Jessica Farm
Jessica Farm
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By Josh Simmons. Published by Fantagraphics.
Hardcover, 304 pages, B&W, 2024.
A career-spanning comics project 24 years in the making, Josh Simmons creates a deeply personal fantasy drama infused with psychological horror.
Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland, Jessica Farm opens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse. Once inside, we track our titular heroine (she is a person, not a place) as she bounds out of bed on Christmas morning and goes about her routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread, as we discover that Jessica’s increasingly nightmarish house — where the inside seems bigger than the outside, like Snoopy’s doghouse — is filled with creatures around every corner: some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing, and some malevolent. Most terrifying of all is Jessica’s father. Will she even get to open the presents under the Christmas tree?
Taking place over a single Christmas Day, Jessica Farm is a career-spanning comics project in which Simmons has been drawing one page every month for the past 24 years, starting in January 2000. This is a horror-fantasy-psychodrama that will appeal to fans of Charles Burns, David Cronenberg, and Dario Argento.
PRAISE
"Indie comics fans will relish this enigmatic mash-up of Lewis Carroll and Jim Woodring." — Publishers Weekly
"[Simmons's work is] idiosyncratic, grotesque, and adept at wince-level physical violence and comedy — all in service of a worldview so brutally cold that aimed in the right direction it could shut down the sun. Simmons is the reassuring hand in the dark that took yours into his and then shoved it into something sharp and wet." — Comics Reporter
"The sort of book you read very fast for the story, then again right away to slow down and savor the images. As ever, the interiors in particular are captivating, darkly hatched and full of mysterious shadows." — Quietus
"An exhilaratingly horrific tour de force. There may not be another creator of horror stories working in comics, film, or prose today who comes even close to rivaling Simmons's ability to evoke an atmosphere of menace and dread." — Library Journal
