I'm giving this a two, however I'm struggling pretty hard with it as well.

Partially it was because the artwork turned me off. I was doing okay until the scene where they see a character digging (or possibly burying) something in the dirt off the side of the road. Until that point the art had been defined, but not detailed. For some reason the artist decided to hone in on this one instance in such graphicness that I physically cringed away from the book. The scene is of the guy pulling off his fingernails one at a time.

From then on I continued on in morbid fascination tempered with a lot of confusion. The characters all seem to be "in the know" in a way that doesn't quite come across in the story. They go from scene to scene, "clue" to "clue" with a sort of manic need that I never felt. The GN is paying homage/taking inspiration from the old teen books/shows from yesteryears, but it had none of the charm of those stories.

It at times felt like it was maliciously mocking those stories - mocking the fact that these "meddling kids" would look into investigations that they had no business looking into yet come out of it pristine and heroic. The town itself was unsettling, which fits with the overall ghoulishness I suppose - the macabre nature of the deaths and disappearances seemed less important then keeping everything peaceful for the one character who turns out to be the villain, or one of them at least, it makes complete sense. For everyone else not so much

In the end this book was extremely unsettling, but not in a good way. ( )

Very fun and quirky mystery graphic novel that is growing on me even more with the second read through. I had heard great things and had been meaning to read this for a long while, but for some reason it kept getting put off. I finally sat down with it and I ran right through it in a single sitting (riding from Montréal to Toronto for Word on the Street, a fun lit festival), and mostly enjoyed the page-turner mystery elements. This book not only offers up a loving homage to a wide swath of detective fiction (I shall not mention the "XXXX meets XXXX" blurb from the back cover that has seemingly managed to make its way into every single review here on Goodreads... Good work, flap copy writer!), but it also genuinely delivers the goods, with a complex and intriguing central mystery that keeps both the Junior Detectives Club and the reader guessing right up until the ending.

On my second reading, I really noticed elements of the artwork (drawn in a very appealing, scritchy-scratchy style which reminds me quite a bit of the excellent [a:Eddie Campbell|5122|Eddie Campbell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1261253995p2/5122.jpg]), from the very authentic and well-realized costal town of Hobtown, Nova Scotia and the excellent and varied character designs to the multitude of little jokes and micro-expressions in the characters' faces throughout.

Looking forward to the upcoming [b:The Cursed Hermit|43548798|The Cursed Hermit (Hobtown Mystery Stories #2)|Kris Bertin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547329030l/43548798._SX50_.jpg|67744352]. Oh, and I've gotten the chance to read a preview the soon-to-be released French translation of this book, "L'affair des hommes disparus," and I thought that [a:Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau|7181636|Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] did a great job with this book, which has a ton of interesting wordplay and cultural elements throughout. ( )

One of the strangest books I've read in a long time. ( )

Fantastic storytelling and art. This really blew my socks off. Highly recommended, gang.

“An eerie blend of Scooby Doo and Twin Peaks…” ~Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Distinguished by its offbeat sense of humour and legitimately shocking last-act revelations, this debut would be impressive enough as a mere genre exercise – the perceptive insights into the weirdly hermetic lives of both teenagers and small towns alike, then, are almost a bonus.” ~Sean Rogers, Globe & Mail ( )

I like it when books review themselves: "It's not strange. It's nonsense."

The creators try to bring a Twin Peaks sensibility to the teen detective genre epitomized by Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and deliver a vaguely supernatural and wholly nonsensical missing persons mystery filled with murder, brainwashing, premonitions and some random little gnomish monsters. The Scooby gang here consists of a bunch of stiffs, with hardly an actual personality to be found. While the art fits the desired tone, the story is just too dull to be eerie or scary or any of the other adjectives used on the back cover. ( )