The Furnace
A Graphic Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Timely and heartfelt, Prentis Rollins’s graphic novel debut The Furnace is a literary science fiction glimpse into our future, for fans of Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone
One decision. Thousands of lives ruined. Can someone ever repent for the sins of their past?
When Professor Walton Honderich was a young grad student, he participated in a government prison program and committed an act that led to the death of his friend, the brilliant physicist Marc Lepore, and resulted in unimaginable torment for an entire class of people across the United States.
Twenty years later, now an insecure father slipping into alcoholism, Walton struggles against the ghosts that haunt him in a futuristic New York City.
With full-color art and a cutting-edge critique of our increasingly technological world, The Furnace speaks fluently to the terrifying scope of the surveillance state, the dangerous allure of legacy, and the hope of redemption despite our flaws.
“Surreal and evocative, The Furnace is a great critique of technology and the human condition.” —John Jennings, illustrator for the New York Times #1 bestseller Octavia Butler’s Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious solo effort by Rollins, a frequent Marvel and DC comics artist, offers an unsettling cautionary critique on the misuse of technology to further the marginalization of society's "undesirables." An aging physicist visiting 2052 New York City, Walton Honderich recounts his participation in a prison program that rendered supermax criminals silent and unseen. Nearly 30 years earlier, Walton, then an undergrad student, reluctantly helped brilliant-but-unstable professor Marc Lapore design the "Gard" security software. The program assigned a floating drone to released criminals, which rendered them invisible and unable to communicate and "immobilized" them if they stepped out of line essentially enforcing eternal solitary confinement in the outside world. Through conversation and backstory, Rollins carefully crafts Walton and Marc as complex but flawed characters; Marc is a repressed gay man with outsized ambition and a self-destructive streak, while Walton is timid, overwhelmed by stunted ambition and, later, guilt. The detailed artwork is grounded in the familiar world, which makes the futuristic details pop such as an eerie, menacing Gard hovering above its implied captive in the middle of a beautiful, snow-covered Central Park and the inevitable play-out of consequences feel all the more disturbing. Rollins's strong worldbuilding lends his narrative a creeping sense of prescience, sending a provocative message about what modern society is capable of bringing about, and at what cost.
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