Heaven no Hell

Michael DeForge, 1987-

Book - 2021

"In 'No Hell,' an angel's tour of the five tiers of heaven reveals her obsession with a haunting infidelity. In 'Raising,' a couple uses an app to see what their unborn child would look like. Of course, what begins as a simple face-melding experiment becomes a nightmare of too-much-information where the young couple is forced to confront their terrible choices. 'Recommended for You' is an anxious retelling of our narrator's favorite TV show--a Purge-like societal collapse drama--as a reflection of our desire for meaning in pop culture. Each of these stories shows the inner turmoil of an ordinary person coming to grips with a world vastly different than their initial perception of it. The humor is... searing and the emotional weight lingers long after the story ends. Heaven No Hell collects DeForge's best work yet. His ability to dig into a subject and break it down with beautiful drawings and sharp writing makes him one of the finest short story writers of the past decade, in comics or beyond. Heaven No Hell is always funny, sometimes sad, and continuously innovative in its deconstruction of society."--

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Subjects
Genres
Comics (Graphic works)
Graphic novels
Humorous fiction
Social problem fiction
Short stories
Humorous comics
Published
[Montréal, Québec] : Drawn & Quarterly [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Michael DeForge, 1987- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
226 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781770464353
  • Roleplay
  • No Hell
  • Snow gods
  • Smothered mate
  • Recommended for you
  • My darling astronaut
  • One of my students is a murderer..but which?
  • My new stepdad is a disgusting bug, and I hate him
  • Surprise party
  • Album
  • New museum
  • Song selection
  • Road trip
  • Boyfriend
  • Raised
  • Kid mafia
  • Soap opera.
Review by Booklist Review

DeForge has a knack for cartoonish exaggeration in his artwork, and this collection of short comics takes that to new heights. Social interactions, emotions, genre conventions--all are pulled to compellingly absurd degrees. In "My New Stepdad Is a Disgusting Bug, and I Hate Him," the narrator's stepdad is literally a bug, and her larval stepsiblings clutter up the full-page scenes. "Album," told in structured panels in sepia tones, is bittersweet, touching on nostalgia, grief, and regret in a series of snapshots from the past and future: "Here's my mom forgiving me for all the trouble I caused"; "Here's my mom looking over our dying solar system." The final story, "Soap Opera," is a comical standout, escalating a man's abandonment of his wife until he's in love with an entire state's voting body. DeForge's art style varies, sometimes using straightforward, simplified forms; elsewhere, faces and bodies are stretched and distended as if made of Silly Putty. Though the experimental, outré tone of these stories might not have broad appeal, for the right reader, they'll push all the right buttons.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

DeForge (Familiar Face) returns with another arresting collection of cryptic, spiky modern parables. In DeForge's constantly shifting, primary-colored universe, characters fluidly change identities, inhabit bizarre cosmologies, and get sucked into the alternate realities of mass media. In "Raised," a couple uses an app to conjure potential offspring and adjust their lives; "Recommended for You" describes a Purge-like TV show with a fan's obsessive detail; "One of My Students Is a Murderer... but Which?" is a darkly funny noir mystery set at an elementary school; and entries like "My New Stepdad Is a Disgusting Bug, and I Hate Him" explain themselves. Most of DeForge's stories, whether serious, comic, or horrific, are driven by a sense of snarky absurdism, but he occasionally touches earth with disarmingly naturalistic pieces such as "Kid Mafia," about a group of neighborhood kids trying to start a gang. The artwork alternates in style from story to story but is always abstracted and disorienting, building tableaux from bold shapes, blobby figures, and patterns. Occasionally, though, the arch surrealism threatens to grate. But the overall generous collection showcases DeForge's command of genre, tone, and his trademark inventive visual style. (Mar.)

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