The Squirrel Machine

Hans Rickheit

Fantagraphics, 2013, 192 pages

Kramers Ergot cartoonist’s achronistic parable for the convulsive elite is now in paperback.

What is The Squirrel Machine? • An immutably strange and haunting narrative that transcends known logics and presumptive dream-barriers; • A distillation of subconscious beauty and inspired madness; • A dangerous object for the incautious; • A revelation for the undernourished crypto-seeker; • The virgin caress of unconsummated apocalypse; • The unspeakable thing that you always knew. It’s also the longest and most ambitious graphic novel by legendary obscurantist cartoonist Hans Rickheit, 200 pages of exquisitely rendered pictorial narrative. Meticulous, strange, and hauntingly beautiful, this enigmatic work will ensure the inquisitive reader a spleenful of cerebral serenity that will take exposure to vast quantities of mediocrity to dispel. Set in a fictional 19th Century New England town, the narrative initially details the relationship and maturation of Edmund and William Torpor. But the two brothers quickly elicit the scorn and recrimination of an unamused public when they reveal their musical creations built from strange technologies and scavenged animal carcasses. Driven to seek a concealment for their aberrant activities, they make a startling discovery. Perhaps they will divine the mystery of the squirrel machine.