2009: Video store clerk Darla Vogel is fed up. Fed up with her job, her wake-and-bake roommate, everything. But when one of the customers at Kwok's Video, a precocious home-schooled kid with dreams of chemically engineering authentic meat-flavoring, offers her some of his meat-tinged candies, Darla takes a plunge down the rabbit hole into a surreal world of throbbing, veinous buildings, compulsory public nudity, weird creatures and more. If William S. Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, H.P. Lovecraft and Harvey Kurtzman had a mutant lovechild, it might resemble Bob Fingerman's bold new confection Connective Tissue. Fingerman, a cartoonist and novelist best known for an acclaimed graphic novel (Beg the Question, a Gen X classic with "dialogue worthy of the stage" according to Entertainment Weekly) and an acclaimed prose novel (Bottomfeeder, which Booklist described as "at the front ranks of its genre" in a starred review), merges his two favorite disciplines in Connective Tissue, a genre-bending and medium-mixing work best described as a fully illustrated novella. Fingerman's visuals...
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