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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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