Love Everlasting– Graphic Novel

Love Everlasting by Tom King, Elsa Charretier, and team is a five-part series completely unique in its storytelling, art, and character development. Three are out as of now, with the rest due to be out by the end of this month. As a series, this was well worth the investment of time and money. Following Joan Petersen, a young woman who finds she is in an endless time loop of romance, the reader experiences love, loss, confusion, and shock; in the West, the 1970s, the 50s, and a Pride and Prejudice-esc story. The art is reminiscent of older style comics, but with its own unique modern flavor, that gives the characters the perfect sense of being removed from a normal linear timeline. With each comic ending unresolved, and in most cases seemingly with a more dreary outlook than before, this is the type of series that once started, being fully invested into the mystery is inevitable. 

Moon Knight Annual 2022 – Graphic Novel

Moon Knight Annual by Jed MacKay, Frederico Sabbatini, and team, is one of the best installments to the Moon Knight character I have seen thus far. In this comic we get to see a more vulnerable side to Moon Knight as a father, who because of his complicated and often chaotic lifestyle cannot be there for his family. Although the Black, White, and Blood series was good in the sense it had three stories in one book, I actually comparatively enjoyed this more well-rounded and developed story. As a book that only comes out once a year, it was worth the read, the writing was amazing, and honestly did what it needed to do for the character. Instead of focusing solely on his personality disorder, the reader gets to see the repercussions and separation Moon Knight has to endure, and we get a glimpse of the father that could’ve been.

Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

Frank Bidart’s poems are strange and disturbing, yet touching, and raw; the kind of rawness that a reader feels afterwards, with an impression of wonder and existentialism. My favorite in the book is the “War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” a story of guilt, insanity, and love. The struggle of feeling too much, of being too aware of the burden that you impose on others with your insanity and turbulence. This is the type of book that causes me to type notes on my phone, to save the best moments, the lines that made my heart tighten and my head hurt. Some of my favorite lines are:

“ He said I was his heart, I had asked to be his heart before I knew what I was asking.” – The Third Hour of the Night

“WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE.” – The Sacrifice

 “Insanity is the insistence on meaning.” – The Arc

Frank Bidart’s unique habit of writing entire stanzas in capital letters drives home the feeling of epiphany, of screaming, of the mind maiming the heart, or vise versa. This is by far the best poetry I have had the pleasure of reading and is my favorite of this list.

Lolita 

After reading Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov for the second time, I realized the true genius of the disturbing and alluring storytelling Nabokov does so well. From the point of view of a truly terrible man, we see his motivation, his perverted delusional thoughts. By telling the story from the point of view of the aggressor, the rapist to put it blatantly, the author drives home that in this world there is no truly good or truly evil, because as much as the reader resists, the reader is fascinated by his psychology, his motivation. By setting the crimes of this man with his Lolita, Dolores Haze, with the landscape of  Americana – rolling highways, pools, and hotels and motels – the juxtaposition suggests that perhaps there is always something darker, more sinister, behind every nostalgic memory. The book, although drawn out, disturbing, and quite honestly fatiguing, it remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. Art is to make people feel, and this book accomplishes that perfectly. Nabokov realized to turn a love story on its head and make it wrong, was to test the reader’s psyche, what can be accepted, forgotten, and what can’t. Nabokov realized that some stories don’t have a traditional climax, some are like a match, extinguished quietly and all at once. It is a warning of desire of giving into whims, and a tragedy of moral proportions. 

HP Lovecraft Collected Works

The prince of the macabre, Lovecraft’s short stories are cult classics for spooky season. This book perfectly encapsulates the strange, and pushes the boundaries between weird and whimsical to disturbing and off-putting. “Herbert West – The Reanimator” is one of my favorites, a classic about a doctor’s ambition to preserve life past the grave.His ambition haunts and stalks him through his life, questioning the line between what is just queer fancy or paranoia and what could be real. Another exquisite piece of whimsy, “The Outsider,” is about a  boy who escapes confinement, just to be isolated from civilization, another type of cruel confinement, an excellent commentary on society’s views towards the more eccentric and bizarre. So if you’re into old haunts, tales of insanity, and odd towns, HP Lovecraft has you covered, carrying a general mood of dread and ambiguity throughout. To be noted, he was a cat person, and it SHOWS.