Bayou: chilling ghost story, a graphic novel about race and haunts in the deep south

Cory Doctorow 6:21 am Wed May 27, 2009

Jeremy Love's Bayou is a graphic novel ghost-story that is scary, beautiful and sad. Lee is a sharecropper's daughter in 1930s Mississippi who finds herself in trouble when her white friend, Lily, loses her necklace in the bayou and blames it on Lee, rather than facing a beating. Her problems only get worse when her father is framed for Lily's disappearance, and Lee has to go to the spirit world to rescue her father.

Creepy and sad, Bayou reminded me favorably of Robert McCammon's award winning Boy's Life, a thoughtful story about racial injustice, the spirit world, family, love, heritage and history, which never lets go of its fundamental ghostiness, even as it relentlessly pursues beauty through the gorgeous pastoral scenes in the art.

This is volume one, and having read it, I'm impatient to know how it ends, and frightened, too.

Bayou

Update:: Turns out you can read it online for free!(Thanks, Fancycwabs!)

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