Land of the Dead
Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From Brian McDonald, an expert on the narrative arts, comes a remarkable non-fiction graphic novel about the art of storytelling.
There is wisdom in the land of the dead, for it is the place that all stories lay to rest. And what is a story, if not a simulation of survival?
Wielding his massive experience from film, tv, comics, and more, Brian McDonald lays out a history of storytelling and shows the reader how the best tales tug at our truest biological instinct: the need to survive. Readers will see how different forms of survival—physical, emotional, spiritual—inform the arc of character development in a way that makes them more complex and compelling. And how plot and circumstance must then force your protagonist to meet their worst nightmare. Toby Cypress’s electric art guides the reader through the underworld, visualizing each narrative masterpiece, and bringing the ideas to life.
Whether you’re in film, books, comics, or simply a story enthusiast, this book offers a way to see character development and the crafting of plot through the lens of human questions of morality and mortality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McDonald (Old Souls) distills a seminar's worth of storytelling lessons from an interdisciplinary cross-section of literature and mythography into an eerie yet life-affirming graphic narrative. Appreciative of the importance of mood-setting, he employs a learned crow as narrator. Broken into seven loosely themed sections, the book is largely about the wisdom to be gained from the "Land of the Dead," however it might be represented. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Hitchcock, he relates instances of characters' journeys into the underworld, for which he uses the Greek "katabasis," and the wisdom they bring back. That wisdom is often variations on a theme: enjoy what fleeting life one gets. Still, McDonald's pungent recreations, enhanced by scratchy and dark-shadowed art by Cypress (the Gravediggers Union series), of various "fictive dreams" (borrowing a term from John Gardner) are both wide-ranging (Little Red Riding Hood to Moby-Dick and The Silence of the Lambs) and evocative. McDonald casts his net so wide that it seems to encompass anything remotely connected to death. Also, writers looking for practical advice could be disappointed: there is little here to help finish that long-gestating mystery novel. But those who appreciate and take inspiration from musings on mythology and the underlying soul of great literature will be rewarded.
