Horrific Heroine

In a wondrous, cascade of black-and-white cross hatching and colored pencil art, monsters who are real and imagined come to life in Emil Ferris's graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book One. With an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and as a Toby Devan Lew Fellow in the visual arts, Ferris has been the recipient of critical acclaim for her illuminating work. Her graphic novel is a coming-of-age story that centers around the fictitious experiences of ten-year-old Karen Reyes—the novel's primary narrator—and her family in Chicago during the late 1960s. Fashioned as a diary against lined paper, the graphic novel explores family tensions, sexual awakenings, unlikely friendships, and horrific histories. Ferris' work also reflects the tumult and hysteria of the mid-twentieth century while appealing to those readers who are seeking something peculiar, adventurous, and frightening—yet moving—in its narrative.

Obsessed with B-horror comics and late-night creep-shows on television, Karen imagines her transformation from an ordinary girl into a powerful were-creature and slinks around the streets of her neighborhood. She idolizes her older brother, Deeze (short for Diego Zapata Reyes) and is befuddled by the superstitions of her fastidious mother, Marvela "Mama" Reyes. In a family where she is half-Mexican and her mother has indigenous ancestral roots, Karen explores not only her racial identity but her gender and sexual expression. Struggling to connect with her classmates, she decides to investigate the murder of her beautiful yet elusive neighbor Anka Silverberg, a survivor of the Holocaust. In her pursuit of answers, she dons her older brother's trench coat and a dapper hat to get to the bottom of the murder mystery. What she finds along the way is truth stranger than fiction.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters begins with Karen's metamorphosis as she dreams the people of her town have taken up arms against her in a mob (otherwise known as Mean, Ordinary, and Boring people). She awakens and considers that even if these ordinary townsfolk insist monsters aren't real, monsters can still exist in everyday circumstances. Unfortunately, Karen knows these monsters all too well as she faces repulsion from her classmates, who alienate and other her through their insidious remarks and taunts. She also pines for the validation and love of her best friend, Missy, who has chosen to hang out with the more popular girls of their school. In the meantime, she befriends a hungry girl called Sandy—a ghostly figure who resembles skin and bones—and a queer young man named Franklin who looks like Frankstein's monster because of his facial scars. Yet, Karen finds the most solace in her brother Deeze, as he whisks her away to art museums and buys her the newest horror comics. She also learns about sex and relationships through his dalliances with women around the neighborhood. Yet, Deeze spends the majority of the novel grieving over his illicit love affair to the dearly departed Anka.

Turning away from the horrific vitriol of her classmates, Karen plunges into the opaque and mysterious circumstances surrounding Anka's death. Acquiring a series of personal tape recordings by Anka's late husband, she hears the story of Anka's life and discovers that she was raised in a brothel and sold into sex slavery. As a young Jewish girl in Berlin from the early 1920s to the late 1930s, she experienced sexual assault, rape, and the deaths of those about whom she cared deeply. Although she was almost sacrificed in a secret ritual by a dangerous cult, she escaped and found refuge with a previous client, Herr Schutz. After a torrid relationship with him, she was cast out from his estate and hurled into a world filled with chaos. Remembering the horrors of the holocaust, Anka describes her grueling trip to the concentration camps. Her story is one of violence and tragedy—a narrative that reveals the marginalization of women...