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The Lagoon (2008)

by Lilli Carré(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1560979542 (ISBN13: 9781560979548)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Fantagraphics

review 1: Fast and freaky. Super cool art. Everyone and everything curved, had a liquid vibe. What little story there was goes from eerie to suspenseful, then sad to bittersweet, and ends on an almost completely sweet note, with a touch of odd. Colleen asked me if it was funny and I told her 'its funny peculiar, not funny haha.' My favorite scene/bit of dialogue, between the Grandpa and Granddaughter after she finds him laying under her bed practicing his piano scales: "Monsters don't exist anyway. You know that/You always tell me they DO exist!/Well of course they exist." Fascinating.
review 2: This is unusual for me in that I liked her short story and tidbit collection Heads or Tails (2012) more than this, her first graphic novel (2008), which is kind of interesting. V... moreisually more sketchy, like woodcuts, and black and white to maybe help set the mood for the sort of moody, supernatural story. It's funny, in the same day I read Gipi's Garage Band which one would think was about music but wasn't, and Carre's The Lagoon, which really was about music, and sound, all through it. This is about how various characters, none of them particularly compelling--which is the problem for me--respond to the experience of listening to a song in a lagoon at night, sung night after night. People go to listen to it… and it is haunting, a little scary, though not in a Neil Gaiman way, not really scary, it is more lyrically haunting, and mysterious, and all the characters are a little odd and the center of it is a girl and her Grandpa… and this creature in the lagoon who sings this sort of siren song that gets everyone to listen to it, standing in the water… and then they go home.. though sometimes not everyone goes home… It's mysterious at its best but not all that likable. More complex than any of the stories in Heads or Tailes, but also less attractive, and the art seems less accomplished here, but I think this is somewhat deliberate, she didn't want attractive, colorful characters, she wants a little creepy, and for the music to be central, not beauty. Ugly is in a way the point, as even the girl characterizes the song itself as ugly at the beginning, and both she and her Grandpa seem to almost deliberately drawn to be "ugly," or at least purposely physically unattractive… interesting, but on some level it didn't work for me, I didn't love it… though it seems to have succeeded in its intentions. Maybe I just like pretty things more than creepy things? And maybe then I would imagine Carre would shake her head and say, I'm disappointed in you for that. less

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