Date read: 2.20.09
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera
In Violent Cases, an adult narrator evokes a confused patchwork of childhood memories, from his uneasy relationship with his father to the half-comprehended gangster stories of an osteopath who claims to have treated Al Capone.
Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s first collaboration? Too cool! McKean’s art can be hit-or-miss for me, but here, I loved it. It has a scratchy, sketchy, flickering quality, like a very old slide show being flicked by, or an old film, and the black inkwork is just barely shaded with beautiful shades of sepia and ghostly blue. Add in the splintering, tilting panels and the narrator’s suggestively spare commentary, and you have an incredibly evocative, ominous story about the insidiousness of violence – physical violence, imagined violence, the violence we do to ourselves in letting ourselves forget the ways in which we were hurt and damaged – and the ways that memories reach out to one another inside of our heads, and make strange but right connections.