4 out of 5

Wiebe’s got a thing for love.  I mean, yeah, it’s a common trope, but Wiebe had some hefty thinking to do with Green Wake, working through a divorce, and you can trace elements of his ruminations on romance through the rogueish elements in Peter Panzerfaust and the lone-lady-against-the-odds in Debris.  Grim Leaper deals with it head on through an incredibly roundabout way, and though it ends up being a fairly simple tale, it’s a well balanced one, and tiptoes into interesting territory before its cute conclusion.

Lou keeps dying.  And waking up in a new body.  This has happened at least 13 times when we meet him, and he doesn’t yet really know the ‘why,’ just that it will happen.  Some insane accident, then a trip down a long dreamlike hallway where he’s gobbled up by a picture which then deposits him into his new body.  It’s an incredible sense of displacement that seems to help Lou ‘find himself,’ the generic moral realization that there’s more to the world than just you handled in Wiebe’s typically awesome subtle fashion, and with this clever spin on it to boot.  We follow him through a few issues, hopping from body to body, opening up to the ramifications of his actions, just wanting to give the people in these soon-to-be-dead people’s lives one more good day, or good morning.

And then some karma – Lou meets Ella, a girl who seems to be infected with the same forever-dying addiction.  And they keep meeting, body after body.  Another intelligent way to have us think on the nature of what attracts us to someone else and, during some short flashbacks into Lou and Ella’s lives, how difficult it is to break our cycles to get to such a point of natural attraction.

Cycles end up being what leads us to our story’s conclusion.  Wiebe doesn’t reach for the sky with Leaper, but it’s much more successfully paced than Debris and manages to pull off a high-level concept with enough substance to make the little love story a very worthwhile read.