Valentine’s Day means love, and love comes in many forms — including the love of a boy for a girl who has been turned into a doll by a strange (and “strange” is only the tip of the iceberg) plague. By which I mean Dead Girls, by Richard Calder. Calder, who has lately been writing and illustrating a graphical story, Death and the Maiden — initially appearing in Murky Depths, then on its own — is writing a graphic novel version of Dead Girls, with artist Leonardo M. Giron illustrating. Calder has a new website here, with a page for Dead Girls (a composite of sketches at present, to which more will be added over the course of the year).

I’m looking forward to this graphic story bigtime. The novel is linguistically rich — hard to describe, but to use the Maldoror paradigm, as beautiful as the chance encounter, in a library of modern philosophy, of Madame de Pompadour, the Marquis de Sade, and, say, Nancy Spungen. I’m told that the graphic novel will be a different story, based on the book. In Death and the Maiden, Calder successfully welded ludic and brainy language and occasional diversions into history and theory with the graphical format, while moving the story apace, so I’m very eager to see what he and Giron come up with for Dead Girls. Dead Girls will be appearing in installments in Murky Depths.