Swimming in Darkness

November 4, 2019
Harari melds academia, obsession, and mysticism in this eerie graphic novel about a young man traveling through a mysterious network of mountainside baths. Pierre, a French grad student who dropped out of school after a mental breakdown, decides to confront the object of his obsessive thesis: the Vals Thermal Baths in Switzerland. Along the way, he learns there’s a legend that “every hundred years, the mountain chooses a foreigner, lures him into its mouth, and swallows him up.” Pierre encounters a rival who will stop at nothing to gain the bath’s secrets, a woman also fascinated by their maze, and an eccentric hermit who tells him the legend is true. Harari works in a clear line with a sickly pastel palette, and his attention to architectural detail is crucial in establishing the strange, sinister mood. Disappearing doors, murder attempts, and unexpected romance all lead Pierre to his inevitable destiny with the mountain. This is a stylish, atmospheric book whose deliberate pacing deliciously builds tension and mystery.

December 1, 2019

DEBUT Promising architectural student Pierre drops out of school after suffering a mental breakdown while writing a dissertation on marvelous and eerie baths built atop a thermal spring in the Swiss Alps. Unable to move on, even as he's blocked from writing, he visits the site, where he swims, sketches, and discovers secret rooms and corridors that may be connected to a local legend stating that the mountain possesses a mouth that magically opens once every century. Debuter Harari creates a growing sense of dread as Pierre encounters inexplicable phenomena, townsfolk who know more than they're willing to share, and a French writer determined to stop him from delving further into the mysteries by any means necessary. VERDICT Harari's adept skills as a storyteller are elevated even further by his talents as a designer with a strong sense of color, as pleasantly round, cartoonish characters wander angular planes and inhabit a world filled with warm, glowing red rooms and grainy, foreboding purple skies.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2020
Pierre was nearly finished with his thesis on the Vals thermal springs in the Swiss Alps when he abruptly destroyed his research and dropped out of university. Several years later, he's back at Vals trying to figure out exactly what happened and why he can't resist the pull of the mountain there. Eccentric villagers speak of unexplained phenomena and disappearing men and, although the stories are mostly dismissed by the locals, Pierre can't deny the increasingly strange events he witnesses as he travels deeper and deeper into the history of Vals and the mountain itself. Economical and precise, this compelling mystery begs the reader to follow along to its ambiguous conclusion. The large format allows the illustrations to shine front and center, filling the oversize pages with panels washed in saturated hues of blue, red, and grey. The panels are often quite spare, distilling the isolation and unease of the narrative into single gestures, and any gentler moments are swiftly overcome by underlying tension. Beautifully rendered, this should appeal to discerning readers who favor the artwork as much as the story in graphic novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)