Cara & Lyn – A Twisted Fantasy is a graphic novel born at the intersection of grief, creativity, and the quiet courage of living with a fatal illness.
Cara is 17, a fashion design student and goth sewing geek from Brooklyn, New York. She has just been diagnosed with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease. In a parallel goth dimension, her alter ego Lyn, a ceramic doll, has a mission: to mend, with a magical sewing machine, the souls of the people Cara loves before time runs out.
Created by screenwriter Giorgio Salati and graphic novelist Lelio Bonaccorso, Cara & Lyn – A Twisted Fantasy is based on the life of Carolyn Josephine Goracy, who was diagnosed with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease at 17 and died of the disease at 31. In the years following her diagnosis, Carolyn began assembling a remarkable collection of curiosities and oddities, objects that expressed her singular, fearless relationship with death. Not as something to flee from, but as something to look at directly, to understand, to transform into beauty.
After her passing, that collection became a photographic exhibition that has traveled to HD conventions across the United States and Europe. It is the seed from which this graphic novel grows.
Carolyn’s story asks the question that the best stories always ask: what do we do with the time we are given? Her answer, woven through every page of Cara & Lyn, is as defiant as it is tender, we create, we collect, we repair, we love. And in doing so, we become, for those around us, a light in the dark.