I’ve said a few times that I’ve never been a fan of comic books, neither as a kid even when I had friends who liked them nor as an adult when longer versions of these, often called graphic novels, have crossed over somewhat into the mainstream and even earned critical acclaim. Alan Moore’s Watchmen is often cited as the greatest or one of the greatest graphic novels ever published, but I found it thin, clichéd, and very short on plot. The form itself isn’t conducive to great storytelling because so much real estate is dedicated to the images that pushing a narrative forward becomes secondary to the artwork, and creating a plot worthy of the term “novel” would require several hundred more pages and, I imagine, a substantial amount of additional work for the artist.

So when Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina showed up on the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, becoming the first graphic novel to earn the honor, my immediate question was whether the work was worthy as a novel, or simply there because of the novelty of the format. (It didn’t make the six-title shortlist, announced a few weeks ago; this year’s winner will be announced next Tuesday.) I can at least say, however, that Sabrina uses the graphic novel’s form to enhance the underlying story, adding to the senses of dread, suspense, and isolation that affect its central characters, while also creating a jarring sensation of unease as Drnaso switches settings without visual or textual warnings. The story itself is also different, with three interlocking narratives stemming from a single source, telling a contemporary tale of our disastrous modern media environment and how it affects the psyches of vulnerable people.

Sabrina herself only appears in a few panels at the start of the book; her disappearance and the discovery of her murder at the hands of a stranger set off the three main threads of the plot. Her boyfriend Teddy, devastated and unmoored by these events, goes to stay with his friend Calvin, an Air Force serviceman stationed in Colorado who works a job that is socially and emotionally isolating, while Sabrina’s sister Sandra is left to try to cope with her loss and the detritus of Teddy’s life with her sister. After Sabrina’s death is discovered and someone leaks video the killer recorded of her murder (never shown or described in much detail, but implied to be highly graphic), the story becomes the focus of American news outlets for several days, after which the mainstream media moves on to the next murder, allowing conspiracy theorists to step in, claiming the murder was staged as a false flag event and that the three protagonists of the book are actually crisis actors. Teddy ends up listening to an Alex Jones clone on the radio while he’s holed up in Calvin’s house, refusing to leave, even though doing so furthers his isolation and essentially claims his grief is fraudulent, while Calvin and Sandra are doxxed and harassed by delusional randos (including a stand-in for the fired FAU professor James Tracy, himself a Sandy Hook hoaxer).

There’s more narrative depth here than you’d find in a short story, albeit probably less than you’d get even in a 200-page novel; there is only so much a writer-artist can do with the aforementioned problem of visual real estate. Drnaso compensates brilliantly by packing subtext into many panels, with or without dialogue, that support that ongoing sense of unease or psychological imbalance. When the characters don’t feel ‘right,’ it’s immediately apparent in the panels – with their facial expressions or posture, with the angles from which Drnaso depicts them, and even sometimes with his use of lighter or darker shading in specific panels.

Sabrina probably also benefits in the minds of critics and readers for how of the moment the story is. We are inundated with fake or slanted news reports from sources outside the mainstream who have gamed various algorithms to appear higher on social media feeds or search engine results – I’ve seen links to Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit, both alt-right blogs with minimal editorial controls or regard for veracity in their stories, appear in the first ten results of Google searches – and conspiracy theories follow every tragedy that hits the news. The effects of this, itself an extension of our increased alienation from each other as we spend more time online and less in the real world, on something as difficult and fundamental as grief, especially when processing the horrible and sudden death of a loved one, are enough fodder for a book this length and then some. Drnaso has taken a critical, timely subject, and presented it in a new way, both with his art and with his storycraft, to produce a work that is worthy of the praise it’s received.

Next up: I’m reading an Agatha Christie novel before diving into Vernor Vinge’s mammoth Hugo-winning novel A Deepness in the Sky.