Synopsis
This road-movie crime story is a masterful debut graphic novel from France.
A road movie featuring two detectives, Rene and Agatha, on the tracks of Robert Illot, a serial killer whose modus operandi is to suffocate his victim with various objects (including chickens and lightbulbs) along the highways and byways of France. As they get closer and closer to catching up with him, seeking out and interrogating men and women from his past life at the insane asylum, he always stays one step ahead and the row of corpses grows longer and longer In this lengthy original graphic novel by Matthias Lehmann (his first, released to great acclaim in his native France earlier this year), dreams and flashbacks converge with the ongoing narrative, done in Lehmann's hypnotically intense and insanely labor-intensive woodcut style to form a dark and disquieting vision of humanity.
Reviews
Grade 10 Up—This cynical, twisted tale of murder and mayhem bespeaks of several genres: horror, noir, you-think-you-know-whodunit, and road trip. Detective Rene Pluriel traverses dark alleys, dank hotel rooms, and sinister country settings populated by seamy characters in order to interview mental-patient acquaintances of the serial killer he is tracking. Woven throughout are occasionally confusing backstories, including a recurring motif of an abused little boy locked in a dark room, that leave readers wondering if something was lost in the translation. The large, stand-alone black-and-white panels of exquisitely rendered, highly detailed scratchboard art capture an R. Crumb-like drawing style but lack Crumb's humor and humanity. The dark, scratchy drawings with their highly stylized, sleazy, self-possessed characters and bleak, moody settings further accentuate the dark nail-biter of a narrative. Violence and exploitive sex throughout make this a title that will have appeal to a segment of older teen readers of adult graphic novels.—Jodi Mitchell, Durham County Library, NC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Like a deadpan killer-on-the-road film painted in chiaroscuro, Lehmann's Hwy. 115 has a pair of none-too-bright amateur detectives, René and Agatha, trailing one Robert Illot, a surprisingly verbose serial killer who disposes of his victims by cramming different objects down their throats (a lightbulb, stapler, etc.), and then talking about it to those who then helpfully relate it to our fair heroes. In Lehmann's symbol-weighted story, René and Agatha are always one step behind the devious Illot; as they question men from his time in an asylum, he's leaving another body for them to ponder over. Set in a nominal sort of France, the landscape of fantastically looming factories and opulent nightclubs barely approaches real. The tale is not the thing so much as it is Lehmann's beautifully rendered and darkly dramatic scratchboard drawings, which come close to providing the pulsating drama and noirish fantasia that his rote story can not. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Lehmann prefers the scratchboard technique, which can be considered a process of bringing light out of darkness and, as such, altogether appropriate to the quintessentially noirish story he tells. A man and a woman search for a convicted serial killer who escaped from psychiatric detention. He has a car; she, a notebook of details on the escapee's now-released fellow inmates, whom they find one by one. Only he confronts and questions. Each informant relays a story the escapee told. Each story begins the same but eventually involves an object unique to it that, by the next day, figures in a murder. The secondary characters, as brutal looking as figures in a Goya war painting, constitute a cast of credible grotesques; there is much more to each episode than the grilling scene; and the ending is as appalling as anything Hollywood came up with when film noir flourished. Deliberately and quirkily developed, tinged with just enough of the ludicrous, this would make a good, gritty movie. But could the movie ever look this good? Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
