Fabien Vehlmann

A dark fairy tale.
A really dark fairy tale.
AN EXTREMELY DARK FAIRY TALE.

And I loved it!

Like all fairy tales, it takes place in a forest. There, a community of fairies spring up around the corpse of a murdered girl. The fairies aren't trying to help solve her death, not bring her back to life, not even respectfully festoon her with woodland flowers and a fairy dance.

No. She's the fairies' new home now...the rotting body of a human little girl.

That is some serious fairy tale shit right there. show more It's fits right in with the old fairy tales collected by the Grimm Brothers. Full of bloody horrors, callous brutality, nonsensical actions, and dives down deep somewhere dark inside us. Is that dark place our own repressed demons? Or is it a recognition, a reminder, that we live in a world of lurking evil and we must prepare for a possible encounter?

Whatever psychology is behind it, it was enough to utterly flabbergast me; its presentation beautiful and odd enough to gob smack me at 66 years old. I couldn't stop turning the pages.

I can't do any better than Melki* did than when she described it as "Alice in Wonderland meets Lord of the Flies."

*Melki's review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/955228748 show less

Traditional cultures tend to see death as a process. The body collapses and as it disintegrates the spirit/ghost/psyche lingers, often confused and jealous of the living. Add to that a Jungian notion of the psyche being not one entity, but a society of selves, and you have this eerie graphic novel about “life” after death. The book is a terrifying blend of the unpredictable, yet inevitable, and makes this an entirely satisfactory modern horror story.
Thanks go to Caleb of Avid Books in show more Athens, Georgia for the recommendation. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3673857.html

I'm always trying to broaden my reading of bande dessinées, and this won the Prix René Goscinny 2020 so I thought I would give it a go. The setting is a really interesting alternate history (uchronie as the French put it), in which France won the Algerian war by developing giant nuclear powered robots to stomp out the resistance; but in the end, Algeria gained independence after all after the 1976 Batna disaster (which everyone mutters about but show more has not yet been described) and the robots were all dismantled apart from one which is quietly rusting away in India. Our protagonist, a hoodlum from Nantes in roughly the present day (2020 ish, in the alternate timeline), is given the task of retrieving it for his crime boss. Meanwhile in the Algerian desert, something very strange is happening.

This is really good, and you don't need to be an expert in the history of France and Algeria to appreciate it. The characters are all well drawn and well depicted, and the scenes of France, Algeria and India are convincing, with the legacy of colonialism a major subtheme. Giant nuclear-powered robots are a silly idea, of course, but the point is that they and their crew became cult figures for kids in the 1970s like our protagonist, who still has his sticker book. Gloriously, the robot he is sent to India to retrieve is named after George Sand, the embodiment of French culture stomping out the natives. show less

A wretchedly beautiful and twisted tale of adorable things killing and screwing each other over in a myriad of brutal ways. This plotting is quite simple, yet it still serves to elevate the clashing of the cutesy art filled with lethal inflations, unflinching betrayals, horrific violence, and other classic horror staples. A quick read, but not one you forget for a long time.