How to Make a Monster: Ugly Memories of Chicago from a South Side Escapee (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781683965718)

Conveyed as a bleak first-person narrative with darkly humorous overtones, Casanova Frankenstein reveals how real life experience shaped his hard-bitten, survivalist view of life. His was a world of fear and isolation punctuated by bullying thugs, the stifling atmosphere of the Lutheran school on the South Side of Chicago, racial segregation, unapproachable girls, and a home life consisting of an emotionally distant and unsupportive mother and an violent, alcoholic cop father who was not above giving his son a good thrashing now and again while preaching Christian family values. It is a searing portrait of an unbearably painful upbringing.

How to Make a Monster is illustrated by Australian outsider artist Glenn Pearce in a rare creative symbiosis in which Pearce captures Frankenstein's inner turmoil using a variety of stunningly realized artistic approaches from naturalistic portraiture to outrageously inventive phantasmagoric imagery. A seamlessly contrapuntal balancing act between Frankenstein's raw, unadorned writing and Pearce's stunningly detailed drawing.

Author: Casanova Frankenstein, Glenn Pearce
ISBN-10: 168396571X
ISBN-13: 9781683965718
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Language: English
Published: 09/06/2022
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 11.21h x 8.05w x 0.68d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/30/2022