Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.
A suitably dark graphic treatment of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece.
French artist Larcenet delivers a full 21 frames before McCarthy’s main characters, a father and his preadolescent son, speak. That’s fitting: In the original novel, the father is grimly taciturn, while the boy is full of anxious questions: Are we the good guys in the piece? Are the bad guys going to eat us? Larcenet’s landscape is the dark, dead land of nuclear winter; in an afternote, he admits to liking snow, though atop every snowbank here, it seems, there’s a corpse. Larcenet’s rendering of the father looks nothing like the Viggo Mortensen of the film, for, as he writes in an afterword, “I’ve been racking my brain to avoid any reference to the movie adaptation.” Instead, the man looks like one of the hirsute Trumpets who stormed the Capitol. But then, so do all the other grown-ups, personal hygiene having fallen victim to the irradiated world of the future. McCarthy’s story is simple: The man and the boy have to head south to find a place they hope isn’t frozen solid. On the way, wheeling a shopping cart, they have to keep their few possessions safe from scavengers while avoiding gangs of roving, cannibalistic brigands. The son remembers a few hallmarks of the old world, praying that a dead family whose larder they’ve raided “are safe in heaven.” Dad, meanwhile, is full of more instructive notes: “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget,” he remarks amid an endless landscape of tortured corpses and detached skulls. The story, as with McCarthy’s work in general, ends happily only if you count mere survival as a satisfying resolution. Larcenet’s brooding black-and-white drawings suit the original perfectly.
Read McCarthy’s novel first to appreciate the subtlety of Larcenet’s superb graphic adaptation.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781419776779
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
For readers of the once-popular dystopian YA novels who are now all grown up.
In a distant future, after the Last War when the human population became endangered, a new society formed from the ashes, strictly to optimize procreation.
But not procreation between just anyone. This society, ruled by the Illum—a mysterious authoritarian group—assigns mates to select for the best traits and to breed out defects, to grow the Elite population living in the clouds. Protagonist Emeline is a stubborn and bored young woman, working her days away on the ground as a Minor Defect—one of the class of women waiting to be approved for mating with an Elite, and hoping to never be banished further from society. Emeline’s instincts are apparently to reject the rigid decorum of her society, but she spends years trying to follow the rules set out for her, or at least dissociates enough not to challenge her way of life, until one day an elusive and charming man, Hal, walks into her office to talk about art. The same day, she is approved for mating and matched with Collin, the youngest member of the Illum, in the sort of pairing that hasn’t happened in decades. Courtship with Collin is full of luxury—fancy dinners and balls in the clouds—but also lies and days of discovering secrets kept from her, while trying to keep the Elite’s rumors and malicious Press at bay. Caught between these two men, with their own agendas, and so many unanswered questions, Emeline must decide what she wants, if she can want anything at all. With a rebellion rising in secret and the repression of the Illum close at hand, she’ll find what she’s willing to lose for the ability to choose for herself. The dystopian worldbuilding is underdeveloped at best, so get swept up in discovering truth from lies quickly before it starts to fall apart in your hands.
For readers of the once-popular dystopian YA novels who are now all grown up.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798217090990
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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