Review by Frank Plowright

The funfair looks intriguing as the young girl stands on a box to peer over the fence, but once inside numerous obstacles prevent her enjoyment. She’s too young, too short, or lacks enough money. Eventually, though, she discovers the Cinema Panopicum, a set of viewing machines each only requiring a single cent to operate, and they play out the following short stories.

Thomas Ott’s scratchboard art on disturbing horrors was familiar to readers of alternative anthologies in the 1990s and early 2000s. The glacially slow pace induced suspense as the protagonist inched inexorably to a shocking revelation. ‘The Girl’ is a prelude to four other such shorts. A man visits a strangely unstaffed hotel; a Mexican wrestler receives a challenge delivered by raven; a man is given an experimental treatment for exceptionally poor sight, and another pieces together a diagram indicating the world will end.

Faces are frozen in fear at worst, and puzzled at best as their appearance on black pages accentuates the unease. It’s phenomenal art, every panel a scream away from Munch, featuring desperate and doomed people.

The primary mood is tension, but Ott’s never far from cracking a smile. The wrestler’s framed wedding photograph shows him getting married in a mask, while the comedy of the other tales is more integral to events, and therefore shouldn’t be disclosed. The result is a blasting together of Edgar Allen Poe’s mood with trash culture and forced finales reminiscent of 1960s shock-ending TV shows. It’s amusing, but very much the single note joke, which wasn’t apparent when one of Ott’s stories formed part of an anthology. The sheer amount of effort Ott expends in repeating himself is testament to a stubborn persistence, but surely an artist of his calibre could set his heights higher.