reading notes

by Timothy K. Beal
ISBN: 0415925886
This book is divided into two parts. The first half deals with monsters in religious texts — mainly the biblical stories about Behemoth and Leviathan, and their cultural antecedents. The second half is more concerned about monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, Lovecraft’s Cthulu) and their religious/spiritual implications.
Beal clearly loves what he is writing [...]

by James Kochalka
ISBN: damn good question
When I met James Kochalka at MoCCA, he said that these diaries were his best work.
Being a Kochalka fan, I’m not going to argue with the man. (Though I will add that I really like his graphic novels.) This is the most recent volume of the diaries; it covers the [...]

by Joe Sacco
ISBN: 1560974702
Sacco is a comics journalist and this book is his account of the war in Bosnia, as he came to understand it during the months he spent there. His understanding came through the eyes of others: the people he met and sometimes befriended in Goražde and Sarajevo, people who had always lived [...]

by Thomas Lynch
ISBN: 140276238
Lynch is a poet, whose day job happens to be funeral director in a smallish town in Michigan. Pretty much his whole family is involved with “the dismal trade”: his Dad was a funeral director, too, and many of his siblings work for funeral homes.
His family is Irish and Catholic and broken [...]

by Ben Marcus
ISBN: 0375713786
I’m not entirely sure why I finished this book.
It is very odd (the book itself, not that I finished it.) It says it is a novel, and I suppose it is if you are going to be elastic in your definitions. So it is an unconventional novel about a fictional cult, the [...]

by Ray Vukcevich
ISBN: 1931520011
This is a collection of truly weird short stories.
Make that very weird, very short stories. By short, I mean on average they are under ten pages, as there are 33 stories in a book around 250 pages long. By weird, I mean these kinds of things happen: a guy thinks cats are [...]