A Book to Make Friends With

Verstraete leaves no stone unturned in his English-language debut, a violence-drenched, underground-comic-style flight into the unknown. The proceedings open with an anarcho-comic noir nod to Pulp Fiction, when a couple of mouse-masked henchmen named Jules and Vincent beat a seemingly random stranger to death, then steal his briefcase and fence it to a crime boss known as Mr. Pussy. From there, the volume (which has been bound to mimic a valise, with actual handles) splits into multiple strands, none of them adhering to laws of narrative logic. The Mr. Pussy plot involves his complicated relationship with the quasi-demonic and briefcase-obsessed Lilith. Elsewhere, the man seemingly killed in the first pages is resurrected as a spirit passing from one entity to the next before he realizes he can create his own form. Verstraete includes a “writer” character who occasionally addresses the reader or his characters in futile, Monty Python–esque attempts to bring order to chaos, and even resorts at one point to a literal deus ex machina. Bright and dynamic figures cavort in bold colors, in acrobatic and often grotesque styles that range from pop psychedelia to quasi–German expressionism and American precisionism. It’s an expertly rendered if at times seemingly arbitrary journey into a realm of magic, brutality, and entropy. Verstraete finds a cockeyed humor in this apocalyptic vision. (Aug.)