It’s been a hard year. I saw exactly one film in theaters, my favorite albums weren’t as phenomenal as my favorites in years past, and I can’t leave my phone in my pocket for one hour without the discourse shifting to the President’s tweets, another beloved celebrity being exposed as a sexual assailant, or some other Hell. So over the next twelve days, I’ll be counting down twelve pieces of entertainment that kept me sane in 2017.

3. The Can Opener’s Daughter (Self Made Hero), by Rob Davis

In 2014, Rob Davis released The Motherless Oven, a strange tale that can be summed up simply: Knowing the when but not the how, Scarper Lee deals with the knowledge that he will die in three weeks. We see those three weeks unfold as the mysterious Vera Pike changes his conception of the world while they, along with Castro Smith, quest to help Scarper escape his supposedly inevitable death. Its ending is blunt and brutal.

That simple summary is deceptive. More interesting than Scarper Lee, and even more interesting than Vera Pike, is the world they inhabit.

“The weather clock said, ‘knife o’clock.’ So I chained dad up in the shed.”

“A couple of local bands were torturing their parents outside – racing them up and down the main road at full throttle.”

“The sound of the chains on the mines is always the first sign of summer.”

The above absurdities are put matter-of-factly. Perhaps as a way to level our sense of wonder with the teenagers discovering this world, we’re presented with a land whose logic makes no intuitive sense.

It’s not a dystopia. No, dystopian tales highlight where a society has gone wrong. It’s not an Alice in Wonderland or The Phantom Tollbooth situation, as we have no audience proxy. To these characters, this is all rather mundane.

A line from The Can Opener’s Daughter might be a worthy glimpse into said logic.

Children create their parents, and are frequently seen riding them, carrying them, dropping them, and so on. Where children are made…it remains mysterious, and we can’t even be sure the obvious answer is involved.

And, of course, everyone knows how long they have to live. Scarper Lee had three weeks.

The Can Opener’s Daughter picks up after those three weeks, but it takes a pretty big risk for its first half: a recollection of the life of Vera Pike. Usually, I’m not for all-at-once information dumps via flashback, but the trick here is that Vera grew up in Grave Acre, where we have an entirely new set of rules to confound us. A sort of answer to the first act’s most burning question – who the hell is Vera Pike? – does little to curdle any intrigue and might actually fan its flames.

The Motherless Oven‘s Bear Park had lions standing guard during school hours, knife storms, and death days. The Can Opener’s Daughter‘s Grave Acre has an annual bird slaughter each student must carry out, nameplates whose enduring quality – both their physical well-being and the name they display – are the greatest signifiers of social status, and scheduled suicides.

While death in the Bear Park is absolute and tracked by the government, death in Grave Acre is always by suicide, plotted out and planned from childhood to live through the good times while avoiding wasting away in miserable later years.

This is probably the bluntest social commentary to be found in Rob Davis’ world.

But The Motherless Oven hinted that Vera was of some unthinkable importance.

The Can Opener’s Daugher does not dance around it: “Mum started drinking after she became Prime Minister. Dad started hiding under the bed.” She is the Prime Minister’s daughter. Although what it means to be Prime Minister…that remains to really be seen.

But after the flashback and after the book begins suggesting that Vera and the her mother have some parallels worth thinking about, it begins to do with Castro Smith – whose “Medicated Interference Syndrome” is constantly on the verge of annihilating him with understanding – what The Motherless Oven did with Vera Pike: suggest that he’s the most interesting character in Rob Davis’ universe, that he’s the key to everything.

If The Can Opener’s Daughter is any indication, The Book of Forks (the last in the trilogy) will succeed through foiling those very expectations.

Though this book is punctuated by a moment when someone who puts up glorified wanted posters considers a proposal to instead use that real estate to post Castro’s grand theory of everything. In exchange for a bike. A rather useful thing in a world where cop cars travel no faster than a walking pace, simply relying on sheer persistence.

It’s just that sort of book.

Davis’ art keeps getting sharper, and these books meet their alien setting with a maintained headspace I’ve never felt before. I ache every day for the conclusion more than I do any other book, but I’m sure I’ll regret it once some sort of sense has been made.

Even moreso than The Motherless Oven, The Can Opener’s Daughter is a beautiful book to feel lost in.

___

(previously)

#12: Doki Doki Literature Club

#11: Riverdale

#10: 4:44

#9: The Young Pope

#8: Life Will See You Now

#7: Super Mario Odyssey

#6: Better Call Saul

#5: The Wicked + The Divine: “Imperial Phase”

#4: competitive fighting games (part 1: Smash 4), (part 2: Street Fighter V), (part 3: Super Smash Bros. Melee)