xxxHolic: The Title Is Confusing, But Bear With It For A Great Manga!

A Review By: Amelia

I’ve always been unhealthy obsessed with the supernatural. Ghosts have always fascinated me. Of course, with ghosts and spirits the subject matter is usually pretty heavy where I prefer light-heartedness and humour. With xxxHolic, they strike a good balance of horror, drama, and humour.

xxxHolic is a nineteen volume manga that follows a group of rag-tag, strange, social outcast, supernaturally-gifted people as they solve bizarre situations with more bizarre solutions. The creators of xxxHolic are a group of female Japanese manga artists that named themselves CLAMP. They formed in the 1980s and had upwards of 11 members at any given time. Nowadays, they’ve thinned out to four members: Nanase Ohkawa provides much of the storyline for the works and Mokona, Tsubaki Nekoi, and Satsuki Igarashi are the three artists whose roles shift for each series. CLAMP has written many notable manga series including the very popular Cardcaptors series.

Yuuko on the left, Watanuki on the right

The main characters of this manga are Watanuki, a teenage boy who has the ability to see and communicate with spirits and Yuuko who is a physic/mystic who owns a gift-granting shop. There’s also a few secondary characters: Himawari, who is Watanuki’s love interest, Doumeki, who Watanuki dislikes strongly because he thinks he’s trying to steal Himawari, Mokona, who is a small cat/rabbit-like creature who’s a smart-ass and always hungry, and Maru & Moro, who are twin spirits who live at Yuuko’s shop.

An example of the art

The art style of xxxHolic is some of the best I’ve seen. It’s very, very stylized with the human characters having unnaturally long and thin limbs and wild expressions, and that might put some readers off, but that highly specialized style looks amazing on the supernatural characters. All the characters are cute and good-looking but all the attractiveness does get a little boring as background characters just become cookie-cutter replicas of good-looking nobodies.

All in all, xxxHolic is something really special. It’s a supernatural drama piece that doesn’t disappoint in its horror or its humour. The characters are likable and funny, the artwork is unique, and with nineteen volumes in the first series, you’ve got more than enough for hours of manga enjoyment.

My final thoughts on Clamp’s xxxHolic are that it’s wonderful. It’s my favourite manga. It’s hilarious: Watanki’s reactions are enough to leave you giggling for hours all on their own. It’s a chilling and creepy with some of the supernatural terrors they introduce being truly scary. It’s touching and sweet, as this strange collection of characters do care for each other and have very sweet and tender moments. This is just an all-round great manga and if you haven’t read it or aren’t even considering reading it, you’re doing yourself a great injustice!

Fall of Giants: The Possible Fall of Ken Follett?

A Review By: Amelia

Historical fiction is probably my favourite genre of fiction. Taking something that’s actually happened and putting new people in it just appeals to a history nerd like myself, and, honestly, there’s no better historical fiction writer than the fabulous Ken Follett.

Follett, for the uninitiated, made a name for himself pretty earlier on in his career with his knack for World War II thrillers but has, on occasion, written books outside of those perimeters. Fall of Giants is one of those books. Unfortunately, Follett may have gotten in over his head with Falls of Giants, and, in this review, you’ll learn why.

Fall of Giants is a massive, epic of a novel that covers the first thirty years of the 20^th century through the eyes of five families from different social backgrounds and different countries. We, as the readers, watch the families deal with important issues like worker’s unions, women’s rights, the First World War, and the beginning of the depression.

The Century Trilogy–Fall of Giants being book one of three–follows five families and this is where Follett really let me down. He usually has such strong, well-rounded characters, but in Fall of Giants he’s so concerned with what’s happening in the countries around the characters and not the characters themselves. As an example, the Russian family (two brothers named Lev and Gregori) deal with things like a corrupted royal family and poverty because they’re Russian. Sure one of the brothers is selfless and believes in Russia and one of them is selfish and cares only of money and sex and that’s about it. Follett does nothing to expand on them to make them likable. It’s the same deal with the other four families: an American family from old money, a British family from old money, a Welsh coal mining family, and a German family from–you guessed it–old money. It’s like Follett is trying to create some kind of allegory with his characters instead of just writing characters! 

The locations in this novel are just as flat and lifeless as the characters. What happens within the countries are things that actually happened in history and Follett is usually a great writer with history but that’s when he’s focusing on one main character. All the history in all the countries with all the characters is overwhelming and often just plain boring. Take for example the years of World War I. Some of the characters fight in it and it’s interesting–Follett writing about war always is–but when it switches over to a character who is not fighting in the war but instead campaigning for unions or running a night club, who cares? It takes away from the action and romance and the sex–which means it takes away everything Follett is renowned for!

Follett could have done something really awesome with Fall of Giants, but I think he got a little over eager. He dove head first into a story that’s too much–too much for him or for any other author for that matter. There’s too much history happening all at once and too little character development too support it all.

My final thoughts on Fall of Giants are that it’s a jumbled mess of information and characters only partially developed. It really frightens me that Ken Follett–one of my all-time favourite authors–might be losing his touch! Don’t get me wrong, the book is still well written compared to some other authors out there, but by Follett’s usually high standards, it falls way short.

Joker: A Disturbing Take on a Super Villain Who Is Already Pretty Disturbing

A Review By: Amelia

Joker has always been one of the greatest–if not the greatest–superhero foe. He’s a madman with no regard for human life but he does it with a smile and usually, a ridiculously over the top plan to cause absolute chaos. What makes Joker such an interesting case study for comic fans and comic writers alike is that he doesn’t have to be over-the-top, and to make him more grounded is to make him more terrifying. That’s what drew me to read and review Joker.

Joker, written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Lee Bermejo, is a comic book that is entirely about a realistic Joker in a realistic Gotham. Joker stays the same, but his methods are more grounded–more real world gangster–than what we’ve seen of Joker before.

Azzarello and Lee have worked together a few times and their notable work within the DC Universe (aside from Joker) is Lex Luthor: Man of Steel which is a noir/pulp take on why Lex Luthor feels he needs to be a constant foe to Superman. Azzarello and Lee both have gritty styles that suit each other perfectly, and their comics are always intricately written and drawn.

The characters in Joker include Joker (duh), Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, and Two-Face, with a brief (and I

mean really brief) appearance of the Dark Knight in the last few pages of the comic. Surprisingly though, the story isn’t out of the perspective of any of these characters. The story comes courtesy of a low-level criminal named Johnny Frost that has the good luck (or bad depending on how you look at it) of becoming Joker’s right hand man. Having a new character weigh in on what’s happening around him is a really intense experience. He believes working for Joker will be a good thing, but as the story wears on and Johnny sees Joker for what he really is, that shiny veneer begins to fade and Johnny, along with readers, begin to see the Joker in a new light–no easy feat for a character with as many stories as Joker.

The characters are also given a small tweaking to make them more original to the writer. As an example, usually talkative Harley Quinn is silent: she never utters a single word throughout the whole comic.

The art style in Joker is gritty and realistic. There’s a lot of shadows, and a lot of sharp, square angles. For close ups, Bermejo softens his style and the sharp angles are replaced by smooth, regular features while the colours, that are stark and/or lacking in most panels, are more plentiful and blended together. Overall, the colour scheme is drab, but the excessive details–especially in clothing and cars–make up for the subdued colour palate.

Joker is a great comic book. It shows the crime in Gotham like crime in the real-world and that’s something you don’t usually get in comic books. Joker’s still bat-shit crazy, but also has his moments of weakness, and that’s also something that’s fairly original. The art style is unique and beautiful in it’s sharp-edged, drab colour way and the story is fantastic.

My final thoughts on Brian Azzarello’s Joker are that it is a terrific comic book. Read it more than once to really get it and let your mouth water at the art style. Keep in mind it’s incredibly violent and for mature audiences only, but for me, that only added to the charm. In Joker, Azzarello showed what Gotham would be like in the real world and it’s disturbing, but more than compelling enough to read this comic book over and over again.

The Monuments Men: History, Art, Nazis – It’s Three, Three, Three Books in One!

A Review By: Amelia

It’s amazing the things we–as a collective people–have never really thought of before and The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel is one of those things. World War II was some of the worst destruction that the world had ever seen before and miraculously, the artwork survived. Why? Well, a little known group of highly educated, extremely brave men named the Monuments Men are to thank, and within the four-hundred pages of the book, you’ll discover that they didn’t receive half the thanks they should have!

The book follows the Allied group known as the Monuments Men as they raced against time and behind enemy lines to find, retrieve, and save as much Nazi stolen and relocated art from destruction as they could. It focuses on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day and follows the accounts of six of the Monuments Men and the seemingly impossible task of saving the world’s art from the Nazis destruction.

The plot of this book is all about art and how it ever survived the ferocity of World War II’s fighting and Nazi looting. At the same time that Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world and eradict the Jewish race from the face of the Earth, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe for Hitler’s and his highest officers private art collections. The Nazis were painstakingly cataloguing art that Hitler planned to display in his Fuehrer Museum in Lintz but also destroying modern art that they considered ‘degenerate’ art. 

To stop the cultural destruction of Europe from reaching the level of devastation that Hitler intended to reach, American museum directors, Canadian art historians, British curators–and anyone else educated in fine art, were to travel through Europe and save what they could. Their searches lead them from France, to Belgium, to Germany, and back to France. They found huge art warehouses in semi-collapsed mines, Austrian castles, and German basements. They were helped by employees of the Louvre, as well as members of the Nazi party that didn’t want to see the art come to harm.

The Monuments Men is such a wonderful non-fiction book. Edsel writes facts and dates in such an elegant way it almost makes you believe that you’re reading fiction. He goes inside the characters head and writes about what they’re thinking after he painstakingly went through personal letters and diaries of the men who worked so hard to preserve the culture of a war-torn Europe. Without what they did, looting would have run rampant, priceless works would have been stolen or destroyed. Art as we know it would have changed forever!

My final thoughts on The Monuments Men are that it’s an interesting book. It’s written elegantly and contains a lot of facts that I’d never heard before. Everyone knows the stats of how many people were killed in World War II and of Hitler’s hellish policies and practices, but a vast majority of us know hardly anything of the tireless efforts of the Monuments Men. This book remedies that and everyone with even an inkling of interest in history, World War II, or art should pick of this book and learn something new. 

All My Friends Are Dead: One Story, Two Minutes, Hilarity Ensues

A Review By: Amelia

When looking for my next short story to review, I will admit that I kind of left it until the last minute. I didn’t really have any time at all to settle down, read, and take notes on a short story like Heart of Darkness, which, although a fantastic story is way too long. This is where All My Friends Are Dead came in and my god, what a life saver of a short story!

All My Friends Are Dead is a dark comedy short story written and illustrated by Avery Monsen and Jory John. The story consists of just over three hundred words spread over ninety two pages. It’s a short story about how, well, how an assortment of characters’ friends are dead. Although not everyone’s friends are dead, some are missing, or obsolete, or expired, or have scurvy.

 

The illustrations that go along with the three hundred words of texts 

are simple doodles with basic colouring. They go perfectly with the story – simple drawings, simple plot, simple concept.

My final thoughts on All My Friends Are Dead is that it is cute, weird, and funny and comes off in a very spoken-word poetry kind-of-way. It makes me feel like I should be in a smoky coffee shop listening to a guy emote poorly on a stage made of milk crates. It’s an interesting little story that I suggest anyone who has a couple of minutes to spare check out.

Princess Resurrection: Fight Off Evil With a Smile

A Review By: Amelia

Werewolves, demons, monsters, vampires. All these ferocious creatures are afraid of the same thing: the beautiful Princess Hime, an awesome warrior who fights off the forces of evil with a chainsaw and a smile. Not only does she look great in a tiara, she has magical powers that allow her to raise the dead. She’s a girl on a mission, and with the help of her undead servant, an overly aggressive yet feminine werewolf, a sexy vampire with a taste for virgin blood, and a super cute robot maid, there’s no creature of darkness she can’t take down!

So begins Yasunori Mitsunaga’s manga Princess Resurrection, a manga series about a warring royal clan in a magical kingdom that has been in steady decline for the last couple of eons. As their own world slips away, the royal children move their epic battle to the human world and they bring their monstrous (literally) assassins with them. Princess Hime is part of this warring royal family and, if it were up to her, she wouldn’t be fighting for the crown of her kingdom because she just doesn’t want it. Unfortunately, the rest of her siblings do and they send all manner of horrible monsters after her to get her out of their way on their violent quest for the crown.

Princess Resurrection is currently an ongoing manga series with sixteen volumes published in Japan and seven volumes translated into English. Each volume is divided further into about five chapters with their own independent storylines, each about Hime’s misadventures in the human world. Each chapters within each volume follows a ‘monster of the week’ formula where a new foe will appear with its own miniature storyline and, by the end, will inevitably die by Hime’s hand. Later on in the series it’s revealed that there’s been an arching storyline that has been intersecting with Hime’s storylines all along, but that’s a review for another day.

The art in Princess Resurrection is your general manga art style: big eyes, bigger busted, blonde haired, petite females in black and white line art. Now, that being said, just because the art is nothing surprising or completely original, it is beautifully rendered and the lines are crisp and neat which displays the talent of Mitsunaga nicely and often shows that less is indeed more. Panels are intensified with details during dramatic scenes and stripped of almost all details during a comedic one. The author/artist also has an interesting style for drawing fight sequences. Mitsunaga figured that as the whole manga series involves Princess Him continually fighting horrible monsters that drawing all these constant battle scenes would be, well, exhaustive. So instead of continuously drawing extremely detailed fight panels, the battle panels include close up shots of the two (or more) fighting and the backgrounds are simple lines. Aside from making the artist’s job easier, these lines are actually quite ingenious as they convey a sense of urgency and rapid movement that solid and detailed backgrounds just wouldn’t.

Mitsunaga definitely create an interesting manga when he wrote and then penned Princess Resurrection. You’ll find yourself laughing at and cheering for the rag-tag group of misfits that play the protagonists as they fight for their lives in their ridiculously epic quest to survive. The art style may not be overly striking or dramatic, but a few clever tricks help it to pop and the original and fantastic plot will keep you intrigued if the art doesn’t.

My final thoughts on Princess Resurrection is that it’s incredibly entertaining. Every once in a while a story comes along that is, for lack of a better word, fun. You’re embroiled in the story from beginning to end for no apparent reason other than it is fun. This fun has nothing to do with a complicated plot that you have to keep reading to even remotely understand what’s going down or characters so in depth they their lives become yours, it just simply is. I found myself wanting more and more of Princess Resurrection because it put a smile on my face. I find that the more repetitive media in the current day and age gets (pardon the cliché), the harder and harder it is to entertain the populous, so why not smile when Hime swings a chainsaw around because an invisible man is after her or laugh when the maid’s ample breasts are constantly given the caption ‘bouncy bouncy’? There’s nothing wrong with loving something just because it’s absurd, outlandish, or just plain silly, and if Princess Resurrection is anything, it’s silly. I give it a high rating for being simply and strange but still amazingly fun to read.

Coldheart Canyon: Sex, Ghosts, Movie Stars, and Violence, Not Necessarily In That Order

A Review By: Amelia

Ghost stories are probably the oldest genre when it comes to fiction but why are ghosts always average people who’ve come back from the grave for some extraordinary reason? Why have we never heard a story of Marilyn Monroe’s ghost and how she moans and shrieks in the mansion she died in? Why have we never feared that we’d bump into Humphrey Bogart’s wandering spirit when the sun goes down and we’re left in the dark? Clive Barker must have wondered the same thing when he wrote Coldheart Canyon, a story about excessive celebrity lifestyles and the ghosts that are reaped by the excessiveness.

The story begins in Romania during the 1920s when Romanian-born actress Katya Lupi purchases a unique work of art, a series of sculpted and painted tiles depicting, in a grotesque and obscene manner, the local legend of a Count who is cursed to haunt the nearby wilderness for all eternity. Katya, although she outwardly appears to be an angel and often plays one on screen, is a sexual deviant intent on throwing the wildest orgies imaginable in her Hollywood dream house with all her fellow celebrity perverts in attendance (Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford just to name a couple). Obliviously she’s thrilled by the obscene artwork and displays it with pride, and when it’s discovered that there really is magic in the old cursed tiles, Katya becomes just that much more powerful. Fast-forward about eighty years to the year 2000 and enter Todd Pickett’s life: a twenty-nine year old mega movie star who’s already past his prime. He undergoes plastic surgery but something goes wrong and it leaves him more or less disfigured. His agent sends him to Katya’s ‘former’ home in Coldheart Canyon and although secluded and seemingly abandoned Todd soon discovers that Katya and her deviant subjects still hold court.

The first point I’d like to make is that Coldheart Canyon is written in an interesting way. Barker has always had amazing style. He writes in beautiful prose even when describing the most horrific things, and can create worlds and storylines that the rest of us just literally, could never even imagine: and, of course, Coldheart Canyon is no exception. Barker has written it in a linear plot beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 2000s, but he writes it so that you discover the past by what happens in the present. In the first few chapters of the book you discover how the events of the novel unfold, but not why: the why is left until nearly the last few chapters of the book, which is a fascinating twist to the ending of a book that we, as readers, will think we have entirely sussed out by about page two hundred.

Point number two that needs to be made is how disgusting Clive Barker’s mind truly is. Where as horror is the predominant element in many of his other works, sex is the predominant element in Coldheart Canyon. Now, I’m not saying that Barker’s horror isn’t sick and/or twisted, I’m just saying when you write your sex scenes to appear as horror, some perverse shit is going to go down. One particular chapter comes to mind in which Katya is described masturbating with live snails… I’ll leave you to ponder how and, more importantly, why Barker had this imagery bouncing around inside his head.

Now, lets move onto the characters of the novel (as if the above statement isn’t enough to deduce what they’re like!). Barker has always written very strange and scarred characters: Frank, the hedonist main character of the Hellbound Heart, the Barbarossas, a clan of godlike beings from the spanning epic novel Galilee, any of the characters written about in Books of Blood, just to name a few novels worth! Katya and Todd are no exception to Barker’s strange and scarred repertoire. The two of them are characters driven by their inner demons: inner demons that are masquerading as human desire and are sustained by the excesses of their Hollywood lives.

And, of course, if they weren’t messed up individuals by their own accounts, the location – Coldheart Canyon and the dream palace hidden away in secret to host the kind of parties that nobody was supposed to know about – only strengthened their demons and added to their neurosis. Barker created an amazing landscape when he created the canyon. The house is inhabited by the stunningly beautiful/batshit crazy Katya, mistress of the enchanted tiles that are a cursed fountain of youth. The canyon in turn is inhabited by all manner of strange and horrible creatures: ghosts of dead celebrities being the most prominent of these beings. When Todd discovers the house and moves in he only adds to the chaos of the notorious canyon. There is a catch though; I found that without the bizarre characters inhabiting the canyon, the overall story would have lagged; just as the characters without the location would have made the overall story non-compelling.

Overall, Coldheart Canyon is a book that can go both ways: you’ll love it, or you’ll hate it. The characters are fantastically flawed – as that is kind of Barker’s specialty – and they’ll draw you in with their constant debauchery and pitfalls. The location of the forgotten dream-palace is haunting and disturbing but picturesque and peaceful all at the same time and will have you eager to learn about every single inch of the wicked place. The plot of the novel will leave you disgusted and enthralled but the pacing may leave you wanting more. That was my one issue with the novel: it seemed to be about two hundred pages too long. There was a point within the narrative where all loose-ends are tied up and each of the characters are left with their own closure, be it death, heroism, nihilism, etc etc, but then Barker continues to add more where more isn’t really needed. It was almost as if he wrote them as an afterthought – a two hundred-page afterthought – that he paper-clipped to his finished manuscript and then hoped for the best.

My final thoughts on Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon are that it is a fantastic read. The characters and locations take you to new and exciting realms of fantasy while one foot stays firmly rooted within a realistic landscape. The story is original and reaches, seemingly, into unknown territory as it deals with ghosts of the rich and famous and how they deal with their afterlives of sex and excess. The pacing may throw you off near the end, but if you power through, it is well worth it as Barker truly is a master of prose and horror. All in all, Coldheart Canyon is an irresistible and unmerciful picture of Hollywood and its demons told with the raw narrative power that have made Barker a worldwide horror writing phenomenon.

Superman Red Son: A Communist Manifesto Starring… Superman?

A Review By: Amelia

I’ve always enjoyed fan fiction, it’s a great way to see a side of a character that wasn’t portrayed in their original story. I think that’s why comics are so appealing to me, it’s writers taking an established character and writing their own take on them; and of all the fan fiction and comics I’ve ever read, Superman Red Son has got to be one of the most original and fascinating pieces of writing I’ve encountered.

The whole premise of Superman Red Son is a whole big what-if question. What if baby Superman’s capsule had landed in Communist Russia instead of Capital America? What if Superman fought on the side of Russia and spread Communism to all reaches of the Earth? What if Batman was a terrorist? What if everything you knew about the DC Universe was suddenly shaken up and flipped onto its head? Well, Red Son by the prominent comic book writer Mark Miller answers all these questions and more within its two hundred or so pages!

The characters are standard for a Superman comic: Superman and Lex Luthor are the main focus, of course their roles are reversed with Superman playing the antagonist and Lex Luthor playing the protagonist (well, not really a straight-and-straight protagonist, but he’s less of an antagonist than Superman is as he is fighting for capitalism, the less of the two evils). Then we have Wonder Woman and Batman playing supporting roles within the Communist drama and, being that the theme is indeed Communism, Stalin plays a very large role within the narrative as he’s Superman’s mentor and father figure.

Love Batman's hat. It's cold in Russia and this is a clever mod of the cowl!

The art style is Red Son is good. Good, not great. It’s a very simple style without a lot of detail. Lines are stark, colours are basic, and, overall, it’s a little… plain. There is detail of course, but it’s not on a decadent level and that is definitely how Miller wanted it. The simple art style showcases what this comic is all about: Communism. The straight to the point art with little to no arbitrary detail suits the plot and theme of the comic perfectly–Communism is all about the basics after all.

Superman Red Son is a breath of fresh air. It has such an original premise–a premise that I’m surprised no one before Mark Miller ever thought of. The art style is a little bland compared to other graphic novels (I’m thinking of Batman: Hush in particular, it’s my favourite and I am a bit biased that all art should be like the art in Hush, but I digress). The art is simple but it’s enough to convey what it wants to convey; anyways, Red Son is all about the plot through and through. It’s intelligent, well planned, and the main focus of this Superman piece.

My final thoughts on Superman Red Son are that it is a graphic novel unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It takes what we know of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman and turns it upside down, but in an amazing way. To see such a reversal of the character’s beliefs and values–especially Batman–is something that all comic book readers need to experience. Not to mention all the little details like how Communist Superman’s ‘secret identity’ is a secret–he’s always Superman, he’s never the working man (although if you know anything about Communism, it’s main focus is the working man, but I digress once again). It’s things like this that add all the nice twists that show just how meticulously this comic was planned. Superman Red Son is a manifesto that all Superman fans–and comic book fans alike–should rally behind.

Dad is Fat: A Comedy Book That I Found More Along the Lines of Horror!

A Review By: Amelia

Jim Gaffigan is a hilarious stand-up comedian who became famous for jokes about food and laziness. He can go off, seemingly forever, on cake and bacon and don’t ever get him started on Hot Pockets! Based on how much I love his stand-up performance, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his book.

Dad is Fat isn’t quite a memoir or autobiography; more a serious of funny essay-like stories that don’t quite have anything to do with the previous chapter but aren’t completely separate either.

Gaffigan goes into great detail about his children and family life within the essays and, well, that’s about it. I do realize that when Gaffigan wrote this book he did it with every intention of only making it about fatherhood, but by about half way through, you’ll want him talk about anything else. Seriously, anything else at all! There’s only so many times he can say how terrible everything is and then add ‘just kidding–I love my kids and they’re great and you should all have kids too’ (that’s not an exact quote, mind you, just how I perceived the whole book).

Dad is Fat is an alright book, which definitely disappointed me because it could have been so much more than it was. I did laugh out loud at a few bits and I absolutely guffawed at more than a few of the pictures and their captions but I found that the funniest bits were the bits I already knew because he’d already used them in his stand-up routine. Not to mention that–although he preaches how wonderful it is to have children–the stories he told of his five children were enough to leave my (already sky-high anxieties about having children) pretty much maxed out all the way through! As a side note, I should point out that I’m terrified of giving birth/having children and, because of this, I found myself unable to get completely into it. A book that was supposed to be funny, actually ended up being more than a little terrifying for me!

My final thoughts on Dad is Fat are that it’s an okay book. Some parts were really hilarious (mostly because of their accompanying pictures), but a lot of it was just reading through his stand up (which is better if you watch him actually perform it) and, although still funny, wasn’t exactly what I was looking for when I picked up this book to read it. I’d say read this book if Gaffigan is completely new to you and his re-used stand-up is still fresh. Even better though, read it if you need a reason not to ever have five children: as if any of us needed anymore reasons than we already have to not have five children!

Hellbent: The Most Lovely Story Ever Written About Hell

A Review By: Amelia

I’m a huge fan of The Crow; just the fundamental idea alone pleases me on a primordial level. I love the idea of an entity with the power to return a dead person to the world of the living to seek their revenge against those who wronged them. Gives me shivers, you know? So when I stumbled upon a whole book full of fiction based on the idea of The Crow, I could hardly contain myself!

The Crow: Shattered Lives & Broken Dreams is a book of fiction and poetry based around James O’Barr’s The Crow. All the stories within the book are one-shots and have no connection to one another but all have something to do with the themes of The Crow (death, rebirth, revenge, etc etc). The particular story I’m reviewing today, written by A. A. Attanasio, is about a couple of demons, Dren (the liar demon) and Nergal (the flayer demon) that begin to hear the voice of an angel from deep within the depths of Hell. The angel promises salvation from Hell and Dren and Nergal have to either ignore it, and stay in Hell’s eternal torment, or trust it and hope it isn’t a trick.

The location for 99% of this story is Hell. Not a metaphorical Hell, or a Hell-like place, actual Hell; and amazingly the author describes it beautifully. It’s a barren landscape, icy cold and bleak but within the bleakness, there is incredible beauty. It speaks to the talent of Attanasio that he is able to create splendour out of the depths of Hell.

The themes present within this short story are that of hope, repentance and the idea that you really can change. Unlike other Crow based stories, this is about inner change and not external change (like slaying your enemies for what they did to you, as an example). Dren hears the voice of an angel and suddenly even the lowliest demon in Hell has something to hope for. The voice is offering him a second chance and, although it may be a horrible trick, Dren trusts it and within that trust, and his own willingness to change, he finds salvation from the pit of Hell. It gives me comfort to think that if a demon can find hope from his bleak surroundings, that I can find hope in anything as well.

Hellbent is such a breath of fresh air. Some short stories are about as clear as mud (anyone who took English lit. in university will know that) but Hellbent lays all its cards on the table right away. It’s a story about a soul who has suffered long and hard in Hell and is granted a second chance; it’s a hard story to pull off but Attanasio does with his beautifully written prose. Honestly, if you read this story for one thing, and one thing alone, read it for the prose. Attanasio writes in such a way as to make you feel empathetic for the main character–a demon!–as he struggles to escape Hell–which is bleak and beautiful all at the same time.

My final thoughts on Hellbent are that Attanasio makes Hell beautiful and that is no easy feat! Plot, characters, prose, they all interweave to become a great short story. Of course, what drew me so deeply into this story is that Attanasio took something ugly and made it beautiful and that’s the same thing that James O’Barr did with The Crow (and I’m connected at the soul to The Crow!). Hellbent is truly beautiful and, whether you believe in Hell, demons, or the afterlife at all, it’s a story that should resonate deeply within you because doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance: a chance to repent and grow and change? I think so, and Hellbent has given me the hope that it’s possible for anyone.