Lodger

Written by David and Maria Lapham
Art by David Lapham

120 pages

Published by Black Crown Press

Buy it HERE.

Famous for...

Lodger's from the same team who created 'Stray Bullets' which I confess I haven't read yet. I've got volume 1 ordered today, so I'll soon rectify that.

Lodger is the story of Ricky, a 14 year old girl falling for a man named Dante who rents a room in her family's house in Arizona during one of the hottest spells of weather in memory. Her father Mateo doesn't like Dante. They have a fight and Mateo leaves the house. Later on Mateo is seen visiting Simon, the man at work who accidentally injured him years back. Mateo murders him in front of Ricky and gets sent to prison.

Dante is an evil person, a serial killer who has left dead bodies in his wake as he travels the country. Woven into this narrative is a 'blogger' device in the form of a daily article that Dante keeps writing under the pseudonym 'Lodger.' Ricky reads them and keeps tabs on Dante.

He done her wrong.

Ricky finds out that her father was probably framed. Dante is a master of disguise. She goes on a mission to get revenge. Lodger, being drawn in simple black and white panels, has its share of flashbacks and jump cuts, flipping back and forth from one time or scene to another. I had to re-read it to make sense of it.

I wished it had only one flash-back -to when Ricky was 14 and no more. That way I could watch the progression of action as Ricky's transformation from innocence to hardened revenge-monger develops.

Back and forth in time.

Young Ricky had a crush on Dante.
Her father's in prison, framed by Dante.
Later she discovers her mother having sexual relations with Dante.

She goes on a single-minded quest to catch him and get revenge on the damage he's done to her psyche. But no sooner would I read a passage about a cute thing Young Ricky and Dante were doing together than I'd get side-tracked by Older Ricky now hurling down the road with a loaded gun at her side. And then back again... huh? Why did team Lapham choose to mix these two states of Ricky up in a swirl?

The one rule.

Simplicity.

That's it. Lodger suffers from being overly chaotic and mixed-up. Actions start and stop with frustrating non-linear twists and turns. It made a lot more sense on the 2nd go around reading this, but that's the thing, isn't it? If a story's good you should be able to enjoy it the first time around.

You need to get emotionally invested in the characters. You need to care about them. Keep their actions and motives simple and easy to follow. Plot twists, no matter how clever they are, always derail your reader.

I'm waiting to see if Stray Bullets is a good read. From the positive word of mouth I'm pretty sure it will be.

Next Tuesday:

Barking at the moon once again, with a deeper richer heavy compilation of Night Wolf stories and the origins of Snow Paw, an ancient Irish She-wolf! Woo-woo-woo!

10454 Lomita Ave #B, Felton
United States

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