Dave-El's Book Report: Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips

It has been awhile since the last edition of Dave-El’s Book Report where I posted about Night Fever, a graphic novel  by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

 

So what other books have I read since then? 

 

Today’s edition of Dave-El’s Book Report is a graphic novel  by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

 

For crying out loud, do I not read anything else?

 

As I have read other books (actual book books) and they will one day be the subject of a future post of Dave-El’s Book Report.

 

But today, my attention turns to Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips. 

 

Judging from the title, you might guess since there’s a body and we’ve got ourselves a murder mystery.

 

Not quite.

 

Yes there is a body and there are questions about how the body got dead, how the body got where it was and what not but the questions around the body are almost incidental compared to the larger tableau that Brubaker and Phillips create in this novel. 

 

Brubaker called the story "the strangest and most experimental thing" he and Phillips ever created.

 

And it is. 

 

The story is set in 1984.  Of course it is. Brubaker writing something set in the present day? As if!

 

The novel is a slice of life look at a wound up tight suburban neighborhood called Pelican Road. 

 

• Tommy and Karin squatting in the old rooming house, juvenile delinquents far from home, getting high. 
• They break into homes in the neighborhood, making quick scores for money for drugs and alcohol. 
• Tommy loves Karin. We’re less than clear on Karin thinks of Tommy.  
• There are the Melvilles, Ted the psychiatrist who is almost never home and his wife Toni who almost always is, lonely, neglected, bored.
• And there’s Palmer, man with a badge. People think he’s a cop and he let’s them think that but he’s not. He took the badge from his dead police officer father’s coffin.
• Toni invites Palmer in to alleviate her boredom.
• Meaning lots of fucking going on. 
• Palmer actually grows fond of Toni but worries what will happen if the lie about him being a cop is exposed.  
• Lila Nguyen patrols the neighborhood in a mask and cape as the Roller Derby Kid. 
• Ranko, the homeless vet who lives in the woods behind he convenience store.
• He keeps to himself mostly and is left alone except for that weird kid in the cape who brings him food sometime. 
• Oh, and Dr. Ted Melville. Ranko checks in with him from time to time.  
• Mrs. Wilson, neighborhood watch or just a nosy neighbor?  
• And speaking of nosy, there’s Jack Foster, PI, poking around the neighborhood looking for someone.  

Pelican Road is a seething cauldron of secrets, lies, hormones, frustration, fear, lust, desire and anxiety. 

Then there is the matter of the body.

Lila Nguyen is the one who finds it. It's that private eye who's been nosing around the neighborhood laying flat out on the sidewalk next to his car.  

Lila runs off the find an adult but no one believes her. She's a little girl wearing a mask and a cape and every grown up she tries to tell assumes she's playing some kind of make believe game.  

After 10 minutes of getting no one to listen to her, she goes back to where the body was (hey, that's the title of the book) and it and the PI's car are missing.

Well, what the fuck is going on?  

Palmer also found the body and knows a dead body lying on the street will bring the cops to Pelican Lane and there will be questions and inquiries and someone is going to say, "Maybe that cop who lives in the neighborhood knows something" and then....

Palmer loads the body into the PI's car and drives them far away from Pelican Lane where the cops can find the body there. 

Meanwhile, one of our cast has a plot to kill another person in our little tableau using a 3rd person in our group but then there are complications when Tommy and Karin break into the wrong house and...

There is an explosion of violence and a whole bunch of shit is laid bare.

The book ends with a number of  codas as we move into the future, the survivors of that summer on Pelican Road now older, wiser, sadder reflecting on those events.  

With hindsight, some of them arrive at answers. 

But even after so much time, some questions remain  unresolved.

Like who the hell killed that private investigator anyway? 

Brubaker and Phillips provides an answer in the very last pages of the novel labeled "But wait! Who killed the private eye?"  It was a stupid way to die. 

I have seen some reviewers describe Where the Body Was as a murder mystery and well, it isn't. At least not in the classic sense of a murder mystery.  

The story is about the quiet desperation in which many of us live our lives and the mystery is "How do we cope with that?" 

And what happens when we can't.

Where the Body Was is without a doubt the most ambitious, complex and challenging work to come out the team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips which I was very much engaged in it. I've read it multiple times.

The next Dave-El’s Book Report I promise will be about a book-book.