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Winner: 2023 MoCCA Award of Excellence
New York Public Library’s List of Best Comics for Adults in 2023
Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Award Nominee: Best Artist
"In fine-arts painter Rostovsky’s scabrously funny debut, an ordinary guy visits an ordinary therapist in an extraordinary place: Hell. […] This is the rare high-concept satire that lives up to its premise." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“In Fred’s story, as everywhere else, Damnation Diaries pulls off a complicated feat of tone. It is both a muscular, thoroughgoing satire, in its verbal jokes and its drawn grotesquerie, and it also manages moments of sincere connection and soul-searching gravity, holding this duality in tension. […] The widespread resonance of Rostovsky’s satire is an indicator of our Mephistophelian reality. Indeed, hell is everywhere.”—Hillary Chute, Artforum.
“Two aspects of the novel make it a work for the ages. First is the old-world draftsmanship. Rostovsky, a realist painter, hints at the musculature beneath each figure’s tortured skin (the residents of hell are naked) with exquisite hatching. […] It’s also a nuanced work of politics. Witty advertisements world-build hell’s bleak debtor capitalism that oppresses torturers and inmates alike. […] Damnation Diaries is a bravely personal vision — I found it strangely comforting.” —Noah Fischer in Hyperallergic.
“This novel […] is the culmination of Peter’s travels through contemporary art, Occupy Wall Street, art criticism, adjuncting, growing up an immigrant in New York City, American healthcare, and, above all, being somebody’s son. It’s all a version of hell; all of it.” —David Levine, from our uniquely presented interview on “Damnation Diaries” in BOMB Magazine.
“Great art, a good sense of humour and something to say – what’s not to like?” Karl Verhoven in The Slings & Arrows Graphic Novel Guide.
"Damnation Diaries" is what happens after Michelangelo paints Dante's Inferno on the ceiling of your parents' bedroom the night you were conceived. Peter Rostovsky's semi-autobiographical masterpiece is a laugh-out-loud crisis carnival riddled with artistic guilt and slathered with existential viscera. A lost literary relic resurrected from an underground comix Grand Guignol where R. Crumb meets Bernie Wrightson by way of Harvey Pekar in Purgatory. By facing his emotional inferno and embracing the horrors of inhumanity, Rostovsky shows us a painful pathway to personal paradise." —Dean Haspiel, creator of Billy Dogma and The Red Hook
"Most of the time when you tell someone to go to hell, it's not meant as a pleasant directive, but the exception to this would be to enthusiastically advocate — as I am doing right now — that people should read Damnation Diaries by Peter Rostovsky and, essentially, go to hell. Except this trip to hell is full of wit and satire and absolutely gorgeous and disturbing art. Rostovsky, our 21st century Dante, holds up a fun-house mirror to our world that will delight and trouble the reader in the most heavenly (and hellish) ways." —Jonathan Ames, author of THE WHEEL OF DOLL
"I just finished Damnation Diaries. I am so impressed with this book—the art, the writing, the sheer amount of work involved, but most of all the intelligence.[...] Damnation Diaries is the expression of an adult sensibility and is not just intelligent and insightful, but hilarious. Misery, madness, and mirth. It’s as if Catch-22 had been written about hell rather than the 256th US Army Air Squadron." —Paul Kirchner, author of The Bus, Hieronymus & Bosch, and Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium.
"Peter Rostovsky reimagines his own life in an infinity mirror from hell, creating a doppelganger sibling that is half Dante half Dostoevsky, as if by etching out the hellish map of his fate he may avoid having to actually live it... It's a good trick, but will it work? Rostovsky gives us the gift of his inner thoughts and fears in a horror book fit for the modern age." —Annie Nocenti, author of Ruby Falls, The Seeds, writer on Daredevil, Catwoman, and Spider-Man, creator of Marvel characters Longshot, Typhoid, Spiral, and Blackheart
"Damnation Diaries seamlessly slips between scenes of satiric dark humor and moments of exquisite pathos, equal parts George Orwell and Gustave Doré, bound together and gorgeously rendered through Rostovsky's inimitable literary and artistic sensibility." —Bishakh Som, author of Apsara Engine and Spellbound
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