Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children #14

Piranha Press's Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children Volume 14 arrives with one of the imprint's most unsettling cover images: two pale hands pressed together in prayer, laced tightly shut along their seams against a deep crimson background — Dan Sweetman's meticulous linework making something devotional feel deeply wrong. The story within is titled "Dangerous Prayers," a pairing with that cover that speaks volumes about the dark, literary territory Dave Louapre and Sweetman staked out together in 1990. For mature readers willing to follow where that stitched-together supplication leads, this is exactly the kind of quietly disturbing comics work Piranha Press was built to deliver.