THE WORLDS WE LEAVE BEHIND

How do individuals shape the world around them?

Tommo’s friend Hex is the first person to appear in this eerie illustrated tale. Hex is careless, impulsive, cognizant of the ways he often acts without thinking. On Monday, when a younger child tagging after the boys falls out of a tree and breaks an arm, her big sister blames them, especially Hex. She succumbs to the temptation for retribution offered her by an old woman whose cottage mysteriously appears in the ancient forest nearby. The result? Hex is removed from the world entirely. On Wednesday, Tommo leaves his house in the morning with the sense that someone he knew well is simply no longer; it’s as if he’d never existed. Finding his own way to the cottage, Tommo makes the horrific discovery of Hex’s spiderweb-wrapped form. An official looking woman informs him of an Unauthorized Temporal Reweave and arms him with a device to remove the old woman and her timeline interference from this corner of the world—but Tommo must find the courage to use it. Pinfold’s fine-lined, chiaroscuro drawings—stars against the night sky, characters’ elongated faces and hands—are perfectly in tune with Harrold’s reserved, unsettling narrative voice. This original work, unfolding over the course of five weekdays, is reminiscent of William Sleator’s speculative fiction and will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Characters read White.

Compact and disquieting: a horror story with plenty of food for thought.