The narrative builds to a revelatory climax that falls far short of a conclusion, implying the unstated, “To be continued…”
This graphic novel is more like an apocalyptic hallucination.
The first installment of what promises to be a full-color series from one of America’s most renowned graphic artists, appears in some ways to be a throwback to the comic books of old—similar length, size and paneling (though not price). Yet the visionary artistry of Burns (Black Hole, 2005, etc.) exists beyond the bounds of time and constraints of conventional narrative. To summarize the novel (nightmare?) is to misrepresent its contents and betray its spirit. What the reader learns from the start is that a man in pajamas with a bandage on his head lies in bed before his black cat (Inky) leads him through a mysterious hole in the brick wall of his spartanly empty bedroom. “This is the only part I’ll remember,” thinks the narrator. “The part where I wake up and don’t know where I am.” The realm he enters is more horror-land than wonderland, filled with threatening creatures, questionable food, language barriers and a flood of biblical proportions. It is also punctuated by flashbacks in which the man is identified as “Doug,” is at a party or performance space with his girlfriend, recites some lines from William S. Burroughs to an indifferent crowd and becomes attracted to an innocent-looking young woman whose photos suggest a streak of sadomasochism. The title might refer to the Xs on the calendar that he uses to keep track of his pills or the cuts on the arm of the young woman, though it is never entirely clear whether these flashbacks are memories or simply another alternative reality conjured by the bandaged man in the bed—assuming there really is a bandaged man in a bed.
The narrative builds to a revelatory climax that falls far short of a conclusion, implying the unstated, “To be continued…”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37913-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
A slim novel, both in its emotion and construction, set in 1972, centering on a family coming to grips with the death of a son and the closing of their small town’s factory. The Vietnam War is gradually ending and Watergate is heating up, but these two giant events in US history serve only as backdrop to the personal anguish of the MacLeans. When 18-year-old Cory dies in a summer-job mining accident, the family unravels at the loss of their golden boy—blatantly the favorite son, popular, good, and college bound. Cory’s death leaves a hole in the family that older brother Mike and younger brother Stephan feel compelled, yet unable, to fill. The black sheep of the family, Mike drifts from one low-paying job to the next; after work, he spends his time barroom brawling, or fighting with his bitter father. Stephan, still in school, wants to be a musician, although now, with Cory’s passing, he feels the pressure to take the straight and narrow to college, to live out the life that Cory lost. Add to this the disenchantment of parents Bud and Lola, laid off when the bottle factory closed down, and the tale provides fertile ground for examining the failure of the American Dream. This slow-moving effort, however, just scratches the surface, shifting from one landscape-focused event to another, rarely exploring the emotional terror that lurks within each character. Nieman offers some gemlike observations—the desperation of the town slut, holiday shopping at the local department store, Bud’s frustration at being retrained in computers—but she can—t quite sustain a storyline that refuses to progress. The bleak ending, derived from a lack of resolution, is in a sense admirable, and true to the resignation the characters hold for the future; it also reinforces, though, the lack of movement that defines the rest of the narrative. A potentially powerful work that fails itself through lack of focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9657639-6-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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