Monica

Clowes’s (Patience) long-awaited, genre-bending thriller begins with a young woman named Penny, who, upon becoming pregnant while her fiancé is off fighting in Vietnam, runs away and falls in with a group of bohemian artists. When her daughter, Monica, is just a few years old, Penny mysteriously vanishes; years later, an adult Monica becomes obsessed with finding her. After discovering evidence that her mother may have been involved with a cult dedicated to the belief that “our shared reality is a quasi-demonic fabrication designed to thwart individual fulfillment,” Monica tracks the group to their headquarters in an abandoned housing complex and applies for membership. That’s the throughline, leaving a whole lot out; much of Monica’s uncommonly difficult-to-summarize quest is revealed elliptically, through the perspectives of various characters with whom she crosses paths, in sequences evoking the tropes of a variety of genres, including teen romance, war, the crime thriller, and supernatural horror.