The Murder Next Door: A Graphic Memoir

In D’Andrade’s thought-provoking debut, he depicts himself as a suburban 10-year-old in the late 1970s, recounting how he saw the nude, dead body of his murdered neighbor after her own young sons discovered it, and in denial, begged him to go look. In adulthood, the disturbing memory is a persistent source of anxiety and dread—which he tries to reason away (the proximity was frightening, yet it was not his family member). Cue self-loathing, which he shares with his therapist in present-day scenes as he struggles with “toxic masculinity,” which he loathes but fears he embodies, despite trying to be a “different kind of man.” Through therapy, he mourns his kind neighbor, wonders about the at-large murderer, and regains his sense of safety. This is not a whodunit, though the murderer is found eventually via familial DNA. In bold line drawings, the colors deployed are primarily aqua with blood-red accents—with the exception of a scene in which Hugh imagines telling himself as a child, in full-color drawings of the murder scene, “When you put the bright colors next to all that black, it makes them appear even brighter.” It’s an empathetic look at the lifelong quest to find light amid the dark. Agent: Madison Smartt Bell, Pande Literary. (Feb.)