La théorie du grain de sable - Schuiten and Peeters

There is a sense of both La Fièvre d’Urbicande and L’enfant penchée in the latest book of Schuiten and Peeters’ marvellous Les Cités obscures series, when the city of Brusels starts to show signs of strange localised phenomena that threatens to gradually overwhelm the city. An elderly man discovers large white rocks appearing out of nowhere into his apartment on a daily basis, one of his neighbours finds her house gradually being inundated with white sand, and a chief in a restaurant notices that he is getting lighter each day. Mary Van Rathen (L’enfant penchée) is called in to investigate the links between these seemingly unrelated events and believes they may be connected to the death of a mysterious foreign visitor to the city. It’s marvellous to see François Schuiten working in black-and-white once again and his detailed drawings of the cityscapes and people of Brusels are simply wonderful. Whether the story lives up to its promise remains to be seen however, since this is another two part story. À suivre...


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