Worry Doll began life as a children's book but the bottom fell out pretty quickly, dropping readers in a nightmare vision of meticulously rendered hallucinations. This book is disturbingly real and frighteningly unreal, an uneasy road movie laden with suggestion, symbols and tension. Don't look to the text for help, it just rebuffs you with its oblique commentary and slippery relationship to the images. Coyle has achieved the kind of disjoint, broken reality Freud termed "unheimlich": in the same way Kubrick explored the strangeness of the real, and Lynch breaks through narrative expectations to unsettle an audience, Worry Doll takes the format of the graphic novel, bends it, plays with it and gives it back broken. Worth reading again and again.
On the print job: I'm stunned by the lavish detail in the minutely detailed, fractured and surreal panels. Coyle's visual achievement is matched by incredible attention to detail in the printing and reproduction, making this one of the best produced books of its type I have ever seen.
