucks and tweaks at familiar fairy tales in a variety of ways – through POV changes, time shifts, reimagined elements, and most especially an irresistible voice that’s by turns sardonic, salacious, or brimming with empathy. “Little Man” gives us the motivations behind Rumpelstiltskin’s baby mania. “Jacked” believably paints the beanstalk climber as dumb and lucky. “The Monkey’s Paw” locates another haunting angle on W.W. Jacobs’ tale about the cruel side of wishes.

Based only on its literary merits, A Wild Swan would already be worth your time – but this book is special. Masterful pen-and-ink illustrations, drop caps, endpapers, and cover art by award-winning illustrator Yuko Shimizu elevate A Wild Swan to exquisite object. Where your stereotypical fairy tale collection might boast lush colors, ornate bindings, and metallic accents, A Wild Swan is elegant. Restrained, but not spare, its quality emerges in sedulous attention to detail. White space explodes into knots of intricate line on carefully composed pages. A swan’s silhouette stands out in relief on the embossed cover. Cunningham’s canny, contemporary voice is made more timeless with decorations that hearken back to, but don’t simply imitate, famed illustrators from Walter Crane to Harry Clarke.

I’ve loved Shimizu’s work since a friend pointed me to her public page on Facebook a year ago. (Come for the behind-the-scenes illustration techniques, stay for the adorable Chihuahua pics.) A Wild Swan and Other Tales gives the Japanese-born artist the chance to shine in tandem with a talented major author secure in his powers. – Lisa Barrow

August 11, 2016

Horrorstör – A twist on a haunted house story set in a modern IKEA-like megastore

Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books
2014, 240 pages, 7.4 x 8.8 x 0.6 inches (softcover)
$9 Buy a copy on Amazon

Imagine a store much like Ikea, but not quite up to Ikea’s standards. In the book Horrorstör, Orsk is a shabby copy of the Scandinavian warehouse we all know, and maybe even love, right down to the incomprehensible product names (Frȧnjk, for example) and a Bright and Shining Path that guides shoppers through the showroom floor maze. But something about Orsk is different. And very, very wrong.

Amy works at the Orsk in Cleveland, Ohio. Caught in a spiral of student debt and unable to support herself, she moves into her mom’s trailer and wonders if she’ll ever dig herself out of retail. ​That’s when things change. ​Resigned to working at Orsk for the rest of their lives, Amy and her co-workers arrive every morning to find broken wardrobes, shattered glassware and vandalized sofas. Convinced someone is hiding out in the store and up to no good, they agree to spend the night in the store with their manager to unravel the mystery. Little do they know that tonight is their final shift.

Horrorstör is a clever twist on a traditional haunted house story that takes place in a modern consumerist setting. The symbolism and criticism of consumer culture and the nature of work are there if you look for them, but it’s light, and pretty funny, and doesn’t get in the way of the story. The catalog-style furniture ​pages in Horrorstör — complete with enthusiastic but meaningless descriptions – grow increasingly dark as the story, and Amy’s situation, become dire. Consider this catalog page for a chair:

“Boasting several advantages over traditional forms of restraint, BODAVEST confines the penitent and opposes the agitated movement of blood toward the brain, forcing the subject into a state of total immobility, conducive to self-reflection and free of stressful outside stimuli.”

The book also includes humorously grim versions of Orsk employee evaluations, order forms, and pages from the Orsk Leadership Handbook. They really add to the enjoyment of the story. I found myself eagerly looking forward to them, trying to decipher which twist in the story they alluded to. Surprisingly, the last pages of the book took the story from hilariously gruesome to “Oh, heck yes!” in the last few paragraphs. I won’t ruin it for you, but they left me wanting to read more stories set in the wild and outrageous world of Orsk.

“Orsk. It’s not just a job. It’s the rest of your life.” – Keith Monaghan

May 19, 2016

The Pharos Gate: Griffin & Sabine’s Lost Correspondence

The Pharos Gate: Griffin & Sabine’s Lost Correspondence
by Nick Bantock
Chronicle Books
2016, 60 pages, 8.2 x 8.2 x 0.8 inches
$17 Buy a copy on Amazon

The lovelorn nostalgia and mystical voyeurism of an extraordinary correspondence return in the latest edition of the Griffin & Sabine saga, The Pharos Gate. This is the seventh book in the bestselling series by Nick Bantock and it brings several questions about the unusual love story to a satisfying end. As you might recall, Griffin and Sabine share a peculiar connection through their mail and art that seems to allow them to transcend space and time. As they fall deeper in love, danger looms and they are forced to dodge and hedge around the globe in an attempt to unite. Bantock disappointed some fans by leaving the fate of the lovers somewhat ambiguous at the conclusion of the third book and then launching a new storyline in the fourth book surrounding another unlikely pair of sweethearts. The ultimate fate of Griffin and Sabine remained tantalizingly mysterious until last month with the release of The Pharos Gate. Readers will finally find the answers scrawled in between the lines of the missing letters as Bantock revisits correspondence that has eluded us for more than a decade.

Perhaps in answer to the frustration of fans, this latest edition pays particular attention to recreating the feel of the first books. Fascinatingly strange, juxtaposed images of Egyptian gods and sketches of animals mingle and crowd the pages. Quaint envelopes stuffed with carefully lined type or flowing script anchor the story in art that seems to come alive in your hands, with pages that contain crossed out words and ink blots. You’ll catch clues in the images that align the story with the previous editions and provide new context for the puzzling mystery that the correspondence seems to allude to but never openly discusses. Each page is fashioned with a careful, adept hand that seeks to draw the character’s souls through the marriage of art and words, weaving them together across the continents and oceans. By the time Griffin and Sabine reach The Pharos Gate, you’ll be right there alongside them, clutching their love letters in your hands and gazing open mouthed at the beauty of a conclusion that has always been as inevitable as their unlikely love story. – Kaz Weida

April 26, 2016

The Marvels - A playful novel of real life lived on a theater stage

The Marvels
by Brian Selznick
Scholastic Press
2015, 672 pages, 5.8 x 8.3 x 2.2 inches
$18 Buy a copy on Amazon

1766. A ship named the Kraken. A little girl tied to the mast, her face darkened by the shadow of a fearsome sea monster. It’s approaching, closer, closer, its teeth just inches from her face. But none of this is real.

Pan back to reveal an audience – and that’s when we realise that we, like them, are being treated to a performance. All this comes in the first few pages of Brian Selznick’s The Marvels and it sets the tone for everything after. Stories within stories, books inside plays, real life lived out on a theatre stage.

The Marvels is a novel of two halves. Part one consists of a 400-page collection of immersive black-and-white pencil drawings that tell the story of the Marvel family. From modest roots to fame and fortune, from lucky escapes to fiery ends. Part two is a short novel in itself, picking up in 1990 with young runaway Joseph Jervis absconding from boarding school in order to search out his enigmatic uncle, Mr A. Nightingale, and then discovering the history of the Marvel family for himself.

The illustrations of part one are a real pleasure and very manageable in one sitting. With every image realized on a two-page spread, there are layers and intimate details to get lost in. A range of pencil techniques capture the story’s varied landscapes, which switch from brooding oceans to tropical forests to cobblestoned alleyways. Selznick obviously doesn’t believe in white space. He doesn’t even believe in margins. Every page is decorated to its very edge and the print quality is top-class. It all may look freshly drawn, but don’t worry about wiping your fingers, there’s no risk of smudging here.

The Marvels’ story begins in classic adventure territory, then stands back and acknowledges its influences with pleasing allusions to Tintin, Robert Louis Stevenson and a healthy sprinkling of Shakespeare. When the story gets up to date in part two, however, it carries an emotional heft and grounds itself very much in the real world. This is a children’s book that is admirably progressive in its depictions of non-nuclear families – which is a bone of contention for some Amazon reviewers but gets a huge thumbs-up from me. Selznick’s Afterword is an interesting read in itself, citing his inspirations and adding a layer of non-fiction to this story about stories.

Full of reversals and inversions, The Marvels is a work that is playful, inventive and has a few good surprises up its sleeve. Like the preface says, You either see it or you don’t. – Damien McLaughlin

March 30, 2016

The physical self forms the centerpiece of She of the Mountains

She of the Mountains
by Vivek Shraya
Arsenal Pulp Press
2014, 128 pages, 5.5 x 8.2 x 0.5 inches (softcover)
$15 Buy a copy on Amazon

The body is a tangle of sensations. It’s both a source of pleasure and a confusing amalgamation of parts that don’t quite seem to function in concert. Teeming with desires and repulsions, the physical self forms the centerpiece of She of the Mountains. The protagonist is unnamed in this slender, poetry-drenched novella by award-winning author Vivek Shraya. He’s keenly aware of his brown body in the sometimes hostile, sometimes indifferent world of Edmonton, Alberta, as he tries to discover what it means to be gay, then falls in love with a woman, and finally begins to establish a life for himself that feels honest.

A Canadian youth’s search for social and sexual identity would be fascinating enough in Shraya’s thoughtful hands, but by braiding his tale with a personalized vision of Hindu mythology, he casts it into timeless territory. The goddess Parvati describes herself as “the mother of the universe. … I am life itself, the spark that makes a heart pump, that keeps a tree alive for centuries, green and reaching.” But she isn’t immune to sorrow; a terrible error causes her beloved consort Shiv — Destruction himself — to decapitate her newly born son Ganesh in a fit of rage. Only the substitution of an elephant’s head for Ganesh’s own lets him escape death. In her own lyrical, searching words, Parvati describes her evolving love for Ganesh and Shiv, the wisdom that comes to her through incarnation in a mortal body, and even her newfound empathy for Kali’s destructive powers. Each mythic interlude in the novella mirrors the growing pains of a main character struggling to come to terms with his queerness, his brownness, and his capacity for love.

With a story so bound to corporeality, Arsenal Pulp Press has gone the extra mile to make She of the Mountains into a beautiful little book. Lushly enriched by stylized two-tone illustrations from Raymond Biesinger, the novella also features silky-smooth, heavy paper and meticulous design and typesetting. When tactile and literary pleasures combine so seamlessly with a surprisingly intimate tale, the result is a volume you’ll be glad to hold in your own two hands as you read and read. – Lisa Barrow

January 22, 2016

The Resurrectionist: Your favorite mythic creatures laid out on a mortician’s table

The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Spencer Black
by E. B. Hudspeth
Quirk Books
2013, 192 pages, 7.8 x 10.8 x 0.8 inches
$16 Buy a copy on Amazon

Imagine all your favourite mythic creatures: pegasus, mermaid, centaur, sphinx, minotaur. Now imagine them laid out on a mortician’s table: dissected, given Latin medical labels, and analyzed in terms of their unique muscular and skeletal makeup. This is what we’re offered in the second part of E. B. Hudspeth’s The Resurrectionist in the section titled The Codex Extinct Animalia.

This intriguing novel does its best to defy categorization. Part One reads like a nonfiction textbook piecing together the biography of controversial 19th-century surgeon Dr. Spenser Black. Through reproduced letters, newspaper clippings and exhibition flyers we chart Black’s life: his early career as a stellar young surgeon, his marriage and the birth of his son; and then his rapid descent into infamy, gaining a reputation as a splicer of anatomies and an eccentric who believed that the creatures from our myths are in fact our evolutionary ancestors. Part Two presents his extensive drawings and writings, though it is left up to the reader to decide whether Black was a visionary or a madman.

The book’s beautifully macabre images capture the imagination instantly, but where Hudspeth really impresses is in the utter believability of Dr. Black’s story. The narrative is furnished with a fictional note from the publishers, and Black’s biography neatly intertwines with real 19th-century events. The Resurrectionist channels the aesthetics of Edgar Allan Poe while playing with form in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges. While the novel’s publisher Quirk Books has given us a wealth of visual treats in the last few years, The Resurrectionist still feels like the most immersive and fully realized book in their catalogue. – Damien McLaughlin

July 27, 2015

An unusual fairytale about a cannibalistic librarian by Haruki Murakami and artist Chip Kidd

The Strange Library
by Haruki Murakami (author) and Chip Kidd (artist)
Knopf
2014, 96 pages, 5.5 x 8.4 x 0.3 inches (paperback)
$10 Buy a copy on Amazon

I bought this book on a whim. It was the cover that caught my eye. The big cartoon eyes and snarling leopard’s mouth spliced together to make a goofy yet menacing face instantly drew me over to it. I flipped it over and read a summary so bizarre that I felt obligated to buy it. When I got home I opened the book by separating the cartoon eyes from the leopard’s mouth. Inside this vertical flap was another set of unsettling images. Where the normal book cover should be there was the first page of the story. At this point I knew I was in for a truly original reading experience.

Part of this experience is due to Haruki Murakami’s unusual fairytale about a schoolboy, a sheep man, and a ghost girl trying to escape a terrifying library and its cannibalistic librarian. The other part is due to its beautiful design by legendary book cover artist Chip Kidd. He did a masterful job bringing this novella to life with striking images and a truly unique layout. The pictures and typography evolve with the story. Each turn of the page brings something new and exciting. It’s a story in a category all its own with a design to match. – Kye Wood

March 19, 2015

Dead Inside: Do Not Enter — Notes from the Zombie Apocalypse

Dead Inside: Do Not Enter
by Lost Zombies
Chronicle
2011, 160 pages, 8 x 10 x 0.5 inches
$15 Buy a copy on Amazon

Some of my favorite things about zombie movies are the details of the changed world. The dead grass, broken windows, toppled telephone poles, abandoned cars with missing wheels and trunks left open, boarded-up buildings, spent ammo shells, and other signs of struggle and desperation serve to create a fascinatingly creepy environment.

And that’s why I like Dead Inside: Do Not Enter so much. The book consists entirely of letters, hand-written warnings, and pages torn from journal entries that were written during the zombie pandemic. The notes are on matchbooks, napkins, photographs, advertisements, shopping lists, road maps, scraps of cardboard, and gum wrappers. Some of the notes are written with pen and pencil, others are written with lipstick, burnt wood, crayons, and blood.

The messages of the notes themselves tell the tale of the rise of the zombie pandemic, from tentative, joking questions about a “really bad flu,” escalating to confused panic, and later to grim acceptance of the new reality that the survivors now must live in.

In the introduction to Dead Inside, we learn that these notes had been found in a Dora the Explorer backpack. The first note presented in the book was written by the man who killed the owner of the backpack, a girl who was about 10 years old and had been bitten by a zombie (but had not yet turned into one). The man wrote “I opened her backpack and found all these notes and letters. This stuff is poisonous. No one in their right mind should read it. Reading this is like looking into the sun.” – Mark Frauenfelder

September 16, 2014

Parker: The Hunter - New illustrated edition of the classic 1962 crime novel

Parker: The Hunter
by Richard Stark (author) and Darwyn Cooke (illustrator)
IDW
2014, 222 pages, 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
$19 Buy a copy on Amazon

After reading Donald Westlake’s The Hot Rock (read my review), a humorous crime novel about a gang of professional thieves who repeatedly bungle a jewel heist, I picked up Westlake’s The Hunter, a much less funny, but equally enjoyable, 1962 novel about a sociopathic thief named Parker, who is the main character in many of Westlake’s crime stories. (Westlake wrote the Parker series under the pen name Richard Stark, one of many pen names he adopted during his prolific career.)

The Hunter is about Parker’s quest to get revenge on a partner who ripped him off and tried to have him killed right after Parker and his crew robbed a gang of arms smugglers. Parker doesn’t let anyone impede his mission, even if it means killing an innocent person who just happens to be in the way.

At one point while reading The Hunter, I contemplated abandoning it because I was bothered by Parker’s psychotic disregard for human life, but two reasons kept me going. One, the people that Parker is going after are even more despicably inhuman than he is. And two, Westlake is such a terrific writer I couldn’t stop myself from reading to find out what happens.

Parker fits in with the recent crop of charismatic sociopaths that headline shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Dexter. I guess their appeal is that even though they are awful people, they have just enough humanity to make you care what happens to them without actually rooting for them. It takes a skilled writer to create bad people that you care about, and Westlake is one of the greats.

This new edition is illustrated by Darwyn Cooke, a talented cartoonist who has been creating outstanding graphic novel adaptations of Stark’s Hunter series. – Mark Frauenfelder

August 8, 2014

A gasp-inducing novel about madness and deception

Woman’s World
by Graham Rawle
Counterpoint
2005, 437 pages, 6.2 x 8.4 x 1.5
$13 Buy a copy on Amazon

Turn to any page of Woman’s World and you’ll see that it isn’t your ordinary novel. In fact, it took author (and collage artist) Graham Rawle five years and 40,000 text cut-outs from 1960s women’s magazines to piece together this book. What makes Women’s World truly incredible, however, isn’t just Rawle’s keen ability to string together a coherent story from magazine fragments. That alone would be admirable. But Women’s World is much more than just a novelty, with a gripping story, both tragic and humorous, reminiscent of Psycho, if Psycho were told in a vintage women’s magazine.

Honestly, I had my doubts when I first picked up this book. It’s rare that a literary gimmick carries its weight in regard to the book’s narrative merit. But after the first ten pages of being distracted, trying to figure out where each piece of text came from and how Rawle so cleverly weaved it into the narrative, the strength of the plot took over.

Without giving away too much, Women’s World starts off with Norma, a young woman who we realize has something wrong with her, but she doesn’t admit this. She is obsessed with glamour and fashion, speaking as if she were a character from a women’s magazine, and we quickly see that she is deranged. She lives with her “housekeeper” (aka her mother) Mary, and her brother Roy, neither who want her to leave the house. But she does. And then trouble ensues, which affects the entire household with moments that made me cringe and gasp. From beginning to end Women’s World is wonderfully “written.” I felt for the characters, rooted for the protagonist (Roy), and in the end, sighed with amusement, the way I might after stepping off a roller coaster.  – Carla Sinclair

Magnificent multiple-component artifact from Lost creator J.J. Abrams 

S.
by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
Mulholland Books
2013, 472 pages, 6.4 x 9.7 x 1.6
$23 Buy a copy on Amazon

This is a book that uses another book to tell its story. S. comes in a box that contains what looks exactly like a well-read, slightly stained library copy of a 1949 novel called Ship of Theseus, by V.M. Straka. There was never a novel by that name, and V.M. Straka is a fictitious character (though the publisher, Hachette, plays along by giving Straka an author’s page on its site).

The Ship of Theseus is a novel about a man who gets shanghaied on a ship crewed by evil characters. S. is a copy of that book, filled with handwritten annotations from various people, some of whom have a personal relationship. What’s more, in between the yellowing pages of the book you’ll find postcards, sketches on napkins, old photographs, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera that add more layers to the story. Even if you don’t read S., it is a stunning artifact that will astonish everyone you show it to.  – Mark Frauenfelder