Best of
Surreal

2018

The Book of Onions: Comics to Make You Cry Laughing and Cry Crying


Jake Thompson - 2018
    And misplaced optimism. And perverted talking fruit. Sort of like Gary Larson’s “The Far Side,” if Gary were way less accomplished and suffered from depression.

Poochytown


Jim Woodring - 2018
    Poochytown takes a deep dive into the psychedelic, ever-twisting reality of Woodring’s boundless universe, the Unifactor.

Jacked Up


Erica Sage - 2018
    But he’s also being followed around by Jack Kerouac, who’s incredibly annoying for a genius.If arguing with a dead beat poet doesn’t qualify him for antipsychotics already, Nick’s pretty sure Eden Springs is going to drive him insane. The campers ride donkeys into the desert, snap selfies with counselors dressed as disciples, and replace song lyrics with Bible verses. And somehow, only Nick seems to find this strange.Worst of all is the PC Box, into which the campers gleefully place daily prayers and confessions. With Jack nagging him to do it, Nick scribbles down his darkest secret—about his sister’s death—and drops it in the box.But then the box is stolen, with Nick’s secret inside of it. And when campers’ confessions start appearing around the camp, Nick is desperate to get the box back—before the world learns the truth about what he did. The truth he can’t even face himself.Laugh-out-loud funny, surreal, and insightful, this is an unforgettable novel about the strangeness of life, death, and grief—and the even stranger things people do to cope.

The Wonder That Was Ours


Alice Hatcher - 2018
    Finally released, he tries to piece his life together working as a bartender and reading literary classics to the unruly cockroaches infesting his taxi. On the anniversary of his arrest, Wynston picks up two white Americans just kicked off a cruise ship. The next day, the ship reports a deadly viral outbreak. As the tourist economy collapses, the island succumbs to riots and a devastating spiral of violence, and Wynston’s fate becomes entwined with that of three strangers: his American passengers and a local named Tremor, the focus of a vicious police manhunt.

Occasional Beasts: Tales


John Claude Smith - 2018
     We are all Occasional Beasts…

The New World: Comics from Mauretania


Chris Reynolds - 2018
    On the surface, it seems much like ours: a place of cool afternoon shadows and gently rolling hills, half-empty trains and sleepy downtown streets. But the closer you look, the weirder it gets. After losing a mysterious intergalactic war, Earth is no longer in humanity’s control. Blandly friendly aliens lurk on the margins and seem especially interested in the mining industry. The very rules of time and space seem to have shifted: Mysterious figures suddenly appear in childhood photos, family members disappear forever without warning, power outages abound, and certain people gain the power of flight. A helmeted man named Jimmy is somehow causing local businesses to shutter and is being closely watched by the “trendy new police force,” Rational Control. The world is being remade, but in what image?This new collection, selected and designed by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, includes short stories, a novella, and the full-length graphic novel Mauretania. It is the ideal guide to all the mystery and wonder of one of the most underappreciated cult classics in the history of comics.This NYRC edition is a hardcover with foil stamping, debossing, full-color endpapers, and extra-thick paper, and features new scans of the original artwork.

The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions


Maud Casey - 2018
    Mystery is not often discussed―apart from the genre―because, as Maud Casey says, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction? She takes us into the Land of Un―a space of uncertainty and unknowing―to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and more. Casey’s wide-ranging discussion encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. The Art of Mystery is a striking and vibrant addition to the much-loved Art of series.

The Double Star and Other Occult Fantasies


Jane de La Vaudère - 2018
    Sublimely Gothic, exquisitely hallucinatory, these strange, fatalistic pieces by La Vaudère are surely a landmark in the annals of the fantastic.

The Sun and the Wayward Wind


Paloma HernandoHaley Kasof - 2018
    A deadly fire meets its grave in the green bay, where love blooms between a woman and a spirit in the water. Forgotten shores and talk of snake mountain, voices from the past and a train ride with the Jersey Devil… Personal folklore, local legends, and reimagined stories all come together in one exciting, new visual anthology.

The Fall of Delta Green


Kenneth Hite - 2018
    government destroyed the small town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts.The Innsmouth Raid uncovered the Cthulhu cult, an unnatural threat to reality itself. Worse things lie hidden: Nazi sorcerers, Mi-Go brain harvesters, corpse-eating ghouls, nightmare dimensions, and a headless god offering apocalyptic rituals. Worst of all, under the MAJESTIC program the federal government blindly strives to weaponize these toxic alien secrets.You are an agent of DELTA GREEN, a Top Secret classified black program, authorized but unacknowledged by the United States national security establishment.Your mission: Search out and destroy the unnatural at home and abroad. At all cost. At any cost.THE APOCALYPSE IS NOWMurder cults rise in the Middle East and in California.Riots against reality paralyze Paris. Russian spies undermine governments.American forces fight secret wars around the world, and pour fire and poison onto the jungles and villages of Vietnam.Space probes touch down on other worlds. People feel the light of invisible suns.In 1968, that's just the headlines.In the shadows, still fouler forces lurk. A sociopathic conspiracy offers the Earth to Nyarlathotep. The Mafia obeys inhuman commands. A Yellow Sign gleams in Cuba, and in San Francisco. Invisible torturers flow out of China. The world is going mad. The stars are coming right.The 1960s being in sunny optimism and end in nighted disaster in the jungles of Indochina. After the summer of the 1950s, now comes the fall...The Fall of DELTA GREEN adapts the award-winning Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game to the award-winning GUMSHOE system. Although it is inter-operable with Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents, this corebook is all you need to play deadly one-shot adventures or a campaign spanning the years from hope to madness.

Tucumcari


Patrick Parks - 2018
    A man wakes up one morning believing he has a wife who lives in Tucumcari, New Mexico. A wife he somehow remembers yet does not know. When he decides to find her, he embarks on a surreal journey through both landscape and memory. The reader travels with the narrator through sinking cities, his father's various jobs, government-designated atomic safe havens, motel rooms, cities made of only men, and interactions with people from his childhood including Boyd Delmarco, a famous radio personality whose lungs have turned to glass.

Second Acts in American Lives


Ryan Ridge - 2018
    Punchlines, plays on words, dad puns, and yo’ mama jokes straddle the saddle with deep metaphorical lessons on society today, making companions of dark humor and serious wit. A séance of poetics and politics, this collection of glimpses into the disheveled and desperate, the cerebral and celebrated, the gangly and glorious, conjures what it is to be American in a society as stupid as it is terrifying.Illustrated by Jacob Heustis.“Short fiction from two masters of the form.”—NERVE“Ranging from short to super-duper short, the prose-poetic stories in Ryan Ridge’s and Mel Bosworth’s Second Acts in American Lives zig and zag, fake and fade, keeping the reader guessing on every page, and the illustrations by Jacob Heustis are every bit as funny and surprising as the words they accompany. It’s a pinball machine of a book, full of bounce and light and crazy ricochets: sentences start, you don’t know where they’ll end up, and this dynamic unpredictability is what gives this collection its life and its victory.”—Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk