Paul Rainey’s ‘Murder School’ Launches At Gosh Comics! On September 19
by Richard Bruton
Oops, missed this — Paul B. Rainey‘s Murder School, his latest book from Drawn and Quarterly, gets a launch at Gosh! Comics London this Saturday, 19th September …
After so many years of telling you about the great comics that Paul B. Rainey makes, it is so good to see him finally getting the success he more than deserves.
His books There’s No Time Like The Present and Why Don’t You Love Me? are bestsellers, both published through Drawn and Quarterly, with Why Don’t You Love Me? optioned by Jennifer Lawrence through A24, and very much looking like it will make it through development to reach a silver screen near you eventually.
So yes, finally, after many, many years working at the coalface of comics, self-publishing his works, Rainey is finally getting the acclaim he’s more than due.
His latest, Murder School, again published by D&Q, is every bit the Rainey book, combining a hefty chunk of Rainey’s own schooldays in a Britain of the 70s and 80s with something slightly stranger taking place in the present day.
Of course, Rainey being Rainey, although the schooldays memoir portions of Murder School are couched as autobiographical, we just can’t be sure, not really, as the author has shown before that he plays fast and loose with what’s ‘real’ and what’s either exaggerated fiction or just straight-up strangeness disguised as real life.
Of course, this isn’t to say that the schooldays events in Murder School didn’t happen; after all, education in the ’70s and ’80s here in the UK was a very different thing, and I’m more than willing to believe this tale of vicious, nasty, tribal kids and teachers who aren’t much better. But I’ve read all of Rainey’s works, and I know he’s a delightfully unreliable narrator.
Things get slightly more obvious in the final third of the book, where Rainey fast-forwards to now and unfolds this tale of a somewhat unbelievable murder mystery based on what we’ve just read of his schooldays.
Like I say, Murder School is everything that’s great about what I’ve loved about Rainey’s work for years. The mixing of the mundane and the strange, planting those seeds in your mind that perhaps this happened, perhaps it didn’t, and doing it all in such a way that makes everything he makes an absolute page-turner of a thing.
So yes, Murder School is released by Drawn and Quarterly on 15th September. If you get the chance, head on down to Gosh! Comics on 19th September to enjoy the launch of the book. More details here.
