It’s not exactly been the best time for reading. I’m spending most of my breaks at work looking for a different job, since the one I started at two weeks ago sold me a bill of lies, and I’ve been sick for what feels like about half the time lately. Today, I’m on my second cold in a row. And when you’re tired on a good day, like I am, a cold will leave you with practically no energy to speak of. This means reading has fell quite by the wayside.
However, I found time to set aside for Sabrina, the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. Honestly, it’s that last bit, making the longlist, that inspired me to read it. I saw it on a list of recommended graphic novels, but would’ve glossed right over it were it not for that. What I saw mentioned of the plot, that a woman goes missing and you see the effect of her disappearance on the people who knew her, surely wasn’t making this sound like anything out of the ordinary.
Drnaso, though, taps perfectly, and eerily, into the headspace of the “false flag” folks. From the moment we’re first introduced to the radio show with someone who sounds like Alex Jones transported into this fictional world, I was 100% in. Seeing that radio show devolve, and the effects it and the news cycles have on the people who knew Sabrina, was like looking into people like Jones himself, only without the added layer of it being a grim reality. That degree of separation you have, due to it being a work of fiction, makes the bitter pill easier to swallow and understand.
We want to think that everybody who falls in with this sort of crowd is “evil” in some sense of the word, but there are in-roads you wouldn’t even think about. It’s a whirlpool that you can quickly get caught up in in one way or another if you dare swim too close. Even if it doesn’t pull you under and into it, it’ll chew you up just the same. So for an eerily accurate deep dive into this phenomenon, Sabrina is most certainly the way to go.
