Emily Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters depicts the events of main character Karen’s life as the daughter of a single mother in a poverty-stricken household, trying to survive the struggles of being different in a conservative Catholic school. In an effort to provide readers with the full experience and complexity of a child’s imagination, Ferris …
For me, the most striking page is the one with the illustration of Karen inside the painting. She has literally crawled inside a piece of artwork. She pried open the canvas and poked her head in before diving… Read More
In Emil Ferris’ graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, images play a key role in the meaning of the pages. In the scene where Deeze walks into the restaurant, he is automatically ridiculed by an elderly white woman about his look. He is Hispanic and she makes several racist comments about why he should …
Monsters terrify because to society, they are the ultimate paradox. They remind us of something familiar, yet defy every characteristic that qualifies a creature as human. Their attraction is their repulsion, and their idiosynchronicity traps them into an eternal state of not belonging. Monsters experience a life of complete solitude, making them the ultimate …
In Stephen Graham Jones’s modern werewolf novel Mongrels, the boy at the center of the story come home one day to find his grandfather dead in their doorway, but he’s not entirely human. Instead, the lower half of his… Read More
In the early chapters of Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels, the idea of belonging is heavily discussed. The narrator is a young boy in a family of werewolves, but he has yet to become one himself. He has the blood of the werewolf and the support of his family, but from what I’ve read so far, …
“A neautralized skel was a perfect stage for one’s sadism, whether you were a dabbler, merely taking your time in terminating the thing before you, pruning a finger here or an ear there, or a master-level practitioner, restless all night trying to think up novel variations” (Whitehead 101-102). David Whitehead makes the above statement in …
“They had shambled through the identical outlet showrooms and tested the same sofas with their asses, clicked through the drop-down menus of the same online purveyors, broadband willing, zooming in on See in a Room and mentally arranging the merchandise according to the same floor plans” (Whitehead 72). It is very easy to fall into …
One theme often persists whenever we think about death – there’s one thing we are forced to remember when we read a book such as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which is that we are all the same. In our… Read More
In any properly executed work of horror, there are a set of motifs that are not only common, but essential to the story’s success. These timeless clichés revolve around specific imagery that often tells the audience something about what has already happened prior to the character’s knowledge or what soon will occur in the book …
