THE UNWANTED: STORIES OF THE SYRIAN REFUGEES by Don Brown

 

The ongoing Syrian civil war is a fight against the entrenched dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and splintered rebel factions. The destruction and massacres of the war have led to a flood of refugees to other countries.  The Unwanted is the story, told through graphic novel, of these people who have lost their homes, and often everything else, as they try to survive.

Some Syrians fled to Europe on boats provided by smugglers. Others found rest in shanty towns and apartments in Lebanon and Turkey where conditions are so crowded that sometimes 15 people must share a small apartment.

Brown’s illustrations are sharp and sketch-like as if taken directly from the artist’s notebook made right in the middle of a camp. And some of them likely were, as Brown visited several camps in Greece to get a better understanding of the refugee’s lives. This deliberately rough style actually helps the reader empathize with the refugees. This is not a collection of maudlin stories to tug at the heartstrings- a tactic that can backfire and turn away readers who feel like it’s emotional manipulation. Instead, it is more like a news report. A description of the refugees’ lives and what they go through daily. Brown himself explains: “I decided The Unwanted would focus on the refugee experience and disregard information beyond that constraint except when necessary for context. I was determined to keep the attention on the refugees.” He shows young children who must become the sole breadwinners for families where the adults are sick or dead. He shows opportunists who seize on the refugees and the conflict for their own interests, such as ISIS jihadists who use the instability to seize territories and predatory smugglers who take people’s life savings as payment for passage.

He also shows the backlash refugees face from the citizens of host countries as services like food, electricity, and water become strained, and displaced people become convenient scapegoats for the country’s anxieties.

Yet there are also moments of resilience and adaptation in the worst circumstances, such as the Zaatari refugee camp in the middle of the Jordanian desert which has become a permanent settlement with its own growing economy. Or families who have settled in other countries and adapted to new ways of life while still finding ways to hang on to their own culture.

An extensive bibliography at the end provides opportunities for further reading.

The Unwanted is an important book during these times of increased global hostility towards refugees from all countries. It seems obvious to say that refugees are people too, but it is all too easy to see them as the faceless Other polluting their host countries without reminders like this book.

You can get a copy of The Unwanted at Bookshop.org

THE SPECTRES OF M. R. JAMES by Richard Svensson

 

THE SPECTRES OF M. R. JAMES

written and illustrated by Richard Svensson

M. R. James is one of the most famous writers of classic British ghost stories. His tales feature academically-minded protagonists investigating university libraries, old abbeys, and country manors where they come across strange and malevolent supernatural entitites. His tales are colorful, even quaint at times, but a slow, suspenseful dread gradually creeps in until the final horror is revealed.  

Richard Svensson has illustrated some of most iconic beings from these stories. At no more than 60 pages, it’s a conveniently small book you can keep by your bed to glance at as you’re falling asleep, or leaf through while you’re in the waiting room at a doctor’s office.

Seeing all these stories collected together, it’s surprising to realize just how many “monsters” were in James’ “ghost stories”.  There’s the weird, tentacled horror of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, the unseen, hairy demon of “Casting the Runes”, and the gigantic monstrous sawflies of “The Residence at Whitminster”. Even James’ more traditional ghosts can be quite bizarre, such as the frog-man of “The Haunted Dollhouse”, the hallucinatory pink-faced entity from “The Rose Garden”, or the famous bed-sheet phantom of “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”

You can get a copy of The Spectres of M R James at Lulu.com

BOOK REVIEW: Mary's Monster, written and illustrated by Lita Judge

 

The common story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is that she conceived the plot during a ghost-writing contest while she, her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her sister Claire were staying at the manor house of Lord Byron and his personal physician, John Polidori. Some might add that she took inspiration from an experiment in galvanism she had witnessed a few weeks earlier.  But Lita Judge’s evocative book, told through prose poetry, posits that the novel grew for many years within Mary’s mind, sewn together from the tragedies and drama of her life. It grew from the deaths that surrounded her: her children; her neglected sister; Percy Shelley’s abandoned first wife; and Mary’s own mother who died giving birth to her. It grew from her feelings of estrangement towards her once-beloved father who did not approve of her romance with the young poet.  It grew from the anger of her sister Fanny “shackled by illegitimacy and despair”. And it grew from Percy Shelley’s own growing madness “because society loathes him for his beliefs”. Out of these parts Mary made her creation, so Judge writes, stitching them into a greater whole just as Victor Frankenstein assembled his creature from corpses.

The book is told in first person from Mary’s perspective, giving the reader a personal connection with her pain and her joy. At critical moments the voice of her creature also emerges as an extension of her. A literary child just as precious to her as the biological children she lost. 

Central to Mary’s story is her turbulent relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley. How they came to love each other and fled to Europe to try to build a life through loss, ostracization, and Shelley’s growing mania. Equally important to the narrative is Mary’s relationship with her sister Claire, who travels with the couple and shares in Mary’s pain and joy. And, then, of course the book depicts the fateful ghost-writing contest at Byron’s chateau, when Mary’s creature finally comes to life and speaks with his own voice.

The book gives context to some of the more macabre events in Mary’s life, such as when she first makes love to Shelley on her mother’s grave, or how she rescues his physical heart after he is cremated and keeps it in her writing desk for the rest of her life. Both acts keep her deceased loved ones close to her.

Judge’s evocative black-and-white illustrations accompany and enhance each poem, steeping the book in a gothic aesthetic. This is a passion project for the author, undertaken- as she explains in the afterward- while she struggled with pain, fatigue, and isolation during a long illness. “I have represented the details of Mary’s life,” she writes, “by weaving the actual events (as documented in her journals, copious letters, and later biographies) with the themes she and Shelley wrote about in their creative work.” The author does acknowledge that, although this book draws from facts, it is a dramatization of Mary’s experiences.  Judge provides an extensive bibliography for further reading, along with a list of what the characters themselves read, to provide some context for their lives. She also includes short biographical notes of what happened to everyone later in life.

You can get a copy of Mary's Monster at BookShop or Amazon.