Heads or Tails

Carre, author of The Lagoon, has a new collection out, a scrapbook of strange and beautiful stories. Dark and surreal moments fill most of these pages. A soap saleswoman is slowly forced out of her routine and her life by a mysterious doppelgänger. An opinionated professional flower arrangement judge survives a car accident only to lose his critical compass. And an entire city awakens to a sound that everyone interprets differently. Carre’s visual exploration and experimentation also work wonders for her stories, as she switches between styles and colors with each story. Her willingness to try anything is evident in one short comic that echoes the structure of Cloud Atlas’s stories within stories within stories, and showcases Carre’s ability to tell intricate and meaningful narratives in the course of a just a few pages. Her tales are also close studies of people brushing up and pushing past one another, struggling to connect. In the course of many of these, Carre investigates how we are lonely and the many futile ways we attempt to connect and hold on. Some are stronger than others, but each one is a weird, lovely gift. (Nov.)