Publisher's Weekly Review
San's disarmingly charming debut features seven short stories that juxtapose cute drawings and macabre narratives. In "Sugar," a young woman with a headache gets a cure from a demonic entity that comes at a high price, while in "Dental Plan" a woman performs a strange ritual to achieve a beautiful smile (which includes intoning the invitation: "There is room for you here!")--receiving far more than she bargained. Both "I Like to Squeeze into Tight Spaces" and "At the End" accomplish an eerie minimalist and existentialist horror vibe in black-and-white drawings, while in the downbeat "Be Like Blood," a heroine who thinks of herself as virtuous learns that virtue offers her no protection against sinister, primal forces. "Too Much on Your Plate" paints in watercolors a psychological wind-up scenario as a woman's increasing irritation with her neglectful husband edges to murderous rage. San is a versatile stylist, veering from cuddly to vicious. Her whimsical humor and flair for the horrific make this a treat for genre fans. (Feb.)
Kirkus Review
Illustrator San's debut graphic novel is a collection of short stories loosely connected by their sense of the uncanny and macabre, full of monsters both literal and psychosocial. The topics in these seven stories range from a college student's friendship with a soul-harvesting demon to a grotesque ritual to make a more beautiful smile, a woman's obsession with squeezing into confined spaces, the catharsis of murdering one's disappointing spouse in a dream, and one man's eerie search for the end of his unnaturally long shadow. San's art is clean and confident and deftly captures a story's essential beats, whether that's a character's growing anxiety or the return of a meaty hell spawn whose face is a ring of needlelike teeth. Many of the stories eschew strong narrative arcs and definitive conclusions in favor of punchlines and/or arresting images. A notable exception is "To All the Witches I've Loved Before," in which a villager attempts to protect his local witches from an angry mob of his fellow citizens and ends up getting what's coming to him. "Be Like Blood" similarly has a thesis its story supports, following a friendship pair of a "good" girl and a "bad" girl during a night out and wrestling with morality in a brutally amoral world. Taken as a whole, the book is a phantasmagoria of striking visuals and offbeat perspectives, full of promise for a developing talent. Atmospheric and provocative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
