Most modern supernatural fiction portrays death as a servant of the natural world. The grim reaper doesn’t choose who to kill, it just plays the role of the dutiful collector when called.
Nicholas Gurewitch’s death is a return to an older depiction of death, one who actively tries to kill people. The death in “Notes on a Case of Melancholia” is trying to kill an old man, and isn’t having much luck. Death has been depressed due to family issues. Luckily, the man he failed to kill is a psychoanalyst, and wants to help.
By Nicholas Gurewitch
Death arrives in this darkly humorous and brilliantly illustrated tale created by Nicholas Gurewitch, author of The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack!Death becomes a patient of a recently bereaved psychoanalyst. The topic of discussion? His frolicsome child, who has no apparent interest in grim reaping! Featuring an unfathomable number of lines which have been hand chiseled into inked clay, this labor of love by Nicholas Gurewitch invokes the morbid humor of his comic strip (The Perry Bible Fellowship) and the spooky silent-film qualities of the late Edward Gorey.
There are just two main characters in this book: Death is the protagonist who sets the story in motion, and the old man who fails to be killed is the antagonist. He’s a nice one though, and since he’s a widower he’s not alien to Death, and offers to help Death sort out why Death is depressed. It turns out that Death has a family, aunts and uncles and a father. (This family of reapers have gender and sex and children. Children means age and lowercase-d death. Who reaps Death? A Megadeath?)
Death also has a child who should be taking up the family scythe, but isn’t. Big Death instructs its child to reap a bunny, Little Death offers it a flower. The child leaves the scythe on the ground and runs around with all the little animals, playing with its small, fuchsia flower. Death is depressed about the whole thing. A classic symptom is depression is poor performance at your job, and that’s why he finds himself unable to kill this old man.
It’s a humorous little story. Simple enough to be good for children, dark enough to be worth reading with them.
Not there’s anything to read, this is a silent book. There’s only dialog balloon and it’s Death swearing in grawlix symbols (including a little scythe).
“Notes on a Case of Melancholia” is lighthearted book, but it is darkly drawn. Or etched. Every page is a full illustration filled with blackness and crosshatched with more blackness. There are barely any panels, this silent comic takes its inspiration from children’s books and Edward Gorey artwork.
This is not the first time Nicholas Gurewitch has taken inspiration from Gorey. Gurewitch is most well known for Perry Bible Fellowship, a gag comic that always starts brightly and ends morbidly, and often ironically once the view is pulled back and you can see the wider world. This comic follows that same formula, except it starts dark, and ends darker. Gurewitch’s brightness is only found in the humor and in the fact that this comic is fundamentally structure like a children’s book.
And that’s really what this book is. It’s a children’s story. The anthropomorphic personification of death is sad, and an old psychoanalyst is trying to help.
Therapy in fiction is practically its own genre. The author can take submerged traumas is surface them quickly. In this comic it produces some of the only “panels,” which end up being just shards of glass. The therapy does succeed. Eventually. After the doctor dies. He’s actually killed by the Little Death, and that’s how Parent Death learns that his child is the death of contagion. That fuchsia flower was killing everything. All those cute animals. Dead.
True to Gurewitch’s Gorey inspiration, there are few hints of the time period. There is psychoanalysis on a Freudian couch, and Victorian or Edwardian stylings, so we know it’s early 20th century. That means this diseases was a big one from the early 20th century. I’m not an epidemiologist, but I’m going to guess Spanish Flu.
I’m writing this review at the exact time that the Coronavirus has been declared a pandemic. You’d think I’d have more to say about diseases about a book that ends with mass diseases, but I don’t. This book isn’t about disease, it could just as well have been about drowning or meteor strikes. It’s really about family.
Continued belowThat’s why this book is appropriate for kids.
Children appreciate darker themes in books to a degree that adults don’t appreciate, because it reflects what they suspect is true of the world around them: monsters exist and are waiting to ambush them, probably from under the bed. Giving death a face (albeit skeletal) and family makes this dark concept easier to process, intellectually and spiritually.
There are a thousand children’s books that introduce kids to every possible form of etiquette and behavior and creativity, but books on death, this fundamental and quite-common feature of life, are tucked away in some distant corner of the bookstores. And worse, they’re horribly affirmational.
That’s what makes “Notes on a Case of Melancholia” a wonderful children’s book. It has death, humor, and hope on every page, which are all things that fill our world. By the last page everyone gets to be with their family, the doctor with his wife and Death with child. And isn’t that a happy ending?
