Hooray for relentless ugliness! The art here is blotchy and clumpy, with all sorts of angles on the faces of these sad, sad people. It’s the story of a young boy named Lester who goes to live with his Uncle on a farm after his Mother dies of cancer. His Uncle, Ken, never had any kids and seems to be at something of a loss as to how to deal with Lester. He’s obviously trying, but Lester is having his own problem adjusting to things and they just can’t seem to connect. Lester meets a shopkeeper in town, Jimmy, an old hockey player who took a nasty hit and was never the same. They spend their days building a fort for the upcoming alien invasion and generally playing around like kids do except, of course, Jimmy is a grown man. The sheer vulnerability of everyone here is astounding. With the exception of maybe a page or two (when Ken tries to convince Jimmy to stay away from Lester), the faces here tell a tale of confusion, of trying to cope with something genuinely awful, of knowing that the only option is for them to move forward together but being unable to make the leap. And if Jimmy comes across like a simpleton from that description, it’s not how it reads. He’s a lonely man, sure, but he’s mostly sticking around Lester because he’s trying to help the kid cope, and because…well, some things are best left to the reader to discover. Good stuff, and this is the first part of a projected trilogy based around Essex County. It looks like the characters will change from book to book, but that’s the sort of thing that’ll become a lot clearer when the rest of them are published, obviously… $9.95
