For fans of Joey Comeau’s web comic A Softer World, the writer’s newest project of a young adult horror novel is only a side step from his usual voice. Stripped of its horror elements, the story is about the best friendship—and possible romance—of two teenage girls, and what it means to be “family.” Add in a mother who’s an animal-eating monster with a few bloody ghosts and you get One Bloody Thing After Another. While some of Comeau’s horror elements go too far—a scene where one of the girls feeds a human baby to her own monster mother reads as too much—the base character relationships and unexpected but mundane humour are what hold it together. Comeau never trivializes his characters’ emotions, and it’s what carries the novel from first bloody page to last.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2010.