Echoes - a creepy, Hitchcockian graphic novel

By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:04 am Tuesday, Sep 6

My 14-year-old daughter spotted the review copy of Echoes sitting on my desk. Intrigued by the creepy images on the front cover, which included small illustrations of what appeared to be voodoo dolls, ghostly hands, and scenes of haunted and frightened people, she grabbed the graphic novel, disappeared into her room for an hour and reemerged with a favorable verdict. "Read it," she said. "It's creepy and you'll like it."

I read it. She was right. It was creepy and I liked it. Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov and illustrated by Rahsan Ekedal, Echoes is about a man named Brian Cohn who has to take the antipsychotic medication Clozapine at scheduled times throughout the day. If he doesn't, he starts to hallucinate, especially when he is subjected to stressful events. And as you might expect, Brian gets blasted with plenty of stressful events, usually under circumstances that don't allow him to take his medicine -- like when he is searching the decrepit, abandoned house that his father told him to visit in order to find the bodies of dead children stored there.

The best word to describe Echoes is Hitchcockian, because Brian is a confused victim who doesn't know what's real and what is the product of his schizophrenic brain, and because there are good twists in the story.

Read the first issue online for free here.

Buy Echoes on Amazon