February 1, 2016
The streets, houses, and people that populate the linked pieces of Drnaso’s blandly terrifying debut collection all share a soul-deadening, right-angled sameness that turns into its own kind of nightmare. Set in Chicago and its suburbs, the stories refract the familiarities of popular fiction and TV about teenagers, high school, and family. But while Drnaso’s hard-angled, Chris Ware–like art is flat, bright, and simply drawn—like exercises in perspective done in some ’80s computer drawing program—a murky queasiness soon fills each tight-cropped frame. From a family vacation shattered by an unwelcome intrusion of childhood sexuality to a longer piece about a rape (which reads like a tabloid tale redone by Daniel Clowes), the book is heavy with alienated fear and haunted by predators imagined and real. Ironically, in the final story, a drunk man complains about how he’d never want to live downtown (“probably get mugged or something”), though the lonely outer ’burbs he is returning to are dark with fear and loathing.
March 15, 2016
In his first book-length work, Drnaso offers a half-dozen thematically linked short stories that obliquely reveal the repressed desperation that underlies suburban ennui. A family on a road trip learns uncomfortable, unwanted sexual truths about their preadolescent son; a recent high-school grad drags her not-quite boyfriend to a party where she has a disastrous reunion with her former BFF; a community reacts divisively to news of a 16-year-old's abduction from the pizza shop where she works. Family bonds unravel as though they never existed, and the line between sensitive introvert and potentially violent loner is shown to be paper-thin. The most fully realized characters are the surly teenagers, who, in Drnaso's critical but not entirely unsympathetic depiction, sullenly endure their well-intentioned but stunningly naive parents. Drnaso's visual understatementa simple drawing style using thin, unvarying lines; a straightforward panel grid; and a muted color palateunderscores his low-key, restrained narrative approach. Beverly establishes Drnaso, already masterful in his graphic assurance and storytelling skill, as a talent to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)