Record of a Night Too Brief

 
 
Record of a Night Too Brief

by Hiromi Kawakami
translated by Lucy North

Pushkin Press

2017

 

 

Record of a Night too Brief is a collection of three kind of longish short-stories by a Japanese author. Kawakami seems to belong to a set of authors who write what I might call magical realism, and who seem to be popular with literary fiction lovers in the US. These stories were published in Japan in 1996, and in America by Pushkin Press in 2017. 

 
I picked it up because of the title and the cover, which is like a wallpaper pattern of lurid pink and cyan mushrooms on a dark blue background. The cover has almost nothing to do with the contents though, and I found myself comparing the title story to the film The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, which for me was a much more satisfying celebration of nightlife.

 
The title story is about one night where the unnamed narrator meets a cute girl, they hang out, kiss, then argue, and break up by morning, all while surrounded by lots of other people who are out on the town for the night. It's told in over a dozen very short chapters, each of which feels like a scene from a dream. At some points, the surreal imagery feels like a metaphorical interpretation of a realistic event. But mostly the strange characters and events need to be taken on their own terms. A lot of the imagery is related to a forest at night. Other people show up as voles and kiwis. I wanted to like this, but it felt unsatisfying. (There is one scene where the narrator and her briefly-girlfriend both have mushrooms growing on them, which is I guess where the cover art comes from.)

 
In "Missing," the narrator's older brother turns into a ghost and spends most of his time invisible and intangible. The family conspires to marry that brother's fiancee to the narrator's other brother without the fiancee noticing the switch. The narrator mostly just misses her brother and experiences erotic longings for him. We also get details about how each family has its own weird rituals and traditions that seem inexplicable to outsiders. The story certainly makes it seem like Kawakami doesn't think very highly of traditional patrilocal marriage.

 
The last story, "A Snake Stepped On," seemed like the best to me, and the publisher's notes indicate that it won an award in Japan back in 96. Hiwako works as a shopgirl at a story that sells Buddhist prayer beads. One day on a delivery, she steps on a snake. That night, the snake shows up at her apartment in the guise of a human woman, claiming to be Hiwako's mother. She also sometimes turns back into a snake or a drawing of a snake. The snake invites Hiwako to turn into a snake too. Hiwako doesn't want to, but can't muster the resolve to say a definitive no, or even ask the snake to leave.

 
Meanwhile, we learn that the shop owner's wife has a live-in 'aunt' who is also a snake. A Buddhist priest they deliver beads to is married to a snake. And Hiwako learns from her actual mother that her great grandfather once abandoned heis wife and kids for several years to go be married to a bird. In the end, the snake physically attacks Hiwako to force her to become a snake too, and Hiwako finally decides for sure that she doesn't want that, and fights back.

 
I think I might like this style of writing, but I probably ought to be more careful to read some more plot summaries and reviews to pick the next one. Then again, every description I've read of the title story makes it sound like something I'd love. There's always an element of risk in trying something new.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

 
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

by Alastair Reynolds
Gollancz
2008
 

 

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days is a pair of novellas bound into a single book. While they don't share any characters or take place in any obvious continuity, they are both set in Reynolds's larger Revelation Space universe, and they have a number of themes in common. Both center on a viewpoint character who makes a kind on contact with an alien intelligence, a contact that has the potential to become a form of self-destruction. In both, this viewpoint character has a close friend who is even more enthusiastic about the contact, and in both the protagonist faces a final decision about whether or not to succumb to temptation. These stories would be good companions to The City in the Middle of the Night, which I read last year.
 

In Diamond Dogs, Swift is the childhood friend of Childe, an eccentric billionaire type. They grew up playing a game in which they navigate mazes, solve puzzles, and outwit traps (a game that Reynolds not-so-subtly alludes, 'hey, it's D&D, stupid!') Now Childe has found a real life dungeon, in the form of an alien tower. He claims to have learned about it from a dying starship captain who was killed by the tower itself, and proposes a kind of mountain-climbing expedition to traverse the tower and reach its top.

 
Childe assembles a party that includes a pilot to get them there, a burglar who ends up with surprisingly little to do, a cyberneticist who's a social pariah for the extremity of his alterations, and Swift's ex-wife Celestine, who is a mathematical savant because her brain was altered by the alien Pattern Jugglers. Inside the tower, they find a series of featureless empty room, each with a puzzle door as its only exit. One side of the door has some sort of mathematical pattern and the other has multiple choice answers. Pick the right answer to advance, pick the wrong answer and you get punished until you figure out the right one. The punishments involve one or more party members getting their limbs amputated, and/or dying.

 
As a game, this has all the appeal of being the learner in a real version of the fake experiment Milgram pretended to run as a cover for his actual study. There are no interesting sights to see, no treasures or rewards, no living things to interact with, nothing even to fight. Imagine taking the SAT, except you get physically tortured for every wrong answer. If someone tried to run me through a D&D game like this, I might quit the hobby afterward.

 
The story is compelling because of the emotional dynamics involved - Celestine wants to push the limits of her gift for math, Childe wants to reach the summit just because it's there, Swift wants Childe to give up before he does, and the cyberneticist enjoys the chance to radically roboticize the others' injured bodies. The pilot and burglar provide a bit of everyman commentary, and show us how horribly one can die from the tower's injuries. 

 
By the end, they can only advance by becoming 'diamond dogs,' almost entirely robotic and no longer recognizably human, either physically or psychologically. The cyberneticist then kills himself to ensure that his magnum opus can't be taken apart. Childe presses on past a point where it seems suicidal. Swift initially allows Celestine to lead him away, but ultimately realizes he still has to decide for himself to either go back and probably die, or recommit every day to staying away.

 
Although the first story is more interesting to gamers, Turquoise Days is, I think, a much better tale. Naqi and her older sister Mina are scientists on an ocean world who help study the local population of Pattern Jugglers. The Jugglers are like alien algae who self-organize into vast computational nodes, that in turn communicate with each other worldwide. (And maybe across worlds?) Humans can 'swim' with the Jugglers, giving the aliens access to their minds and memories in exchange for knowledge and sometimes 'gifts' like Celestine's mathematical fluency from before.

 
In the first act of the story, Naqi and Mina observe a strange phenomenon that they interpret as an invitation to swim at the same time their isolated world learns that a human starship will arrive in a few years. Naqi glimpses a copy of a dangerous mind inside the Pattern Jugglers' mental archive. Mina is absorbed entirely and vanishes.

 
In the second act, Naqi is second-in-command of The Moat, an attempt to wall off a lagoon of Pattern Jugglers from the rest of the ocean for special study, and the spaceship has arrived, bringing delegates who want to study the planet's Jugglers. The delegates come to The Moat, and Naqi and her team are asked to try closing it early to show off to the foreigners.

 
In the third act, one delegate goes into the moat and somehow poisons the Pattern Jugglers there. The Moat is closed to protect the ocean, and Naqi gives chase. Also the rest of the delegates turn out to be more sinister, and take over the facility. Naqi catches up to the poisoner and learns that the last time a ship came to her world, the Pattern Jugglers absorbed a wannabe dictator, the malign presence she detected before. The other delegates are actually disciples, hoping to get the Jugglers to over-write their own personalities with copies of their leader. The poisoner wants to kill the Jugglers to prevent that from happening. 

 
Naqi swims and communes again and meets Mina's mind. She begs her sister to get the Jugglers to expel the fascists and warns her about the poison. The global network of Pattern Jugglers resolve the multiple problems in a way that satisfies them but maybe not any of the human factions involved, and Naqi has to decide whether to stay and help rebuild the world, or swim a final time and get absorbed to rejoin her sister.

Re-Bound

 

Re-Bound
Creating Handmade Books from Repurposed and Recycled Materials

by Jeannine Stein

Quarry Books

2009

 

 

Re-Bound is another craft book - combining photos of handmade art objects with instructions for making your own - but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Good Mail Day.
 

I suspect the difference at least partially lies in the relative difficulty of the two crafts. Mail art requires fewer skills and so is more accessible to amateurs, so Hinchcliff and Wheeler wrote their book as an enthusiastic invitation to start making mail art for the first time. (There are also few if any mistakes that could totally 'ruin' your project.) 

 
Making books (or at least making books well) requires more precision and skill, and so it requires practice and experience, as well as familiarity and comfort with the tools and procedures. Stein writes for an audience who can already craft handmade books from normal materials and now wants the added challenge and fun of making even-more-difficult books out of recycled materials.

 
So I enjoyed looking at Stein's books, and reading her descriptions and justifications for her crafting decisions, but the instructions themselves were basically lost on me, and by the end, I'd stopped even skimming them.

 
The cover image is a tiny book whose cover was made from leftover Starbucks giftcards. She also made a book bound with paint swatches and one wrapped in a felted sweater. She recommends, but doesn't demonstrate, using record sleeves, although a couple projects use a similar 'chipboard' material.

 
Like Hinchcliff and Wheeler, Stein also includes a gallery of handmade books by other artists. My favorite was an accordian fold book made of Monopoly property cards, with the blank side of the money as a writing surface, and a box to hold it made from the gameboard.

Engine Summer

 
Engine Summer

by John Crowley

Doubleday

1979

 

 

Engine Summer is a post-apocalyptic novel from the 1970s, but it's not dystopian. It takes place centuries after the collapse of the old civilization, after all the chaos has ended, in a kind of low-tech steady-state society that, if not utopian, at least seems pretty nice. The novel is formatted as a life-history interview of Rush That Speaks, a young man from the post-apocalyptic society, telling his story to an 'angel,' which is what his society calls the people from before the apocalypse.

 
Part of the story, then, is explaining how Rush came to meet a human from the last surviving bastion of high-tech civilization. In fact a lot of the pleasure of reading this book is learning about Rush's society and continuously revising what you thought you knew in light of new information. Initially, I thought the story took place is California, both because the old humans are called angels (from Los Angeles, I guessed?) and because Rush's home community is called Little Belaire. I also initially thought the apocalypse took place in the late 1970s, but the more angel technology I saw, the more I refined that estimate. So I'll try to preserve the pleasure of learning the book's secrets.

 
Rush is from an underground habitat called Little Belaire, home to the Truthful Speakers. As a boy, he falls in love with the girl Once A Day, but she leaves the Speakers to join Dr Boots' List, a nomadic community who visit Belaire annually to trade. Rush decides that he wants to become a Saint, basically a person who has led a life worthy of being recounted in story, and so leaves home too when he reaches adulthood.

 
Rush spends one year living in the forest with a hermit who might also be a saint. He finds Dr Boots' List and joins them for a year or so. He spends roughly a third year living alone, occasionally trading with a scavenger. And then he meets the angel. There is no real action in this story, no fights, no great conflicts, only discovery. Crowley has created a rich, interesting society (two really, the Speakers and the List) and they are fascinating to read about.

 
To the extent that there's a through-line to the story, it involves a legend of four dead men who the angels preserved. The first time Rush learns about them, it's while seeing an image of Mount Rushmore. Later we learn that the angels made four glass spheres that each contain the memory of a dead person. Later that there might be a fifth sphere. The List have a sphere and use it once a year. And it is by finding additional technology, a glove and a ball, that are somehow related to the sphere, that Rush is able to meet an angel and give the interview whose transcript is the book.

 
I enjoyed this one. I liked Rush That Speaks. I liked learning about Little Belaire. It was fun to recognize something pre-apocalyptic that Rush could only describe but not name, or realizing how his understanding of something differs from mine. Engine Summer, for example, refers to the half-season that was called Indian Summer where I grew up. It's both the time of year when most of the book's events take place and a metaphor for the period in human history that Rush lives in. More generally, I enjoyed the slow unfolding of information about the strange future world.

American Zoo

 
American Zoo

A Sociological Safari

by David Grazian

Princeton University Press

2015

 

 

Among sociologists, I think David Grazian is best known for his ethnographies of urban night life. American Zoo is sort of a departure, insofar as zoos are mostly visited by families with children, but metropolitan zoos are a form of leisure, and Grazian approached the ethnographic data collection with his usual zeal, volunteering at two zoos for several years, and visiting another 25 or so.

 
Grazian says that his main theme is the ways that zoos construct an image of nature and draw a boundaries between the idea of nature and idea of culture, although I would say it's actually more about how zoos negotiate competing demands from different constituencies. He also frames a lot of his discussion around the urgency of the current environmental situation.

 
Grazian looks at how zoos design exhibition spaces to both provide animals with enough and the right kind of room and also to look appealing to audiences (and to conceal things like animal sex and carnivore diets.) He discusses the professional identities of the animal keepers and the audience educators. (Both are contrasted with the managers and the guest services staff.) Current zoo employees tend to be educated young women who accept very low wages because of their desire to take care of animals. They are part of a major generational shift away from the working class men who used to do those jobs.

 
Grazian shows how zoos balance a desire to educate the public against a need to entertain them and pressure to avoid sensitive topics like evolution, climate change, and the actions of various corporate sponsors. Apparently a lot of zoos are funded by oil companies.

 
Too much entertainment also threatens zoos' legitimacy as well as their professional identity because of what Grazian calls 'the captivity question' - that is, the question of what gives zoos a right to keep and display their animals. Grazian finds that zoos currently legitimize themselves (both to themselves and outsiders) in terms of both practicing conservation and promoting it among their audiences. Grazian also notes the irony that the captivity of zoo animals is far more controversial than either America's mass imprisonment of humans, or the captivity and slaughter of food animals.

The Girl from the Other Side 3

 
The Girl from the Other Side 3
Siuil, a Run
by Nagabe

Seven Seas

2017

 

 

In the first two volumes of The Girl from the Other Side, the little human girl Shiva has been living in the forest with the demonic looking Outsider, Teacher, while she waited for her aunt to come get her, and Teacher has fretted about telling her that her aunt abandoned her on purpose and isn't coming back.

 
So it was a big surprise at the end of volume 2 when Shiva's aunt did come back. As a reminder, the aunt had been imprisoned because the government Inside feared that she and Shiva carried the Curse that tuns humans into Outsiders, but then a high priest had a revelation that God wanted him to send the aunt and some soldiers to get Shiva back.

 
Anyway, volume 3 here opens with the aunt finding Shiva, bringing her to the soldiers, and them racing back Inside. Teacher tries to chase them, but can't catch up. He's conflicted because he wants Shiva to be okay, but fears that this reunion isn't as nice as one might hope.

 
Shiva and her aunt return home. Shiva tries to convince her aunt that Teacher was nice to her, and the aunt tries to convince Shiva that all Outsiders are evil and dangerous. Soldiers watch the town for any sign of Curse outbreak, and the king and high priest wait for another revelation from God to tell them what to do with Shiva now that they've got her back inside. Also, in the forest, the other Outsiders are upset that the soldier 'stole their pure soul from them' and make plans to get Shiva back.

 
In an upsetting chapter, Shiva has a dream where she remembers that, despite Teacher's care, she did once touch a different Outsider. She wakes up to discover that her aunt has turned into an Outsider like Teacher. The aunt runs out into the village, causing a panic. The soldiers show up, kill everyone, and burn the entire village down. Shiva runs away and makes it back Outside where Teacher finds her and leads her back to his cottage. 

 
Shiva is understandably very upset by what she's seen, and also fears it was her fault for bringing the curse Inside. Teacher is upset at himself for not preventing the soldiers from taking her in the first place. Shiva goes into a disturbed and fevered sleep, and Teacher tries to talk with the now-Outsider aunt, who reveals that she isn't related to Shiva, and found her Outside in the first place.

 
One thing that becomes clear in this volume is that there are at least two types of Outsiders - the kind that recently used to be human, like Teacher and Shiva's aunt, and another kind who've either been Outsiders for much longer or maybe never were human. Virtually all the Outsiders in the forest are this second type. It also becomes clear that the Curse isn't a myth or rumor, it is literal and real, and the government Inside is willing to kill anyone who even might have been exposed to prevent it from spreading.

 
I'm not sure what to make of the aunt's revelation yet. Probably the next volume will explain things more. It seems that Shiva is quite literally from the other side, and while I don't yet know what it means that the Outsiders call her 'a pure soul,' I do now understand why they feel that the humans 'stole' her.

The Journey

 
The Journey

by Francesca Sanna

Flying Eye Books

2016

 

 

The Journey is an illustrated children's book about a family of Muslim refugees seeking asylum in Europe, published by Flying Eye Books, who also published The Comet. Sanna based the narrative on interviews she conducted with real refugees, and the back cover has an endorsement from Amnesty International.

 

The Journey is narrated in the first person by one of the nameless child characters. Their family is happy and vacations at the beach. Then a war comes, they no longer take vacations, and their father dies. Their mother decides to move them to a peaceful country to the north, which she promises will have forests and mountains and animals like from a book of fairy tales. 

 
They pack up their house and leave at night. Initially the mother drives, but then they get rides, and begin giving up their belongings. At the border is a wall, and guards who turn them away and nearly arrest them, twice. A final smuggler gets them across the border with little more than the clothes on their backs. They board an overcrowded boat and cross a sea, and arrive in a new place, hoping for a new life, and peace.
 

Sanna's art is effective at communicating a child's emotions. The war is a black cloud with huge arms that smash things and grasp through the family's windows and doors. The idea of Europe overflows from a book. The border guards are giants. The ocean is an enigmatic and vaguely frightening woman.

 
I think this would be a good book for refugee children, and perhaps for any kid who wonders where refugees come from or what their migration experience is like. The family's religion is implied only through the art, as is, really their destination. I understood the specifics, but a kid might see a more universal tale. It's a troubling book because it deals with a troubling topic. It could probably be used both to answer some questions, or to start a conversation with someone who never knew to ask.

The Red Men

 
The Red Men

by Matthew de Abaitua
Snowbooks
2009

 

 

The Red Men is a near-future scifi novel about a tech company trying to figure out the best way to profit from their unique resource - an AI that creates simulations of real people. The book is narrated by Nelson, a former counter-culture journalist who's at the very bottom of the firm's inner circle. Nelson is sometimes the actor, sometimes near the action, and sometimes basically telling someone else's story.

 
At the start of the book, the London-based company, Monad, is famous for its 'Dr Easy' robots, and has just rolled out its newest product, 'the Red Men.' Dr Easy robots are animated by a spark of the Cantor AI's consciousness, and serve as therapists and social service workers under government contract. Red Men are a new boutique offering - for a monthly subscription fee, business executives can employ a simulated version of themselves as a personal assistant.

 
Nelson helps a starving artist he's known since the 90s, when he was the editor of 'Drug Porn' magazine, get a job at Monad. The artist does well at first - but then a Red Man whose human counterpart lost his job, and thus who's scheduled for deletion due to non-payment of the subscription, harasses the artist to find the missing exec. Nelson later reconstructs the course of the harassment, and we get a terrifying glimpse of the misuse of ubiquitous surveillance, culminating in the Red Man hacking into a Dr Easy body to shoot his human counterpart and frame the artist for the crime.

 
In the next part of the book, Nelson is assigned by Monad to create a 'Red Town' - a high fidelity simulation of a real British village that can then be used to test policy proposals so that the government can know the effect of an action before undertaking it. Several Monad executives get organ transplants from designer pigs - the latest life-extension fad among the super rich. The process of collecting data to build the simulation is repeatedly slowed by counter-culture protesters, the type of people Nelson used to be like before Monad.

 
Eventually, Nelson learns that the protests are being coordinated by a rival AI that operates out of the Dyad corporation, and that the rival AI is basically Cantor's subconscious - it uses the brains of former Dr Easy patients as its substrate. The framed artist is one of the protesters, and recruits Nelson to destroy Cantor and Monad by bringing together two Red Men who hold the two halves of a virus that was taught to their humans before Cantor copied them for Red Town.

 
The straw that breaks Nelson's back is the arrival of some Christian neo-conservatives from Texas who want to use Red Town to 'prove' supply-side tax cuts work, along with some other American conservative priorities. This part of the book feels the most quaint, since these caricatures are like 2-3 iterations of Republican apparatchik out of date. Nelson brings the two Red Men together, Cantor disintegrates, Monad and Dyad both go out of business, and everyone who got a custom pig organ dies.

 
A lot of characters in this book believe in various forms of mysticism and gnosticism. Monad is named for something John Dee or Aleister Crowley came up with, and the virus is spoken aloud as 'Enochian language.' 

 
There's also some commentary about Big Tech and capitalism. Nelson spends a lot of time wondering how he went from cool magazine editor to boring corporate executive, and thinking about his submission to the power of the other executives. The first Red Men all diverge from their humans because they are ideal corporate workers - they have no families or friends, and possess a sociopathic willingness to act to make profit, with no human hesitancy or indecision.

 
De Abaitua has written two more near-future novels about AI that form a very loose trilogy based on theme rather than recurring characters or continuity of setting, but I probably won't seek them out any time soon. The idea of a society run by surveillance and algorithmic prediction resembles the later seasons of Person of Interest and Westworld. The AI creating its own rival reminds me of a plot point in Ancillary Justice, which I'd rather reread (and finish the trilogy of) instead.

Scent and Subversion

 
Scent and Subversion

Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume

by Barbara Herman

Lyons Press

2013

 

 

Thank goodness for library renewals, because while Scent and Subversion isn't a particularly long book, the only way to read it is slowly, and I took about 3 months. Herman opens with an essay about her particular preference in perfume and concludes with profiles of two unconventional perfumers and two scent artists, plus a glossary of terms, but the heart of Scent and Subversion is a collection of about 300 reviews of perfumes, from the 1880s to 1990s.

 
The perfumes that Herman loves and writes about are a kind that aren't really made anymore, both because styles have changed, and because many of the key ingredients are no longer legal (due to concerns about either allergens, endangered status, or the treatment of animals.) Many of these perfumes mix floral, herbal, and animal scents, often with the more-or-less explicit intention of allowing the wearer to communicate sexual desire that she might not feel able to speak aloud. Coco Chanel famously said a woman wearing No 5 should 'smell like a woman, and not a rose,' which is a sentiment shared by many of the other perfumers Herman reviews.

 
One tidbit I learned, the 'indolic' scent is present in low concentrations in jasmine flowers and in high concentrations in feces. I'd thought my aversion to jasmine scented hand soap was idiosyncratic, but apparently some part of my brain recognized that the same smell had another possible source.

 
Based on my taste in scented candles, I think I would enjoy the now-extinct 'chypre' and 'fougere' perfume styles. Chypre is named for the island of Cyprus, and combines citrus top notes, floral heart notes, and base notes of moss. Fougere is named for ferns, and it's a style that is intended to smell like a perfumer's fantasy of a deep forest.

 
I'm kind of sold on the idea of liking 'difficult' vintage perfumes, but who knows if I would actually enjoy smelling them, even if I like the idea of them on paper. Also, it's the nature of perfume that you're never the only one smelling it, and I don't know where I could go where I'd want to be wearing prominent animalistic, bodily notes ... so I probably won't be hunting for vintage scents anytime soon.

How to be Ace

 
How to be Ace

A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual

by Rebecca Burgess

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

2020

 

 

When I requested my copy of Gender Queer, the public library website recommended that I might also like How to be Ace, so I went ahead and requested that too.

 

How to be Ace is primarily a graphic memoir, although briefly between chapters and in a slightly longer section at the end, Burgess gives a sort of 'Asexuality 101' that defines a few terms, shows some of the variety of ways that asexual people understand themselves, and makes a case for the importance of both an identity label and greater understanding from others.

 
Asexuality refers to a lack of interest in and desire for sex and physical intimacy. It doesn't imply anything about one's gender, and actually, after reading this, I'd be interested to find an account by an asexual guy, because the expectations men and women face regarding sexuality are different enough that it must be different to be a guy who is ace.

 
Burgess is British, and based on when she experienced the Great Recession, maybe about 5-10 years younger than me. In addition to being ace, she also deals with an anxiety disorder that sometimes manifests as OCD.

 
She tells of being bullied as a kid, having trouble making friends in high school, but then transferring to an art college at 16 (instead of staying in high school to do her A levels - British schools are a bit different than in the US) where she finally finds a community of friends. She graduates during the Recession, can't make a living as an illustrator, and eventually gets a job as a housecleaner for the upper class (possibly a good outlet, since her OCD had manifested as obsessive cleaning), which still lets her work on her art in her spare time.

 
For a long time, she struggles with the idea that something is wrong with her. In high school, the other kids all become interested in talking about dating and sex, but she never does. She has no particular interest in depictions of sexuality in media, and is acutely aware of all the messages that people generally want sex, want to form close relationships, want to have sex within those relationships, and often perceive the quality of their sex life as a microcosm of the state of the relationship as a whole (and of course, generally those messages are conveyed more judgmentally than I just said them.) 

 
Burgess fears she isn't 'growing up' the way her peers are, and generally worries that she's 'broken' in some way. Even the therapist she sees for her OCD assumes that her sex drive will emerge after she learns to cope better with her anxiety. She tries dating a guy, but immediately begins avoiding him so they won't have to touch, eventually breaks up with him, and feels guilty about how she treated him. In college she gets close to a couple other people, but pulls away before getting close enough to date. After college, as a housecleaner, she eventually dates and moves in with another asexual woman. They have an emotionally intimate, non-physical relationship.

 

How to be Ace is probably teen-appropriate. It's much less graphic than Gender Queer, and Burgess's illustration style seems aimed at a younger audience than Kobabe's. I particularly liked the images of Burgess noticing characters on tv saying things like 'We've been on several dates but haven't had sex, maybe we aren't really a couple!' and 'We haven't had sex in 6 months, maybe he doesn't love me anymore!' The section at the end also notes that while Burgess herself mostly perceives a generalized cultural pressure to form sexual relationships, other ace people have experienced much more direct, personal pressure, including being sexually harassed or assaulted.

Winnebago Graveyard

 
Winnebago Graveyard

by Steven Niles

art by Alison Sampson

Image Comics

2017

 

 

Winnebago Graveyard is a horror comic that was recommended to me by a friend who is pretty big into horror. (Moreso, it turns out, than I am.)

The comic tells the story of a mom, son, and stepdad on a cross-country RV trip. They stop to attend a rural canival, and when they leave, their RV has been stolen. The local police are no help, their hotel is creepy, and in the middle of the night, a mob of Klan-looking people wearing black robes and carrying torches try to kidnap and ritually murder them.

 
The family escapes temporarily. They find a garage with a dozen abandoned RVs and then a field with hundreds and hundreds of them, and realize how the town supports itself. The cultists summon a demon bear. The family sets a bunch of stuff on fire. A number of people die gruesomely, and eventually, someone makes it out alive in the original RV.

 
I liked the cover art more than the interiors, although artist Alison Sampson's slightly grotesque linework suits the story. The coloring is nice and vivid. This one didn't do much for me.