Renée French: H Day

Renée French, an acclaimed graphic novelist and Inkpot Award winner at San Diego's Comic-Con International, has entranced legions of fans with her twisted, highly inventive pencil drawings, whose agile lines and delicate shading open up strange imaginary vistas. She's been called an inimitable and masterful stylist, a kind of Edward Gorey who draws out the whimsical side of body-horror, and indeed, the spirit of Gorey's grotesques breathes through French's creations. In H Day, her first graphic novel in four years, French explores, through metaphor and in pictures, her struggles with migraine headaches, marshaling troops of insects, beasts and humanoids to envision the processes that result in such hideous sensations. A sweeping, often tense narrative of invasion, repulsion and liberation, H Day can be read both as an oblique autobiography and as a suspenseful fantasy story. This volume makes clear the qualities that led Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season, to call Renée French "that rare gift among artists--one whose work finds its way into the most guarded corners of our psyches and allows us to revel in all that is awkward, embarrassing or sticky about being alive."