Of course, the one house you can't smell in childhood is your own: it's the one you grew up in so it forms your own personal baseline of normality and Barry's was full of aftershave, perfume, dog, hair spray, fried garlic and onions and 9,000 cigarettes.

Smell, for example, is as potent as music in being able to thrust you back through time in an instant, and in 'Common Scents' Barry concentrates on the singular smells of specific houses in her neighbourhood. Those titular demons aren't always awful, but they are all the moments which haunt you, stay with you, and had such a profound effect on you that they shaped you. If her more recent WHAT IT IS, PICTURE THIS and SYLLABUS: NOTES FROM AN ACCIDENTAL PROFESSOR are all about catalysing creativity (you won't find anything more inspirational on our shelves) then this earlier autobiographical work from 2002, finally reprinted, was all about jogging memory, which she highly recommends with specific instructions in the back for this Asian-style artistic experiment. Remembering not to remember fractures you.' 'When your inner life is a place you have to stay out of, having an identity is impossible. She alludes to it earlier with an equally adept turn of phrase: That she is willing and able to turn self-denigration into a pithy, comedic side-salad tells you everything about her open and honest generosity of spirit, especially when the reasons behind such early instability were far from funny. Haha! Dear, dear Lynda Barry! That her drug-taking days were already pretty much over aged fourteen tells you everything you need to know about her precociously experimental nature which remains to this day in full throttle. 'I didn't mention the fact that the acid was two years old and had spent two winters wrapped in tin foil behind a brick in a garage, abandoned during my Jesus-freak period which was at least six personalities ago.'

100 demons graphic novel