The Green Hand and Other Stories

French artist Claveloux published most of her work for adults in the 1970s in Heavy Metal and other magazines. This is the first time her short stories have been collected in English, and they show an impish sense of humor and fanciful, rounded art style in the vein of Heinz Edelmann and Terry Gilliam. Most of the stories are goofy, hallucinatoy skits, some written by her frequent collaborator Edith Zha, fitfully amusing and disturbing by turns. But while most don’t quite merit the acclaim bestowed on them by Daniel Clowes’s flag-waving introduction (“it arouses feelings that can’t be quantified or explained”), her ardor for Lovecraftian weirdness gets a solid workout in the title piece and the linked stories that follow. Starting as a lightly surreal mood piece about a woman, a plant, and a depressed bird, it starts vaulting through dimensions with alacrity and ends on an unexpectedly romantic note. Cherubic but lethal babies are a recurring theme in other tales, including one that follows a surreal chain of family murders and another about a young princess who suffers when her father remarries. These pages dream furiously. (Nov.)