The Zone is a small area in southern Slovakia with a suspiciously high incidence of pathological behaviour, mental illness and suicide rates. It is here, a place where the long-term mining of heavy metals prevents the secretion of happiness hormones, that the book’s protagonist finds himself while searching for an old friend who has mysteriously disappeared. His misgivings grow as he encounters more and more uncanny situations and suspicious individuals in the Zone: where has his old schoolfriend vanished? What secrets are the staff of a local library trying to keep from him? And how does all this relate to the murder of a London imam, the works of Franz Kafka, and traditions of the native Indian tribe of the Ute? Daniel Majling’s new graphic novel continues in the vein of its author’s unique caustic humour and sense of the absurd, pressed into the service of an unsparing take on the crime genre.
