Book-A-Day 2018 #363: The End of the Fucking World by Charles Forsman

To a teenager, everything is huge. Everything is monumental, more important than anything else that has ever happened to anyone in the world.

Teenagers have no goddamn sense of perspective: that's how they're wired.

Charles Forsman, from what I've seen so far, focuses on that teenage feeling, that sense of being overwhelmed by life and trapped in a hostile world, and both amps up the tension of that feeling and places it in everyday life. His work appears, or at least what I've seen of it, as series of minicomics -- short moments, often shocking, to be strung together afterward to make a longer narrative of shocking moments.

(See my post on his book I Am Not Okay With This, a slightly later work.)

The End of the Fucking World is core Forsman, the book that got turned into a Netflix series, the stories that got him known.

Alyssa and James are seventeen -- extremely seventeen. James tells us at the beginning of the book he has some kind of problem with diminished emotional response: that's not how he says it, obviously. And Alyssa is his girlfriend, who seems to be the same way. Neither one seems able to interact normally with anyone else. Every tiny thing is, well, The End of the Fucking World.

So they run away, steal a car, hit the road to live life their way. But they're aimless and unfocused, the epitome of my favorite Elvis Costello quote. [1] And their world is just as random and violent and cruel and heartless as they are.

It would have to be, wouldn't it? It's the world that created them, and so it's the world that eventually grinds them up.

The story is told in eight-page chapters, mostly alternating between James and Alyssa's viewpoints. Depending on your sympathies, they can be deeply frightening in their affectlessness or horribly vulnerable in their cluelessness. Maybe both, even.

Forsman's art is simple, in a punky minicomics style: direct and clean, with faces a bit more cartoony than you'd expect for a story this violent. And he's sympathetic to Alyssa and James's desires while being clear-eyed enough to see how horrible and destructive they are. This is a shocking story, as shocking as the title. And it's a bit silly in its genre element: I Am Not Okay has its supernatural conceit better integrated, and is a more mature picture of a confused, mixed-up teen. But this is where Forsman started, and there's real power her in this story.


[1] "I'm not even sure what I want, but that's not the point -- it's that I want it now."