Books like Sugar Skull

Gorgeous, Obsessive, NightmarishCharles Burns’ X'ed Out-The Hive-Sugar Skull Trilogy feels to me like an amalgam of all my personal obsessions, which in itself is a little scary: thick, clean, stripped-down lines – check; lots of soothing black ink – check; a fragmented narrative that subverts this soothing effect by messing with my mind – check; neurotic and obsessive compulsive behavior – check; doomed romance and psychological horror – check; punk rock and visual culture – check; some postmodern reflexivity – check. No surprise, then, that I am the story’s protagonist… or at least that my GR profile picture has been incorporated into the story in the form of a comic-book panel. Wait, or was it the other way round?Anyway, what is the story all about? The plot is easily summarized: a young artist named Doug tries to work through mysterious, traumatic events from his past, while sliding into some kind of parallel world. What gives the story its hypnotic impact, though, is the way it is told. The reader is not provided with a reliable, stable perspective on Doug’s difficult situation, but is instead sucked right into the vortex of his struggles by a narrative that undermines conventional notions of reality and identity, blurring the line between external and internal states of being, between surface and depth. The narrative’s disorienting effect is supported by the artwork’s dense black ink and hard straight lines that take on a character of their own.Gorgeous, obsessive, nightmarish - Burns at his best.