Alex's Pick
Holy Lacrimony by Michael DeForge
After digging into Michael DeForge's most recent release, All the Cameras in My Room, and absolutely loving it, I decided to finally try out one of his books that's been on my TBR pile for ages--Holy Lacrimony. It's now officially safe to say that I'm a bonafide DeForge fan. Where do I even begin? His art style is superb. It's trippy and off-kilter with bold colors and ever-shifting character designs. Somehow, despite the surrealism, DeForge captures human experience more profoundly than countless other artists and authors I've explored.
In Holy Lacrimony, our protagonist Jackie is designated by a set of aliens as the saddest person in the world, and thus, becomes the subject of their intense curiosity. One alien in particular named Kara is tasked with spending time with Jackie, observing him, and eventually, performing the sadness she can't feel herself, but learns to mimic from her ward. Kara has an ever-changing physicality that she can manipulate at will. Despite this, and her eerie attempts at mimicking human forms and iconography (like Ghostface, an attempt to connect with Jackie over his love of Scream), Kara sometimes felt incredibly human. Of course, she explicitly acknowledges her inability to feel despair, but her relationship with Jackie is profound, and her yearning to understand his experience is all too relatable. Relatable, too, is her final performance.
Humans, of course, feel these things directly, but the act of putting on a show with our emotions, especially in the social media age, is pervasive. Even before technology's current state, "performing" emotions has been almost as universal as feeling them to begin with, as has the urge to witness the feelings of others. This theme persists after Jackie is unceremoniously returned home and left to cope, essentially grieving the loss of his friend (or something even deeper, as the two had an intense sexual experience together) Kara, who he assumes he'll never see again. He joins a support group for alien abductees, full of people who are certainly "performing" quite a bit. We are never enlightened to which members are truthful and which are not, but either way, it certainly appears that several of them are outright lying or delusional, a fact that Jackie accepts willingly. He suspects he's the only true victim of the lot, and yet, finds the experience cathartic--something about witnessing and being witnessed is what Jackie needs, regardless of the truthfulness of those around him. What's more human than that?
I could go on and on, and I haven't even touched on DeForge's dry humor that keeps things light amidst some seriously heavy topics, or how much I love the way his art and stories depict sex and sexuality, but I've already written a novella here, so I better stop while I'm ahead. The point is: read it!
