Tag: House of Leaves

The Book of Murmurs Review on Comics Beat

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I recently had the opportunity to write a review of The Book of Murmurs, a new graphic novel from Fantagraphics about a young girl who goes on a magical journey through a fantasy world.

You probably think you know what you’re getting from that description, but this is an incredibly rich and dense story. I actually had to push back my review because, as I explained to my editor, I wasn’t expecting this book to be House of Leaves Junior. Formulating the basic outline of the plot was an intriguing challenge, and I had to do a fair bit of outside research, which included finding interviews with the artist while studying her social media posts. In case this sounds like a bad thing, please rest assured that The Book of Murmurs is well worth the time and effort.

Here’s an excerpt from my review:

In a launch day interview, Purwin describes her work as a reflection of her experience as a child growing up in the 1980s, when lush fantasy films like Labyrinth and The Secret of Nimh were suffused with sinister undertones and didn’t always make sense. Purwin says that she created The Book of Murmurs for her younger self, who would stay up late to watch movies like Stand by Me and then spend days dwelling on the unfamiliar imagery while processing a lingering sense of unease. The Book of Murmurs perfectly captures the sense of fascination with forms and meanings half-glimpsed through shadows, always asking compelling questions that don’t have straightforward answers.

I’d like to expand on my review here and say that I would have loved The Book of Murmurs as a kid. As an adult who appreciates the fragmented and nonlinear storytelling of The Magnus Archives and Bloodborne, I really enjoyed getting lost in this graphic novel. Based on the artist’s gorgeous and heartbreaking social media minicomics about Palestinian refugees, I also get the sense that there are strong political currents underlying the adventure story, and I hope this book receives the sympathetic scholarly attention it deserves. It’s so good.

You can read my full review on Comics Beat here:
https://www.comicsbeat.com/book-of-murmurs-review/

Rental

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Rental
https://smarto-club.itch.io/rental

With the spooky season upon us, Smarto Club decided to take a break from being wholesome and turned spooky with Rental, an eerie game about the risks of renting beach houses.

Rental is a 32-bit game about a family of cute bunnies who rent a vacation house in the woods. This isn’t a horror game, necessarily, but it’s strange and lowkey creepy. It takes about fifteen minutes to finish, although it might take slightly longer for people who are out of practice with PlayStation One style 3D spatial navigation.

As the daughter of the bunny family, your job is to walk through the house and collect objects. The twist is that there are House of Leaves shenanigans going on. The first half of the game takes place aboveground, while the second half is more of an adventure. There’s a shadow monster in the house with you, but its appearance seems to be random. I only saw it once, briefly, during my second playthrough, and it wasn’t a big deal. Rental is much more atmospheric than scary, and most of the atmosphere has to do with the ambient music and the oddness of the scenario.

Rental works well as analog horror. The graphics and gameplay and washed-out colors feel super outdated, as do the Hello Kitty character designs. There’s also the combination of the nostalgic childhood experience of going on vacation with the childhood discomfort of trying to settle into an unknown place. The house you’re exploring has a standard layout and floorplan, and the girl often comments on how normal and unremarkable everything is, which adds to the sense of the uncanny.

The Christian religious icons the girl has to gather are also totally normal. For me, this created an extra layer of resonance in the sense of going to a mundane place with a lot of Christian art and imagery and feeling that everything is slightly weird about the oddly suffering men and oddly beatific women and oddly mature babies. I appreciate the girl’s no-nonsense attitude toward everything in the house, which makes the ending all the more amusing.

There are no jumpscares in this game, and it’s not challenging. Rental is a simple but spooky fifteen-minute treat for connoisseurs of perfectly normal houses that are ever so slightly larger on the inside.