(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Appearances, as we all know and have been instructed about repeatedly, can be deceiving.
For one reason or another, people project one thing while living quite another, a white lie in most cases that avoids emotional entanglement, vulnerability or the need to share in something that they would rather just keep to themselves.
But in some cases, the reason is a bloody and dark one such as we are shown in Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath, a graphic novel where the secret held is a doozy and the ramifications of holding that secrets are heartbreakingly bloodthirsty and unnerving.
At the centre of this incredibly clever and enormously thoughtful story, which feels like Dexter meets Richard Scarry with a heady dose of Sylvanian Families, is Samantha Strong, the lovable brown bear who owns the hardware store on the cosy town of Woodstock’s main street and who is loved and adored by everyone.
The thing is, Samantha is also a serial killer.
She is however careful not to murder anyone too close to home, heading instead to the big city beyond the forest which surrounds her town and in which she tortures and buries her unfortunate victims.
She may initially appear to be weirdly, twistedly ethical and sweetly protective of the townsfolk who sees her as the absolute salt of the earth and pillar of the community, but as you discover later on, for all her outward, buoyantly social appearances, Samantha is pathologically detached from other people (later events in the graphic novel bear (haha) that out chillingly) and only really avoids murdering in Woodstock to avoid drawing attention to herself and to avoid the unnecessary complications that would result.
But then all of Samantha’s darkly protective efforts look like they’ll come to nothing when people, anthropomorphic animal people, start dying in bloody fashion, one after the other, and Samanthat realises she will need to find the killer herself, and quickly, lest her own dark and terrible secret screams to the surface of one of the burial mounds in the surface and her tidily constructed, if morally sick world, comes crashing down around her.
The brilliance of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is that Horvath writes with such empathetic humanity that Samantha actually somehow emerges as somewhat of a relatable, likeable figure.
That doesn’t mean of course that you won’t be freaked out to the very depth of your heart and soul by how coldly calculating Samantha can be; simply that Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees occupies a storytelling rich grey area that allows the graphic novel to explore how the stories we tell ourselves can have some really dark and twisted rationales despite all outward appearance to the contrary.
The artwork too is a sublime joy, with Horvath summoning up both small town and big city life perfectly, his eye for the cosy and the brutal allowing each to exist alongside each other and to increase the existential horror page by page that powers this brilliantly imagined story.
While Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is in some ways not for the fainthearted, it proves that graphic novels can tell incredibly meaningful and potently visual stories that reach deep into your heart, quite literally as it turns out, and make you look again at the stories you tell yourself and the secrets you keep.
