The Familiar, Volume 3: Honeysuckle & Pain

"The Familiar is a massive, ambitious, flawed, brilliant and deeply weird endeavor projected to run through 27 volumes, all centering around a special (possibly magical) little girl named Xanther and a freaky (absolutely magical) stray cat. It has a sprawling cast of outlaws, computer programmers, drug dealers and mystics, is formatted and designed as maybe 53 percent art project (to 46 percent novel and 1 percent literary LSD), and will absolutely pop your gourd no matter where you drop into it. While Volume 3 is perhaps the most readable (and least plodding) of the growing set, what saves the entire series from being some kind of annoying pure-thought experimento-novel is the fact that Mark Z. Danielewski can write. He makes characters that are beautifully drawn, grounded and relatable even amid all the madness on the page."