Toys in the Basement

A creepy kids’ book from a French comics master.

With appearances in such anthologies as Zero Zero, BLAB! and Kramers Ergot, Stéphane Blanquet has been delighting and terrifying American readers with his superslick, ultradetailed creepiness.

So it makes perfect sense that his first graphic novel to be published in the U.S. would be… a children’s book? Yes indeed.

Our hero, attending a Halloween party in an embarrassing pink bunny costume (he wanted to he a pirate) stumbles across a secret society of damaged, forgotten, and pissed-off toys in the basement of his friend’s house—including the terrifying Amélie, not an adorable gamine played by Audrey Tautou but a towering sentient assemblage of broken toy parts out for revenge!

Imagine Toy Story as reimagined by David Lynch and Charles Burns and you’ll have a good idea of what this story is like. And yes, it is for kids! 32 pages of full-color