Laid Waste by Julia Gfrörer

The best creators are unique, with styles and concerns different from everyone else. You know their work clearly: it is what it is, and it is intensely itself.

Julia Gfrörer draws thin lines, mostly all the same width. Her stories are set in the deep European past, told straightforwardly with a cold but not unsympathetic camera-eye. They are about death most of the time, I think.

Laid Waste was her 2016 graphic novel; it followed Black Is the Color, and - if Wikipedia can be trusted - is still her most recent book.

It's set during the plague: probably the 1300s, somewhere in Europe. In an unnamed town, there's a woman named Agnes who seems to be immune to the plague - well, we first see her "die" of it as a baby, and then be pulled out of her grave, so the scientific explanation is that she survived it once and afterward was immune.

There could also be a supernatural explanation. The people in this world are more likely to believe that one. It doesn't comfort them - nothing would comfort them right now, as all the people around them are dying, one by one, painfully and hideously, and the dogs and rats flourish, growing more bold every day.

The dead are all around. We see people die, we see the bodies piled in the churchyard and a ditch. We see the dogs fight over those bodies. We see the survivors - the current survivors; this isn't over yet - continuing with their lives, milking cows and tending crops. Even when the world is ending, they still need to eat.

And we see Agnes at the center of this: strong and capable and healthy. She's holding her older sister when she dies early in the book; she sees other deaths, lugs other bodies. What she's going through is unendurable, we think - but what's the alternative? She is still alive. So many others are dead.

The other main character is Giles, a neighbor. He also seems to be a lucky one, still healthy as we see him. But death strikes his family as well: no one in this village is untouched, not the children, not the plague doctor with his pointy mask.

Agnes and Giles connect: I'll call it that. Cling to each other, I suppose, as two of the few people healthy enough to keep things going. As the ones who have to keep things going, until they fall themselves.

Agnes and Giles, and the rest of their village, believe in the supernatural - Death personified, saints and angels. They see and talk about that; it may be "real" in the world of the story, but it's not nice and it's not comforting. This is a hard world, full of death and woe, and no one talks about the joys of the afterlife, seeing their friends and family die in pain.

Laid Waste is a short book: about eighty pages, covering just a few days. It looks unflinchingly at this world of death and sadness, and we see it through the eyes of the inhabitants. It is powerful and chilly and unnerving and, maybe, with just a tiny bit of hope at the end. (If I had titles for these posts, this one would be "Let Me Walk You Home.")