There’s an inexplicable stone giant looming over the small Oregon town of Stoneshore, but nobody in town is particularly interested in finding out where it came from or why: it’s always been there and, presumably, it always will be there. What’s the point of concerning themselves with it?
Dark Horse
Small towns the world over are filled with these sorts of quirks and features (though admittedly less spectacular), both natural and man-made, and once their initial novelty wears off they simply become part of the landscape. So, too, do aspects of the society itself – moods and ways of thinking that are particular to a certain people, a certain community spirit.
These small particularities are what journalist Fadumo Abdi finds herself facing when she arrives in town, looking for work, though of course Stoneshore’s particularities hint at the potential of the supernatural.
What The Stoneshore Register seems to be about is the mythologies that spring up around a place – and a person – when the larger truth is much more tragic. The local urban legend tells of a man who disappeared after falling in love with a woman from the sea; the sad truth is that he simply disappeared from his boat. An unseen tragedy. When a young man wanders into the woods in the winter and is found dead, a story of children going to the woods and coming back changed seems like a better reality than that of an untimely death.
Dark Horse
Fadumo herself carries tragic secrets – a refugee, there are parts of her history and facts of her family that she doesn’t want to share with her new neighbors. This is trauma, but it is also a form of self-mythologizing. She guards herself so that the reality of her experience becomes both less and more to those around her.
Dark Horse
The book tells these many small stories of the town in starkly common ways: a children’s play, childbirth, or an afternoon on a boat with a fisherman. That the book manages to feel otherworldly speaks volumes about the creators, writer G Willow Wilson, artist MK Perker, and letterer Richard Bruning, whose collaboration feels almost impossibly genuine. These people feel real, their world feels realized, and their words feel honest.
It also feels quiet in that way that small towns manage silence – even its largest emotions are muted against the banality of their everyday existence. It isn’t quite meditative, though it feels somehow peaceful even in its mysteries.
The Stoneshore Register is a remarkable look at the slow erasure not only of small towns but of peoples and their ways of life. It’s worrying, but in a way that sparks a genuine empathy of thinking; the reader might come to worry about the silent, rural spaces that are always just within reach. How are those towns doing? How are their citizens?
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