This may just not be my genre because I could not really get into this graphic novel. I didn't find the story engaging and didn't see much in the way of character development either. The ending also didn't seem to come to a very satisfying conclusion. I wasn't a fan. ( )

It was all a dream . . . or was it?

GYAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! NOOOOTTTTT AAAAGGGGAAAAIIINNNNNN!!!!!!

Third one this month. I thought it was Movember not Dreamvember.

And to make the surreal horror/fantasy/dream sequence even worse, to fully appreciate it (and who really wants to fully appreciate a dream sequence?), you even need to do homework and read some old proto-Lovecraftian book called The King in Yellow from 1895. No, no, nope, naw, nuh-uh.

And then we get to the art . . . Is it heavily stylized or just very sloppy? Regardless, it's a hindrance as reading order becomes confusing with a jumble of panels that sometimes randomly stretch across two pages just to mess with you. Everything is so vague and messy, it wasn't until the end matter that I discovered one page was supposed to show a pomegranate full of teeth. Even with a character shouting about teeth on the page, I had had no clue what I was looking at. I'm thinking I could use more such notes to decipher a bunch of the other opaque doodles.

Garbage, through and through. ( )

WHERE BLACK STARS RISE by Nadia Shammas & Marie Enger is Tor Nightfire’s first graphic novel release. A reworking of Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow (which I admit to having not read), WBSR follows Yasmin, a schizophrenic, who has been forced into finding a new therapist and Amal, a Lebanese immigrant and therapist, who takes on Yasmin as her first-ever patient. Yasmin has increasingly terrifying and intrusive dreams that she knows are real and not a figment of her imagination or a symptom of her diagnosis. While Amal wants to help Yasmin, she also struggles with this being her first patient and she feels that she may be out of her depth. When Yasmin decides one session that Amal may not be the right therapist for her and disappears, Amal takes it on herself to find Yasmin and try to help her, but finds herself in a realm that may be the source of Yamin’s terrors.

Having not read the original story this is based on, I’m not sure how this compares as a retelling/reworking, but I found it hard to follow and the cosmic horror aspect is completely lost on me. I simply don’t think cosmic horror really works for me at all tho, as I’m often left more confused about what’s going on than I am unsettled. I’ve read other stories than fall into this catch of horror, and they’ve done nothing for me. However, fans of the sub-genre may find this perfectly creeptastic.

The art is quite visually stimulating , but not a style that I particularly enjoyed, and found myself struggling to read some of the type when it was integrated into the art as opposed to being in separate word bubbles. I appreciate Nightfire branching out into other mediums with their publications, but I found this particular graphic novel a struggle to thoroughly enjoy.

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