Preview: In ‘Murder School’, Paul B. Rainey Recounts His Schooldays, And So Much More
by Richard Bruton
Released on 15 September, Paul B. Rainey‘s Murder School is his latest brilliant graphic novel, a strange thing of memories of schooldays and a modern-day comedic murder mystery for the ages…
Paul B. Rainey‘s rather the big thing right now. He’s won awards, he’s published big, critically acclaimed books, and his Drawn & Quarterly debut book, Why Don’t You Love Me, is being adapted for the movies by Jennifer Lawrence & A24, where she’s also set to star.
Of course, I’ve been telling you all about Rainey for many years now. In fact, I first had the pleasure of seeing his work back in the 90s when he was self-publishing those things we used to know as comics. Throughout the years, I’ve followed everything he’s done, knowing a talent when I see one, and revelling in his unique storytelling and deliciously off-kilter sense of humour.
2015’s There’s No Time Like The Present was this ridiculous, funny, complex, time-twisting thing, full of all that domesticity and mundanity that Rainey’s always done so well, with just a complete bit of the weird. It did well, but not a blockbuster, sad to say, at least not until it got a 2025 reissue from Drawn and Quarterly.
But then he won the 2020 Observer/Jonathan Cape/ Comica Graphic Short Story Prize with the short Similar To But Not, a daydream turned into comics, with a young Rainey meeting a particularly popular pop star back in the ’80s. It was everything he was so good at: the mundane meeting the extraordinary, and a worthy winner, which I covered here.
And after that, things just seemed to align for him. Why Don’t You Love Me? came next, first run in David Lloyd‘s digital Aces Weekly, then serialised on his website, which is where I avidly followed it. Oh yes, Jennifer Lawrence, I got there first. But hey, I love that Rainey’s finally getting the attention he’s so long deserved, so, please, get that movie finished and out there.
Anyway, Why Don’t You Love Me? is this amazing book, as I told you in this 2022 Webcomic column, where Rainey, playing to his strengths, gave us a gloriously unsettling mix of the mundane and the bizarre, spinning something utterly normal but undercutting it with that sense of the strange, the unusual, transforming the work into something that first intrigues, then fascinates, then absolutely entrances.
So, anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, Murder School, a new Paul B. Rainey book. And it is — as it’s always been to me — a big deal. Published again through Drawn and Quarterly, it’s released on 15 September.
Murder School is part memoir, part surreal fiction, or perhaps mostly fiction with a bit of reminiscing thrown in. Or possibly just the unreliable narrative of an author well used to spinning a fantastical tale from the seemingly normal? Anyway, Murder School takes us back to Paul’s own school days — well, sort of. After all, by now, surely, you’ve all come to realise that a Rainey book is never quite what it seems, with Rainey twisting and turning his fiction in so many ways, even when it’s couched as semi-biographical?
It’s Paul, the precocious nerd at school, complete with all the usual everyday tribal brutality to be found in your average British school at the time. Kids, huh? Nasty little bastards. And then there’s the teachers, often even nastier than the kids.
It could have been very, very dark. But of course, Rainey’s tale of schooldays is punctuated by his usual line in comedy, mostly self-deprecating, all of it just perfectly funny, laugh-out-loud so at times.
And yes, as I say, it’s all about Paul the precocious nerd at school — until it’s not, as the final fictional section of Murder School, set 40 years on from schooldays, turns into a bizarre murder mystery, full of the sorts of things that make any Rainey book a page-turner, involving care homes, an old teacher with a tale to tell, a legendary bit of corporal punishment footwear, and an utterly useless private eye.
It’s everything I’ve always loved about Rainey’s work: that clever melding of the mundane and the low-key fantastical, a schooldays memoir that transforms into something else, something more. Quite the wonderful thing.
Paul B. Rainey‘s Murder School is released by Drawn & Quarterly on 15th September and will be available pretty much everywhere books are sold. Go buy it.
