LIKE SWIMMERS

Two adult siblings navigate loneliness and what it means to become different people, and one must solve the other’s confusing murder.

Mackenzie has always looked after her younger brother, Howie. Even when she’s hard on him, she believes that pushing him to be tough is for his own good. In 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, Mackenzie works from home in Richmond, Virginia, and Howie works as a bike messenger and also runs errands for a married woman named Isa Sanders. Howie and Isa connected before the pandemic when she saw a zine he drew and invited him to teach a comics class at the local museum where she works. They argue over artistic influences: Howie dislikes the museum’s Lichtenstein exhibit, and Isa dismisses comics altogether, but she’s willing to look at Howie’s favorites. Howie’s artistic influences in the horror and fantasy comics world are clear influences on the artwork in this book, especially Howie’s obsession with werewolves and shifters. Mackenzie dislikes Isa and tells Howie to stay away from her, and outwardly Howie agrees. He goes to meet her at a hotel, though, and they make plans for her to leave her husband, Jasper. Howie ends up dead, shot with a silver bullet in a scary reference to his love of werewolves. Mackenzie starts to investigate what happened to her brother, as the cops are not invested in treating his death as suspicious. When she interrogates Isa, she receives an entirely different story about Howie’s life. In the throes of grief, Mackenzie experiences odd symptoms and tries to untangle what happened to her brother under the watchful eye of their shared cat, Jonesy.

Mirroring the confusion of the pandemic with supernatural elements, this graphic mystery is an effective meditation on grief.