The Crow: Curare
A very young girl was murdered, not just murdered, but every imaginable crime and a few unimaginable ones were also carried out on her. All of this happens in the first few pages and it is a downward spiral from here. The main character is the police detective given the case to solve and how his single minded focus on this case drives him to drink, to lose his family, to scare his children and finally to the point of madness where a crow and a ghost of a girl are almost normal to him.
Never before in my life have I been grateful that an artist’s style was ‘imprecise.’ Had this have been drawn by someone like Ribic or Alphona I think I would have been sick, or more likely they would have gone mad trying to draw it. The concepts that this covers are so twisted and horrible that trying to put it onto paper in an anatomically correct, precise fashion would utterly mess with your mind. It actually shows you very little, nothing in fact, of the heinous crimes that it describes, but listening to the coroner describing the crimes while all you can see is a small child’s foot on a slab is actually more disturbing that being shown it.
The best way I can describe this book is that anyone who has read this review and wants to read this book, you should go and check yourself in at your local mental health centre. Perversely, anyone who has read this and decided that this book is not for them, you should go and read it. I am not too proud to say that there was more than a little tear in my eye when I finished reading, so now I am off to slam a couple of doors so that my daughter wakes up and I have an excuse to go and give her a hug.
