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Father's Day by Sefton Eisenhart | ★★★★★

I'm a fan of a certain kind of crime writing. Big-city organized crime? Sure, I'll take it. Urban low lifes eking out a living a la Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, not to mention the century of writers that influenced them? Yeah, I'm into that. But there's something special about the rural, small-potatoes crime stories that Sefton Eisenhart's latest story, Father's Day, embodies that appeals to me.

Maybe it's my small-town, midwest origins, having grown up around the kinds of people that populate stories like these, with their desperation mixed with a deep sense of pride, their fucked-up bonds to family and community.

Anyway, it's a brief foray into a world that I'd gladly spend more time in. I kept thinking back to Frank Bill's collection of Ohio River Valley miscreants in Crimes in Southern Indiana. Ida from Father's Day would have fit right in.

As a bonus, Nantucket Lit has published a lovely limited edition of Father's Day in chapbook format, typeset using a vintage electric typewriter. It lends the story a timeless quality, something from a world where the internet hasn't quite permeated. Read up on the typesetting on Nantucket Lit's website.

Buy Father's Day by Sefton Eisenhart on Nantucket Lit.

Tongues Vol. 1 by Anders Nilsen | ★★★★☆

I've only read one other Anders Nilsen comic, and it was more of a collection of sketches and shorter work. Tongues is on a much grander scale.

It feels sprawling at first as the narrative jumps around between seemingly unconnected characters, but the whole eventually takes shape. Sharply drawn and written, it's an impressive doorstop of a book. Vol. 1 ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, but does give the reader a few important reveals. I might have to pick up individual issues from now on.

I have a memory from childhood of spending time at a lake house with my parents. We rented it, this was long before AirBnB. It was a cool A frame house with a staircase that went right down to a nice dock with a pontoon boat that we could use. I always remembered it as "Hike Lake" but I had no real memory of where exactly it was. I knew it was in southern Michigan somewhere, but that was about it. And it turns out searching the web for "hike lake michigan" or a million variations of that was extremely unhelpful.

Anyway, after a fruitless search I finally suspected that it must have had some odd spelling variation, so I started searching for a bunch of different spellings and eventually found it.

I've had this map open in a tab for a week and it felt like some important comment was on the tip of my tongue. Even with what feels like the entirety of human knowledge only a few clicks/taps away, there remain things that are hard to find. I couldn't remember the actual name, and the details I could remember made it difficult to search for.

There are other things like this, things I remember but that I can't find any trace of on the internet because I don't remember the right search terms.

I'm going to end this post before I end up down some rabbit hole about human knowledge and technology.