Page 45 Review by Stephen
“The world doesn’t change. They found the bloody clothes in his closet. It doesn’t matter if he did it or not. He’ll be rotting away in a place like this just like me. What does he have that I don’t?”
I read this again the other day and by the beginning of the final, nightmarish chapter of this nail-biting, dark-as-they-come crime I was very close to tears. Although the page I quote from above had already sent me over the edge, especially when Michael’s boyfriend quietly but determinedly replies:
“He has me.”
Second half of the best crime fiction I’ve read since Brubaker & Phillips’ KILL OR BE KILLED. This is every bit as personal and psychologically astute. We made vol 1 Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month so offer this to our members at £3 off too.
It is, I believe, the only bona fide whodunit in the house.
Discovering the truth is of pressing importance not just for justice but to stop history repeating itself.
Milwauke, December 1973:
A department-store Santa is discovered stripped down to pants, tied to his armchair, eyes a flood of blood. Separately, his two teenage elves are found in a snow-swept barn, stark naked, genitally mutilated, strung and lit up like a Christmas tree.
Milwauke, December 2023:
Michael and Derek have been boyfs for seven years. Michael is the more intense of the two, and the more distant, sad, self-absorbed. Currently he's being driven, partly by formative experiences in his childhood, to interview the now elderly man, Randall, originally arrested for the crimes on not inconsiderable (yet circumstantial) evidence.
As Michael explains, "Randall hasn't changed his story in almost fifty years. He says he's innocent, and maybe he is. He hopes the gay writer is going to be the one who tells the story he wants. The one he's wanted people to tell. But this comic... It's not really about him.
"It's about me."
Chicago, December 2023:
Oh dear.
This book opens with my fav scenes, in Milwaukee 1999 during Michael’s adolescence, when his best friend at the time goads him into looking at details of the first Christmas killings and – well, see for yourself. Nicely done, all of it.
