My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One, by Emil Ferris, 386 pages.

Karen, the young woman telling the story of this graphic novel, sees herself as a young werewolf. More than that, she sees herself as a werewolf private detective. Karen lives with her mother and her older brother Deeze in Chicago in the late 1960s. There is a lot of family drama going on, and though Deeze and mom do their best to keep Karen in the dark, she is determined to find out their secrets. There is a lot of drama in her downtown neighborhood, too. One of their neighbors goes missing (leaving behind his ventriloquist dummy), another is sent off to prison, and most mysteriously, the beautiful and secretive neighbor upstairs apparently shot herself in the living room of her locked apartment and then went to bed and tucked herself in before dying.
There are some horrifying scenes here, Karen is threatened with violence and finds out terrible and disturbing things about what has been done to her neighbors, and about what they have done. She's courageous, and relentless, even though she knows now that not everything is going to work out okay in the end. Great art and strong storytelling.