Monica

In classic fashion, Clowes offers another devastating, surreal examination of human nature in Monica, in which the eponymous woman obsessively searches for the mother who abandoned her. After a brief introduction of her mother and scattered memories of her, Monica narrates a series of bizarre, unsettling occurrences: she hears the disembodied voice of her late grandfather on an old radio, she wakes from a coma with barely any recollection of how she got there, and she slowly infiltrates an obscure cult where she thinks her mother might have once stayed. In her search, she gradually cuts ties with her successful career and friends, following increasingly tenuous threads to find answers. Intercut capsule stories emphasize her inner flights of fancy about the events surrounding her childhood and the places where she relies on the conventions of fiction to fill in the gaps. Altogether, along with Clowes' lurid palette and crisp, expressive linework, it's a portrait of the self-destructive nature of obsession over questions about the past that, in reality, will never have a satisfactory answer. Even when readers find a measure of hope that Monica is finally settled enough in her life to move on, she's still inexorably consumed by an urge to dig even further. A hauntingly precise and compellingly strange study of the human struggle to reconcile a decentered past with a path forward.

This eloquent end-times tale about a woman's search for herself takes its time winding up to terror. The first full-length graphic novel from Clowes since 2016's Patience offers an episodic and fantastical stitching together of nine stories stretching from the 1960s to the present day. Though ranging in subject matter from the Vietnam War ("Foxhole") to the emptiness of girlboss triumph ("Success") and the pomposity of Lovecraftian horror ("The Glow Infernal"), each is threaded to the title character, whose mother abandoned her as a young girl and who has since been chased by anxieties and hauntings. Clowes's awkward, grief-stricken characters, starkly shadowed art, and EC Comics--esque coloring casts everything as a pulp nightmare--even the most sylvan scene carries the potential for unholy creatures to rise out of the earth. The horror is often suggested rather than visualized, most of it generated by Monica's origin story--mother Penny falls in with hippies and leaves her semi-feral daughter to watch "an endless cascade of hirsute suitors and freaky flatmates"--which reads like a Joan Didion cautionary tale about the price of freedom. Clowes's vision of an unmoored America is replete with lost souls facing seemingly mundane ennui ("I really do wish I could be more like the person I'm pretending to be," Monica says) that insidiously pivots to horror (murder, a cult, a dead grandfather talking through a transistor radio, a possible apocalypse). Lucky new initiates to Clowes will want to dive into his backlist after this unnerving introduction to his oeuvre; for fans, it's a must-have. (Oct.)

Clowes's (Patience) long-awaited, genre-bending thriller begins with a young woman named Penny, who, upon becoming pregnant while her fiancé is off fighting in Vietnam, runs away and falls in with a group of bohemian artists. When her daughter, Monica, is just a few years old, Penny mysteriously vanishes; years later, an adult Monica becomes obsessed with finding her. After discovering evidence that her mother may have been involved with a cult dedicated to the belief that "our shared reality is a quasi-demonic fabrication designed to thwart individual fulfillment," Monica tracks the group to their headquarters in an abandoned housing complex and applies for membership. That's the throughline, leaving a whole lot out; much of Monica's uncommonly difficult-to-summarize quest is revealed elliptically, through the perspectives of various characters with whom she crosses paths, in sequences evoking the tropes of a variety of genres, including teen romance, war, the crime thriller, and supernatural horror. VERDICT Clowes's formal ingenuity, meticulous attention to psychological and visual detail, and masterful sense of narrative and tone combine to create an emotionally resonant and unforgettable opus, reaffirming his place among the greatest storytellers of our time.

Clowes' latest graphic novel weaves nine interrelated stories into a tale of curiosity, corruption, and humanity's addiction to significance. The book opens with a two-page spread of the roiling waters, cratered land, and fiery skies of our primordial planet, then runs through snapshots of history: single-cell organisms, ancient Egyptians, the plague, Shakespeare, Hitler, The Beverly Hillbillies. It's an ambitious opening that the book lives up to through its intersecting narratives of Vietnam soldiers, counterculture, horror, ambition, control, and mommy issues--all spinning around the orbit of a woman named Monica and her quest for her origins. Initially we meet Monica's mother, Penny, as an art student in the 1960s, seduced away from her sedate life plans by the ideas of her new bohemian lover and his friends. As Penny delves deeper into free love and artistic pursuits, she soon finds herself a mother to young Monica and the subject of Monica's observations as Penny cycles through men, eventually abandoning Monica to follow her own path--perhaps into the clutches of a desert-dwelling cult. After a macabre interlude about a young man's return to his boyhood home only to find the town under a sinister influence, we catch up with Monica as an adult, dealing with her own loss and encounter with the uncanny. In pursuit of her long-gone mother, Monica peels back opulent and fantastical layers of her own life until she finds the haunting core. Clowes strikes an irresistible balance of cultural criticism, philosophy, and pulp. The pacing and interconnection of the stories tease the reader along as narration and dialogue pop with insight and humor. Clowes' art retains a classic comics aesthetic while delivering a thoroughly modern vibe. A timeless nugget of polished pulp. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.