Nick Drnaso, _Sabrina_

I MENTIONED AT band practice that I was interested in this, what with its having made the Man Booker longlist and so on, and one of my bandmates mentioned  that he had picked it up recently. "It's good," he said, "dark."

Dark? I would say so. The title character we see only in the opening pages, interacting with her sister. The next thing we know, she has disappeared. Her boyfriend, Ted, at a loss for what to do, departs Chicago to stay with a friend in Colorado. The friend, Calvin, is in the Air Force, with some kind of IT responsibilities, and has room for Ted because his wife and daughter have moved out--the marriage is coming apart. While at Calvin's, Ted (and the nation) get the news that Sabrina was abducted and murdered by a young, psychotic loner. In a few days' time, the story gets picked up and spun into fantastical conspiratorial shapes by internet trolls and radio talk show hosts. Ted is rendered near catatonic by this development; Calvin is not much help.

The book is good, though, as well. It reminded me in many ways of the work of Chris Ware.

Like Ware, Drnaso is ingenious with panel design. Imagine a template of a rectangular page with six equal-sized squares in three rows of two apiece. Then, imagine two, three, or four of those panels turned into four smaller equal-sized squares. Then imagine how many different permutations of those patterns you could have. Thus, even though each page remains rectilinear, the design keeps changing, transforming within its regularity, varying the pace of the narrative.

Ware-like too is the book's muted palette--lots of brown and gray, with even the reds and blues leaning towards the sombre. Even the panels that represent pages in Calvin's daughter's book, with crowd scenes reminiscent of Where's Waldo?, seem subdued, dim.

Most Ware-like of all is that the characters often seem flat, as in not quite seeming to be in three-dimensional space, mere outlines, their facial expressions often just squiggles and a couple of dots for eyes, while the backgrounds have a draughtsman's precision, rigorous vanishing-point perspective, painstaking detail. It's as if the world these characters inhabit, the objects and spaces with which they live their lives, have a definiteness, a clarity, a purposiveness, a there-ness that they, the characters, grimly lack.

In Sabrina, the American male is, at best, adrift, emotionally tone-deaf, unavailable--at worst, a psychopathic killer. So, yes...dark.