The Understanding Monster - Book One

If the crowded, cluttered, chaotic headspace of depression and anxiety were to be mapped visually, it would probably look a lot like the labyrinthine pages of Theo Ellsworth's The Understanding Monster.  Ellsworth embraces the unenviable task of trying to capture the untranslatable, unrepresentable, illegible experience of being trapped inside one's own head and produces out of that task an endlessly captivating and rewarding piece of visual and narrative art.  His intricately drawn, richly-colored visuals sprawl across the full dimensions of each page, inviting readers into the dizzying, frantic mental space of his protagonist, Izadore—inviting in the way a maze invites entry, with a compelling sense of mystery but without any guarantee of safe exit.  The narrative is equally mazelike:  a robotic narrator shepherds Izadore through a dream-logic quest, a sort of in-brain heist plot in which the object is for Izadore to achieve (or re-achieve) psychological coherence and a stable identity.  Along the way, Izadore is accosted by various monstrous embodiments of anxiety and self-doubt, macabre avatars of internal confusion, and psychic roadblocks that seem simultaneously cartoonish and incredibly dangerous.  The book invites its readers to lose themselves in this pandemonium of the unconscious, but as the robotic narrator and other supporting characters escort Izadore through the hazards of his own brain, so do they escort us—if not to safety or ironclad emotional security, then to something approaching understanding.