The night watchman

Blurring the lines between picture book, fiction, and comics, this distinctive illustrated novel by a European team defies easy categorization; part noir detective story and part fable, Labrune's narrative flexes and shimmers with bold magical realism. A night watchman narrates; equipped with a forehead lantern that casts a bright yellow beam wherever he looks, he is charged with guarding a town whose three clock towers are being sabotaged one by one. "Time," he declares, "has lost its voice." He tracks down the culprit, the Vagabond, and his accomplice, a beautiful newspaper vendor the Watchman knows and admires. They convince him to hear their story before arresting them, and the knowledge they reveal changes their lives and dooms the town. Fischer's artwork, like primitive linocuts, uses luminous blues, yellows, and roses to conjure obscure shapes and ghostly figures. Wilson's translation is elegant, though the text will likely strike many readers as overwrought ("They have returned to haunt the night, disgorging themselves into the streets through the suppurating wound of the sewers"). Yet those who give themselves over to it may find themselves entranced. Ages 8-up. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A mysterious rash of broken clocks signals the (literal) rise of old horrors in this sly French import. The action is as stylized as Fischer's art-deco screen-print illustrations, which place semiabstract figures in claustrophobic cityscapes formed of geometric spaces, loud colors, glaring lights, and deep shadows. "This is my time," begins the titular night watchman, self-assuredly setting off on his routine patrol with a lamp that looks inset into his cranium to provide illumination. But the appalling discovery that two of the city's three towering clocks have been dismantled on his watch sends him on a long chase after a "Vagabond." This turns out to be the night watchman's predecessora robot who had in pre-clock Olden Times driven a plague of crocodilian nightmares down into the municipal sewers. The clocks' destruction touches off a general riot, and then (with the narrative's high-toned language pitching even further over the top) giant reptiles burst out again, "disgorging themselves into the streets through the suppurating wound of the sewers." There's nothing for it but to flee through those same noisome tunnels: "The city has digested us," the narrator concludes, emerging alimentarily with a companion into sunlight. "I shall not light my lamp again." Readers may have trouble swallowing, much less digesting, the tale's more rococo elements, but both the tone and the distinctive art play up its melodrama. (Graphic fantasy. 12-17) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.