Squirrel Machine, The [Hardcover]

Occasionally, there are works of art or literature that defy simple classification. The brain breaks upon them like waves and they give up different secrets with each tide but never all the secrets and never all at once. These creations challenge as much as they entertain and ask for obsession as toll on the road to understanding.

The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit is just such an enigma. At face value, it is the tale of two brothers, Edmund, the elder, and William. They live in a small New England town at approximately the turn of the 20th century, and the village's desperate normalcy acts as backdrop for the boys' increasingly strange explorations. The Torpor brothers are creators, Edmund an inventor and William a musician who plays bizarre instruments of his brother's design. There are organs created from organs, music that emanates from pigs' heads and cow carcasses, and an attempt at a recital on the "Bovine Resonator" results in a riot. Misunderstood by the town's inhabitants and desperate to escape the attentions of their widowed mother (whose principle hobby seems to be painting stylized pornography), the two brothers eventually discover and retreat to a labyrinthine complex hidden beneath their home.

Plot is a nebulous concept here. How much of the story is metaphor, how much literal, and what part hallucination, all remain unclear and seem to shift during and between readings. The tale here lies in the telling. It is the characters' journeys, the enigmas that they encounter and create, that ultimately compel the reader onward to the unknown, the uncomfortable, and the unclear.

The art is fantastic in many senses of the word. It is clean yet complex, always intricate but never overwhelming. Mechanical and organic forms are interwoven in complex creations. Rickheit's vision is consistently compelling. Strange clockwork creations are fused with biology and windup toys are wedded to dissection samples. This is biotech steampunk where forms seem to whirr, click, and ooze right off the page.

The Squirrel Machine is ultimately an exploration of the mind. It delves into the imagination, unearthing fear, sex, repression, and finally, if not redemption, then reconstitution. Surreal, gorgeous, and both satisfying and confounding, The Squirrel Machine is a hypnotic, occasionally repulsive, always entertaining, and wildly creative graphic novel. It does not invite rereading so much as demands it, and each encounter reveals new and different details and interpretations. This book is a wonderful mystery, a basket of questions, a wealth of enigmas, and it looks utterly arresting every step of the way.

-- Christian Zabriskie

I discovered a mention of The Squirrel Machine on a web site that recommended it for fans of Al Columbia's brand of nightmarish art. It was described as a horror book but I would more classify it as some sort of macabre fantasy. The story revolves around two brothers, Edmund and William Torpor, who have one driving passion in life. They live to turn animal corpses into musical instruments. Let that sink in for a moment because it's far worse than you might imagine. Early in the story the two create an elaborate organ where the musical notes are connected to 43 severed pigs' heads. It is a grotesque monstrosity and I have no idea whether the horrible thing actually played music or simply squeaked and squealed like pigs. Even as the two brothers reveal their horrifying, putrid creations there is never even the slightest bit of malice evident and the reader might actually sympathize with the misunderstood pair who only want to create unspeakable, nightmarish instruments of *ahem* music.

The two boys live in an enormous house with their aging mother and much of the book is spent on Edmunds exploration of the house's cavernous secret passages and rooms filled with bizarre items like broken pianos, strange mechanical equipment and singing urinals. It is their relationship with the strange `pig lady' that possibly inspires them to their depraved hobby and ultimately to far worse but there exist horrors possibly even worse than the pig lady.

I'm not a huge fan of Rickheit's character drawings with their blank expressions but the backgrounds are positively stunning in their level of detail. The black and white drawings and dreamlike quality remind me somewhat of Jim Woodring who is also quite obsessed with organic grotesqueries. When Edmund slips beneath his bed into the bizarre inner workings of the house it has a sort of David Lynchesque feel to it and I'm not sure if the author was intending for this to be allegorical, hallucinations or straight out fantasy. The secret rooms contain cold mechanical gears and levers attached to animal corpses, the occasional human body part and organic pieces that defy description. There is no indication as to who created this hideous realm of death and sexual perversion, possibly the boys' deceased father but that is pure speculation since it's never even implied. Within this Willy Wonka like factory of horrors the Torpor boys engage in activities so far outside the social mores of society that only a mind as creative as it is twisted could conceive of it and yet the boys seem as innocent as any young boy with not a shred of visible evil.

The only writer/artist I have ever seen who took it even further than Hans Rickheit is Al Columbia whose Biologic Show is as sickening as anything I have ever read in comics. Between Rickheit, Columbia and another extreme cartoonist Tony Millionaire, Columbia is the one who truly seems to have no boundaries. Actually Millionaire is also about as uncensored as they come but I have this feeling that Columbia and Millionaire are completely nuts. Rickheit's `Squirrel Machine' is truly out there with countless disturbing images that just come from out of nowhere such a decapitated dog with wires and machinery coming from the neck and a horn in the anus. This is a story that's not going to appeal to everyone but it's one that will haunt the reader and for that alone I recommend it.

So I got this book without any knowledge of what it was about, I didn't even know it was a graphic novel until I opened it, but after seeing some drawings from it online I knew I had to give it a shot. So its short, most of the frames don't have any text, and I finished it my first time through in about an hour. Since then though I've gone back through several times, and every reread I notice little details in the drawings I missed before. The attention to so many little things in many of the frames is truly amazing.

The drawings are what really make this book shine to me, especially when they are not just used to illustrate the plot, but to tell it like in the dream sequences. The plot itself, well easy enough to generalize; two artist brothers who's craft is misunderstood, is of course (from one look at the cover) far more bizarre than that, but also incredibly intriguing. Several times during my first reading I wanted to stop for a day or two so I could make the experience last longer, but every time I went to "just finish the chapter", another twist and turn of the plot would develop and onward I would go.

Lets not kid ourselves here though, this story is strange in the extreme and I'm glad to see the other reviewers here on Amazon share my love of the odd. As much as I like the Squirrel Machine though I would not share it with most of my friends, they just wouldn't appreciate it. In short, expect adult language, nudity and, things, done to corpses. If you're a more open minded type though this will blow your mind