Review — ‘Concrete: Stars Over Sand’ #3 Sees A Startling Action From The Title Character

Concrete: Stars Over Sand #3 continues the story with Concrete having lost significant parts of his memory and most of his understanding of who he is. Struck by lightning, he barely understands the world around him, let alone why he’s made of stone or what his past life entailed. He is then prompted by an atavistic memory of his mother encouraging him to eat protein when he was a kid. But the action he takes is unusual for two reasons. Readers of Concrete know him to be a gentle, thoughtful soul often motivated by guilt. So seeing him harming another living creature and feeling no remorse is startling. Furthermore, we’ve never seen Concrete eat this way as he usually eats rocks to sustain himself. The writing handles these developments with empathy: the character is confused, striking out based on half remembered notions, and not knowing what he’s doing.

Meanwhile, Maureen, whose attempt to mobilise a group search in the last issue failed to pick up any sign of Concrete, resorts to paying an exorbitant fee to enlist the help of a helicopter owner. She and the pilot decide to head in the direction she thinks Concrete might have gone. Disaster strikes when the ‘Jesus nut’ in the mechanical assemblage connected to the helicopter’s rotors gets thrown loose. Since the pilot must stay at the controls, it falls upon Maureen to climb halfway onto the roof to manually adjust the linkage herself in order to keep the helicopter from plunging them to their deaths. Paul Chadwick is certainly upping the stakes for all three of his principal characters. Although Maureen has faced some harrowing situations before, this one seems especially engineered to inject maximum tension. It comes at the cost of little-to-no development for the pilot or Maureen’s interaction with him. In other Concrete stories, Chadwick takes time to give these odd supporting characters a quirk or two, sometimes unusual or unpleasant, so they stay with the reader.

Not to be outdone — and although Maureen has charged Larry with staying at their trailer to mind the baby — Larry decides to go out searching for Concrete himself. On the way, he runs into a couple of campers he saw as they set out on their trek. Upset and a little bloody, they’re angry after having run into Concrete with the blood of his prey smeared across his crust. Concrete, just as alarmed and confused as the hikers were, repeated the same action he made with the deer: he picked up a stone and threw it at them. The hiker who got hit tells Larry, “Soon as I have bars, I’m calling the cops … my second call is to my lawyer!”

The next issue will undoubtedly bring the three main characters together. I don’t see how Maureen will survive her predicament unless she climbs out the helicopter again and adjusts the mechanism below the rotors, so I think that will have to happen in some fashion. Larry leaving the baby in the trailer will probably lead to something unfortunate happening there. This has occurred where Larry’s concerned before. In the first pages of the second issue, when Larry and Maureen begin their search for Concrete, we saw that someone or something opened the trailer door even though Maureen shut it. It’s possible that someone might have tried to steal into their trailer, but it’s also possible that the baby might not be unconscious all the time and might get up to look around, unnoticed by Larry and Maureen. The cause of this mysterious action will probably be revealed and play a part in the next couple of issues.