4 out of 5

Indeed.  Bleak stuff from Forsman; the kind of personality deep dives that fiction helps us to realize.  As with the affecting Slasher, Charles is dealing with the pain and pleasure continuum – the misasmic meetup between physical and emotional; personality wires perhaps connected from those early formative moments, or perhaps not.  Which is the unique element to Forsman’s work: what can be read as a darkly-humored glee for random brutality in Revenger is, in a story such as TEOTFW, a quiet contemplation on whether such violence has any meaning; any impact.  On the disaffected James, killing animals as a youth and dreaming of strangling his girlfriend, Alyssa; on Alyssa, with her subtle fear and yet justifications of – and maybe adaptations of – James’ attitudes. And behaviors.  But this isn’t the birth of a killer, it’s much more subtle than that.  And because it’s Charles, much more weird than that, veering into the kind of concepts Revenger mined, mimicking the dregs of society as a reminder that things are not well all over.

Because it’s the end of the world, after all.

Foreman’s art here is spot on, with a Peanuts-esque simplicity the perfect way to capture his characters’ dissonance.  Some of the repeated paneling he uses feels occasionally driven more out of structural design than purposeful, and the book’s dual narration – switching chapters between James and Alyssa – is clean (as in not confusing), but something about it feels somehow imbalanced, like it’s not really either James’ or Alyssa’s story.  Which you could say is part of the point,and leaving out one character’s thoughts would have cheapened things, I just wonder if divvying up the voices somehow otherwise (first Alyssa, then James…?) might’ve strengthened things just a tad more.

 Not your cup of tea if you dig on happy endings, but of you like feeling uncomfortable and not being provided with easy Why answers… yup.