cover image Follow Me Down

Follow Me Down

Kio Stark. Cursor/Red Lemonade (www.redlemona.de), $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-935869-06-1

Stark's imaginative debut tells the story of a melancholy young woman who draws herself into a mystery everyone else in her crumbling neighborhood would rather avoid. Haunted by the guilt of abandoning her drug-addicted brother, Lucy has fled to a vague but rough part of New York City where, the only white girl around, she wanders aimlessly with an old plastic camera, observing and sometimes documenting her neighbors' lives: a mother arguing on her cellphone at the playground, a drug dealer at work, corner boys "harmonizing on someone's stoop." But after several months as spectator, Lucy finally becomes an actor in an urban drama after she finds in her mailbox an anonymous letter addressed to "Hombre Cinco," along with an old photograph of a man she's never seen before. Filled with a sense of purpose, Lucy attempts to uncover his identity, but the more people Lucy connects with and the more she learns about the case, the more she confirms her status as an outsider. Lucy's story is dotted with quick urban-anthropological observations and marked by a wistful (if sometimes melodramatic) tone, and her decision to close the story in such an open-ended way will leave readers either illuminated or infuriated. (June)