THE DORMANT BEAST

This haunting, open-ended story of a future society reeling from terrorist violence turns the stuff of ugly current events into extraordinary art. Nike Hatzfield was born in Yugoslavia (like Bilal himself), during the siege of Sarajevo. Nike has perfect recall and can remember everything that has happened to him since he was orphaned as a baby. Because of this talent he's become the target of The Obsurantis Order, a kind of pan-fundamentalist (Judaism, Christianity and Islam team up) terrorist group dedicated to eradicating "thought, science, culture and memory." Nike is dragooned into a plot to destroy the OO by the Federal Bureau of International Investigation, an agency as ruthless as the fiendish terrorists it's fighting. A pawn of both sides, Nike is brutally transformed into a deadly telepathic homing device guided to the mysterious target by a voice in his head. But he's also determined to find two orphans who survived Sarajevo with him, who are also targets of the OO. The book moves cinematically between the lives of these three. Much as he did in his acclaimed graphic novel The Nikopol Trilogy, Bilal has created a beautiful, brooding retro-future world that looks like a cross between Blade Runner and Dune. It's a world of random violence, human isolation, flying cars, deadly androids and blighted high-tech multileveled cities rendered in gothic gloom and punctuated by streaks of rich startling color. Best known in Europe for award-winning comics that dwell on themes of violence, intolerance and uncertain identity, Bilal has used the grim events of contemporary life to create a gripping work of allegorical science fiction. (Jan.)