As regular readers of The Rumpus know, Thomas has been deconstructing contemporary literature in nine-panel comics since 2010. His Horn! reviews are spare, compressed works of art that infer the merits of a book rather than tediously bloviating about plot, character and theme like some reviewers (including this correspondent) are wont to do. The first panel is usually reserved for Thomas’ interpretation of the book’s cover, then we’re treated to eight pen-and-ink snapshots of scenes and objects which may or may not actually appear in the book under consideration. In his Horn! review of Kyle Minor’s Praying Drunk, for instance, we see starfruit, dentures, baking soda, a house cracked by an earthquake, a fossilized human footprint overlaid by one from a dinosaur, wasps swarming over a Precious Moments figurine, sides of beef, and a hamster on a wheel. Beneath those panels runs this review (I’ve squashed the eight panels together into one sentence): “Though this book is full of profound personal upheavals: a crisis of faith, families riven by death, Haiti and its many convulsions; it’s the experimental flourishes–an epistolary novella, a sci-fi bit, a meta-dialogue on the book’s own fictionality–that raise it to the sublime.”

Read the full review at The Quivering Pen.