octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

"The Lottery" is one of the greatest horror shorts ever written - I think I've given it five stars elsewhere on this site - and this is an excellent adaptation of it. It lacks Jackson's exceptional prose, including snippets of it but basically being very sparse in text, and relies instead on lovely artwork, shot through with a bucolic tinge that so successfully (in the graphic novel as in the short story) undercuts the sheer horror of what these people are doing. I was going to say the colours shade darker as the story goes along, but I've just rechecked the book right in front of me and they don't. I think in a way that makes it even creepier... the blues, reds, yellows and so on are consistently cheerful, and it's actually the opening, set in very early morning, that's darkest in its shades. And really, that's very clever and fits right in with the text.

I do like the main character in this series! I have to admit, I was a little curious, at the end of the first book, as to how a park ranger in a very small national park was going to come across enough murders to keep the series going, but Barr has solved that problem by moving Anna to another park. I expect such moves will be typical throughout the series, and I'm excited to see which park she goes to next. I'm a big fan of national parks in general, so I really enjoy having them be such a focal point of this series. The settings are incredible.

That said, while I liked this volume I didn't like it as much as Track of the Cat, and the difference is entirely down to the change in setting. A Superior Death, unsurprisingly, is set at Lake Superior and all the nature writing here is related to water and islands and so forth. This led to some great passages - Anna's diving experiences, especially the one where she was trapped on the sunken ship, were atmospheric and actually quite creepy - but very little of that nature focus was on living things. Cat was positively stuffed with descriptions of plants and animals and that was my favourite part about it, so fingers crossed the next park Anna gets sent to has lots of interesting wildlife.

Apart from a little opener that confirms all my suspicions about Anis and Sherine, this volume goes back to the original storyline, focusing on the wake of the attack on the village. All is well, by which I mean no-one's dead, but there's been significant destruction and repairs are underway. In particular, Pariya's family home has been destroyed, so they all come to stay with Amir, Karluk, and co. Of especial relevance is the fact that all of Pariya's fabrics - all the embroidered articles she's expected to take with her into marriage - have been burnt. She's got to start embroidering again from scratch, poor thing, and the fact that she's not a fan of sewing doesn't help her temper, which has never been very good. She has to try and keep it when her intended comes to help repair the village, however, and although this volume ends before things are resolved, I think it's fairly clear that he's going to end up preferring someone who's not that good at being meek.

Much of this volume is about friendships between women, and the importance, again, of sewing and textile designs. Which is something I find fascinating, so I'm glad for the return of focus. The extended family that's been built up around the central pair is really appealing, too - particularly Granny and little Tileke. I'm also fond of the smallest nephew, who has that toddler habit of staring at sleeping people like a cat until they wake up and freak.

This collects up the next batch of comics in the series, and I think I liked it a little better than the last, even if it had more problems narrative-wise. In particular, I did not buy the choice to cover-up the cop's death - for two intelligent characters, this was extremely short-sighted thinking. No surprise it came back to bite them, and if I'm supposed to feel sorry for Eve here I don't. Stupidity is its own reward. That being said, I still enjoyed the convoluted structure of this, even if sometimes it raises more questions than it answers.

Not quite for me - or I should say, it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I really enjoy Barry's work, and I sort of had the idea that this was more about writing comics than drawing comics. Of course the two are very closely connected, especially in Barry's case, but I needed more of a "how to construct a comic or graphic novel" than I needed a "drawing is fun and you can do it!" tutorial. Which is what this is. It's constructed lesson plans, full of exercises which budding comic artists can do, and it's fun and accessible but I have to say, if I were ever to take this class, I'd end up having nightmares about the phrase "draw a full body portrait!" because it's only repeated about seven thousand times and sometimes, as a comic reader, only close-ups will do.

I read Love & Misadventure a few weeks ago, and Lang continues her story of love and loss here. I wonder if it's a story, anyway. I was reading this book and half of me was hoping she was making this all up and that it wasn't based on real life (I know nothing about the author, so either could be it). I hope this, basically, because this book is verging on obsession, on absolute monomania, and not in a good way. You know, that kind of grasping, desperate love that's just plain uncomfortable for everyone involved. If anyone ever wrote two collections like this about me I'd be looking for a safe house, is what I'm saying.

That being said I still enjoyed it, which says something about my tastes though I don't know precisely what and am not inclined to examine it too closely. There's more variety in the forms this time around, so although the A.A. Milne type of bouncy rhyme still exists, there are forays into prose and different structures, and this gives a welcome change of pace. I think the two poems I liked the best were actually prose, anyway: "Metamorphosis" and "Concentric Circles."

I enjoyed this, but it's very oddly structured and in a way that does it no favours, I think. Gad's Hall starts out as a typical haunted house story. Jill and her husband are buying a house, and look! Here's one, at a ridiculously low price, and it seems far too good to be true. Jill's mother in law senses terrible things in the locked attic, but no-one pays any attention. Two of the three kids are oblivious, but the little girl, disturbed by bumps in the night, goes to stay with granny for a while.

Typical haunted house story, you think, albeit a very mild sort of haunting. And then it stops, because about a quarter of the way through the book jumps backwards in time, moving the action back several generations, to tell the story of why the attic was locked in the first place. There's a very mild sense of underlying demonic activity, but when I say very mild I mean very. I was in two minds whether or not to shelve this as horror it was so mild. It's more a typical historical novel, full of family problems, with the very barest of supernatural tinges. And the story never, ever, gets back to Jill. It just ends.

I understand there's a sequel, called The Haunting of Gad's Hall, which from the sound of it is actual haunting and actual horror, unlike the little tinges of it here. I suspect this volume seems so badly structured because the two books are meant to be read as one, but still. Individual volumes should be able to stand alone, and this is horribly lopsided.

Another volume, another character who thinks screaming at girls and putting them down is an acceptable means of showing them that they like them. The new character, Hiro, is awful. He's the most irritating character of this manga so far, and that's a real achievement considering some of the rest of them. I loathe him. I loathe him so much that, singlehandedly, he drags this volume's rating down to one star even though without him, it might have gone so high as three. I actually liked the backstory of Tohru and her two friends more than anything else I've seen in this series so far, but Hiro ruined everything. I don't even care that this nasty little brat has got some supposed "reason" for behaving the way that he does. I don't care that he even feels intermittently bad about it. And when he thinks "I hate being a useless kid so much that I wish I could die" all I can think is GOOD, DIE THEN.

Words cannot adequately express how much I dislike that brat.

I'm trying with this series, I am, but it's testing my usual practice of finishing any series I begin, it really is. The characters are just so annoying. I thought I'd hit the nadir in volume 7, with the abominable Hiro. And truth be told he's still the worst, but the major guest star of this volume would hold the crown if Hiro didn't exist. Ritsu, the member of the family who transforms into a monkey, is so slavishly, dramatically self-loathing that they make even Tohru look like an emotionally stable and well-functioning individual, and I didn't know that was possible. Ritsu doesn't need to constantly apologise for their existence - they need to go with Tohru to a doctor and get some medication and a mental health check-up, before someone (anyone) around them gets so sick of the woe-is-me dramatics that Ritsu is pushed into a woodchipper for the sake of some fucking peace and quiet.

I don't know whether or not to be terrified or impressed that the author continually comes up with people this irritating. It's a talent, that's for sure.

The final collection of the Coffin Hill comics and it was the best of the lot. Because this was an ongoing story, and because the structure, over all three books, was so complicated - it jumped back and forth in time, following different generations of Coffin Hill inhabitants, both living and dead - it could sometimes feel a little bitty. In this, the final volume, however, all those hanging (ha) story elements are pulled together, and the whole thing coalesces into a really solidly told story. I don't think it's much of a surprise what actually happens to the house, but the focus on family relationships echoing and echoing through the timeline mirrors the structure in a really interesting way.

And that cover is fantastic. I mean the art's generally very good, but the cover is outstanding.