This superbly evocative graphic novella by the award-winning Norwegian cartoonist Jason (his first appearance in the English language) starts off as a melancholy childhood memoir and then, with a shocking twist midway through, becomes the summary of lives lived, wasted, and lost. Like Art Spiegelman did with Maus, Jason utilizes anthropomorphic characters to reach deeper, more general truths, and to create elegantly minimalist panels whose emotional depth-charge comes as an even greater shock.

This George A. Romero-esque zombie comedy is the middle installment of Jason’s “horror trilogy,” begun with the Frankenstein monster love triangle of You Can’t Get There from Here. Jason’s elegant deadpan style somehow manages to make the gruesome gore and splatter effects almost… charming – and yes, it is a sweet love story at heart. If you read only one book in which a zombie devours a baby this year, read this one!

A blank-eyed, silent meditation on young love thwarted and rekindled, Tell Me Something picks up the stylized anthropomorphic characters of Jason’s earlier works, as well as the challenge of all-pantomime to tell the story. Switching smoothly between two time periods, alternating moments of tenderness and sadness with slapstick and irony, Tell Me Something is a virtuoso technical achievement as well as a funny and sad tale of romance and treachery.

Imagine a long-forgotten, never-produced Alfred Hitchcock “wrong man” thriller screenplay discovered, adapted, and filmed by a modern minimalist like Jim Jarmusch, and you’ll have some idea of the unique flavor of this graphic novel.