The Furry Trap Hardcover – 12 July 2012

Ah man, it's pretty horrible man. It's really grimey. Not what I was expecting, proper grimey. I'm just remembering some bits from it now as I write this. Ugh, not nice. It might be good, I'm not sure, but its deffo grimey.

It’s just not a very interesting or good comic, how anyone thinks this is creepy or weird is beyond me, it’s just trite and unoriginal.

absolutely disgusting, I had to throw it in the bin because I could not have such disturbing book in my personal library

What else can you say about Joshua Simmons other than downright absurdism to the maximum. There are plenty of different stories here...if only he did an anthology of Happy.

This is a collection of short bizarro comics centred around some truly messed up characters doing depraved things to one another. I liked Josh's art, he has a way of conveying the disgusting in a simple yet effective way, however I wasn't much a fan of the writing. There didn't seem to be a point to most of the comics and after a while the depravity got repetitive.That said, the last comic in the book was actually pretty good and stepped it up in both writing and art, to the point that I'm interested to read his newer stuff to see if his style evolves into something more coherent.

This is a collection of short stories by Josh Simmons, the artist behind the brilliant silent-horror book "House" a few years ago. The various stories show Simmons' range as an artist while the stories' quality is at times manically brilliant to half-thought out and fizzle out into nothing.The best of these is "Demonwood", the final story, featuring a construction worker down on his luck who after working on a site all day, stubbornly refuses to admit his car is broken and ends up staying on the site after dark despite being told the woods are haunted. Sure enough a cherub-like demon shows up and the story subtly and horrifically gets darker and darker...I also liked his take on Batman even if I wasn't 100% sure what he was trying to say about him. I felt this way about a lot of the stories here: the Jesus monster story, the hick/witch story set in an apocalyptic landscape, and the girl who mutilates her pet. The stories start strong, they're intriguing, but they end in the kind of pretentious arty way that believes non-explanation is better than explicit resolution, so in the end they're quite frustrating.And the worst of these stories feature extreme sexual violence throughout that are the sole purpose of the story. It feels like reading a story by a kid who's looking only to shock - they're simply immature and empty.But on the whole the book is an interesting read with imaginative stories and a few gems that make reading this worthwhile. Simmons has talent and is a compelling storyteller when he is focused; "The Furry Trap" hints at better books to come and I will definitely read them when they appear. For now, this book shows the interesting evolution of an artist.