A Cotton Candy Spider Made Of Razorblades — Reviewing ‘Kill Your Darlings’ #3

Welcome to the table,

“You can never go home again.” 

It’s one of those phrases like “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” or “Barking up the wrong tree.” It just gets tossed around in common culture but not a ton of people know where it originated. The phrase is a slight shift of the title of a book by Thomas Wolfe that was published by his editor Edward Aswell after Thomas passed from this place to the next.

The book was titled You Can’t Go Home Again and the turn of phrase means that if you try to return to a place from your past it won’t be the same as it was because you’ve changed and time changes everything, making that place familiar at times, but never the same.

Kill Your Darlings#3 feels very much like the embodiment of the phrase “You can never go home again.”

Written by the talented duo of Ethan S. Parker and Griffin Sheridan with spectacular line, ink, color, and layout work by Robert “Bob” Quinn, the book continues to be a tour de force in sequential storytelling that takes the reader from the nightmarishly harsh realities of the world we know to the dreamlike terrors of the past that one can never escape.

This book comes at you like a stuffed giant spider made of cotton candy and razor blades. With each page turn you are left wondering what comes next and the brilliant juxtaposition of color and line being dream light and soft yet oddly threatening. It keeps you off guard and anxious from cover to cover, as you follow a story where the only thing you can trust is the unreliable narrator who sits at the center of this web where dreams and reality collide.

Rose, freshly escaped from a mental health facility, has been reunited with her imaginary friend, the four-foot purple elephant man named Wallice and together with her friend Elliot, the trio make their way to a VHS rental store to use a portal door to hope into the Kingdom of Rosewood, a landscape within Roses childhood imagination.

It shouldn’t work. I understand how outlandish this all sounds, but the beauty of this book is that it plays in a way that feels organic and lived in. So far, the story beats have been paying off in a big way.

If you are looking for a read that is going to take you on a journey and keep you constantly guessing while feeling super surreal and being stunningly beautiful, then you may want to give Kill Your Darlings a go. While I have no idea what is coming next, I am sure as heck enjoying this ride.

Until next time, I will call him Bob because he is my friend and my editor likes that I somehow mention that so no one gets any strange ideas that I curry favor. This is easily some of his best work and he is already so freaking talented, the fact he is doing almost all of the art lift himself boggles my mind.