As a vehicle for a slowly unfolding, creeping sense of horror, Rombes' choice of a multi-day interview with an unreliable narrator recalling a series of underground films destroyed by an eccentric film critic is nearly unbeatable. This story is a metaphysical layer cake, and all the ingredients are dark, bloody, and unsettling. And though the unease grows viscerally, there is little outright horror. The supernatural elements are implied, hinted at, seen only peripherally before disappearing when confronted head on; but the sense lingers that something was there, something that persists still.

It's hard to explain the pure delight I feel thinking about a man reading his notes from a voiceover that he recorded of a movie he had watched (alone) and had subsequently destroyed, eradicating the terrible 'undiluted truth' it presented -- a thing too horrible to allow to exist. With each level of removal, the distance is increased, and thus, one would think, the potency diminished. It's a testament to Rombes' writing that just the opposite is true. The films lose none of their power through description, and as the book unfolds, one has the sense of being caught in a nightmare.

Though he makes no claims to it, Rombes strikes me as a spiritual successor to Roberto Bola�o, finding the intersection of art and life, and enfolding it in a gradually increasing sense of paranoia and doom. -- Chris P.   

Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream tells the story of Dorothy and Otis Shepard, two graphic designers who are little known, yet whose work is widely recognized. Dorothy and Otis lived the American dream their work came to represent in the middle of the twentieth century, the "Ozzie and Harriet" era. Working for Wrigley Chewing Gum, Catalina Island, the Chicago Cubs and others, they embody the best of modernist design. The lavish illustrations show us their work and the text describes the lives of this fascinating couple who created them. -- Alan D.