Frogcatchers
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Experience a surreal descent into one man’s psychosis in this haunting and chilling graphic novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Roughneck and Sweet Tooth, hailed as “the Stephen King of comics” (Maclean’s).
A man wakes up alone in a strange room with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. The padlocked doors and barren lobby reinforce the strangeness of this place. This is—as he reads from an old-fashioned keychain beside his bed—the Edgewater Hotel. Even worse, something ominous seems to be lurking in one of the rooms.
But when he meets a young companion—the only other soul in this vast, enveloping emptiness—his new friend begs him not to unlock the door. There must be something behind it…but what?
A haunted hotel on the edge of reality, an endless bridge spanning an infinite ocean, and a man and a boy looking for a way out. This is the setting for a boundary-pushing, genre-defying new work of fiction by one of comics’ master storytellers.
“A perfect miniature of memory and loss, affecting and beautifully told in an outstanding use of the medium. A haunting dream of a book” (Warren Ellis, New York Times bestselling author).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eisner Award winner Lemire (Sweet Tooth) hooks the reader with a mystery in this slim, dreamy fable in which a man wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of how he got there. This scene is preceded by a seemingly unconnected one of a boy catching frogs, who sees an IV drip in the water, which segues into a series of strange images that include a chest X-ray. Together, these passages telegraph, rather unsubtly, the crux of the narrative. The man's subsequent encounters with the frog-catching boy at the hotel and his attempts at avoiding the dreaded Frog King provide more clues. The man and the boy dodge the agents of the Frog King, enter his forbidden chamber, and escape out the window. Lemire's scratchy lines and bursts of color in the "real world" add a visceral quality to this meditation on coping with mortality. The book's puzzle structure points rather obviously to the pay-off; but more affecting is how Lemire simply depicts the man coming to terms with regrets and his fate. This cathartic reverie is carried off with striking visual themes, if sometimes with a heavy hand.)
