My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
by Emil Ferris
Buy on AmazonMy Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a two-volume debut graphic novel by American writer Emil Ferris. It portrays a young girl named Karen Reyes investigating the death of her neighbor in 1960s Chicago. Ferris started working on the novel after contracting West Nile virus and becoming paralyzed at age forty. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for writing and began the graphic novel to help her recover in 2010, taking six years to create 700 pages. The work draws on Ferris's childhood growing up in Chicago and her love of monsters and horror media.…
Recommended by
"Many were stunned by this monumental, eccentric achievement from an artistic outsider. On page after page, Ferris’ painstaking yet emotionally fraught drawings add up to a kind of controlled explosion of self-expression. The weird and wrenching story – of a troubled young girl trying to solve her neighbor’s murder – is almost a bonus. Ferris works in rollerball and painstakingly manipulates her sketches to look like her protagonist scribbled them hastily in a school notebook. In fact, they’re layered in by computer, with even the notebook lines added digitally. It’s a haunting and iconic effect."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org
"Emil Ferris's "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Book Two)""
By the Book: Stephen Graham Jones · nytimes.com