Renee French

The Ticking 

From Publishers Weekly 
 
Starred Review. French's work always splits the difference between cuteness and revulsion, and her new graphic novel is both the sweetest and the most stomach-churning thing she's ever drawn. Budding artist Edison Steelhead is a grotesquely deformed boy—his eyes are on opposite sides of his head—whose mother died in childbirth. His father wants Edison to get radical plastic surgery. After Edison refuses, his father brings home a "new sister" for him, Patrice, who's a bug-eating chimpanzee in a baby-doll dress. Then things get really weird. Edison heads off to seek his fortune in the city, his father continues to try to get him to hide or change his face, and the book's point becomes less and less its plot and more French's astonishing artwork—just a small, wobbly-bordered panel or two on each page, rendered in feather-soft pencil textures. Edison's bildungsroman involves a bunch of exquisitely rendered symbolic motifs: flies, fishing lures, tweezers, dismal hotel wallpaper and some gruesomely sexual-looking geoducks. Miraculously, French keeps The Ticking's tone deadpan and charming, with laconic captions and long silent sequences—even the grossest moments are played for nervous giggles. She's an inimitable and masterful stylist, a kind of Edward Gorey who draws out the whimsical side of body-horror. 

 

"A gem that means more with every reading." -- Booklist 

 

I bought The Ticking at Page 45 in Nottingham.  It was the single most unsettling experience I have managed to obtain in my life for twelve pounds and ninety nine pence.  It was beautiful and oddly sweet and yet it sits in the unlit corners of my head where it makes strange faces and weird chittering noises to itself.  Sometimes it does nasty things with tweezers and surgical implements.  Please buy it and read it, so perhaps it will crawl out of my head and into yours and then I will finally be able to sleep peacefully once again.                                 -- Neil Gaiman

 

"The Ticking is a journey to a place we've never seen or imagined, yet which somehow and inexplicably we know intimately. To be so deeply moved in so many directions at once is a rare gift Renee French gives us, and it is nothing short of astonishing."                                                     --Paul Provenza, director of The Aristocrats

"The Ticking seeped into the deepest folds of my brain like a wondrous, oily spirit-goo scraped from the underside of our dreams. It is an uncompromising work of sadness, oddness, disgust, and beauty. It broke my heart on every page, and I was grateful to Ms. French for reminding me I had a heart at all. I loved it. " 

 

                                              -- James Gunn, Screenwriter of the new Dawn of the Dead and Slither


"Renée French is that rare gift among artists -- one whose work finds its way into the most guarded corners of our psyches and allows us to revel in all that is awkward, embarrassing, or sticky about being alive. -- Myla Goldberg, Author of Bee Season.

 buy it HERE

 

also by renee french  MICROGRAPHICA  and  EDISON STEELHEAD'S LOST PORTFOLIO