Idle Days
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Depressed and unmoored by his father's violent death, and drafted into the Canadian military to serve in World War II, Jerome has fled, taking refuge in a cabin his grandfather owns in a remote part of the countryside.
But Jerome's troubles are only beginning. A strange dread fills the woods, and rumors of murders and ghosts cast his refuge in a sinister light. As Jerome struggles to come to terms with his father's death, he obsessively seeks to uncover the mystery of what, exactly, happened in his grandfather's house.
In Idle Days, Simon Leclerc's expressionistic artwork brings to life a layered and deeply literary story from writer Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau. This haunting graphic novel explores with tenderness and insight the wounds opened with the loss of a loved one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This spooky graphic novel set during the WWII riffs on the old saying about idle hands. Hiding from the war and his father's death, gloomy young Canadian Jerome has gone AWOL from the army. Fearful of Jerome being spotted in their small, nosy town, his mother ships him to his gruff grandfather's cabin in the woods. The house has a morbid history pocked with fire and suicide. Jerome's emotional state spirals out in the seemingly haunted woods, and he's paralyzed by nightmares of the battlefield. Jerome listens to radio reports of the slaughter in Europe, and the odd black cat crosses his path. Once the ghostly scenario is established, Desaulniers-Brousseau doesn't do much more plot-wise than nudge it forward with minor revelations and higher-pitched spookiness. Leclerc's assured, lustrous, and woodsy fall-tinted illustrations make every page feel like a story about to be told around a campfire at dusk. For readers fond of creepy literary tales, this is an unsettling, if occasionally formulaic, debut.
