Book Review: "The Mysteries" by Bill Watterson and John Kascht

The Mysteries (2023)
Bill Watterson and John Kascht
72 pages

Scientists and science writers face a particular challenge when communicating to the public about the risks of environmental degradation and devastation: a reader’s everyday lived experience tends to unconsciously trump any data and descriptions of a problem. Global climate change, toxins in drinking water, a massive plastic garbage patch in the ocean – these and other such disasters seem distant and somehow inconsequential if they don’t affect our lives directly, aren’t impacting our immediate health or what we see outside our door from one day to the next.

Fiction, however, has the power to break through such failures of our imagination. By carrying us beyond our immediate experience and inducing a visceral reaction, a well-told story can make evident what even a well-explained set of data does not.

Bill Watterson – of Calvin and Hobbes fame – provides such an experience in his slender tale The Mysteries, created in collaboration with the artist John Kascht. Through a parable of human fear of the unknown within the natural world, the pair explore not only how such fearfulness can constrain our lives, but also the human drive to overcome it, to uncover and explain what we do not understand. And, crucially for our present-day world, they reflect on what happens when we do finally come to resolve such mysteries. Does humankind only properly respect that before which it trembles in ignorance?

The story has a poetic flow to it, with just a sentence or two per page. Each facing page contains an extraordinary illustration; and, while the words give sense to the accompanying illustrations, these exquisite images created by Watterson and Kascht generate the profound emotional power of the tale. They have an eerie quality – scenes that are at once familiar and yet alien, captivating yet frightening in their intensity.

Watterson and Kascht’s work in The Mysteries forces us to confront the separation from the natural world, whether through fearful ignorance or familiar contempt, that we have allowed to corrupt our world, and our lives.

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Other notes and information:

A New York Times article here, provides fascinating background into what was apparently the fraught collaboration between Watterson and Kascht in developing the artwork.

For a brilliant prose reflection on the impact our separation from nature has on “our world, and our lives,” I strongly recommend Richard Powers’ The Overstory, my review linked to at right.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf