Hugh D’Andrade’s “The Murder Next Door”
A graphic memoir.
I’m about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me on Feb 14 for free at Boskone in Boston, and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis. More tour dates here.
Hugh D’Andrade is a brilliant visual communicator, the art director responsible for the look-and-feel of EFF’s website. He’s also haunted by a murder — the killing of the mother of his childhood playmates, which cast a long, long shadow over his life, as he recounts in his debut graphic novel, The Murder Next Door:
https://www.streetnoisebooks.com/the-murder-next-door-a-graphic-memoir
In 1978, Hugh was a normal ten year old, always drawing and obsessed with riding his dirt bike around his quiet suburban neighborhood. The brothers next door, Derek and Ari, were his constant playmates. One day, he came home from school to find them standing on the lawn. The brothers were crying, arguing. When Hugh asked them what was going on, Derek said there was a dead body in their house, then Ari quickly said, “It’s someone else, Derek, it’s not her.” Ari insisted that it was their mother.
As they argued, Derek told Hugh to go inside and look for himself. That’s how he found the dead body of his next door neighbor.
This became the defining moment of Hugh’s life. For the rest of his life, he felt like there was a before-Hugh and an after-Hugh, the Hugh before the trauma and the Hugh after it. Passing strangers on the street, he wonders about their rifts, the moments that transformed them, that haunt them.
After finding the body, Hugh ran to his own parents, who called the police, gathered in Derek and Ari, and took charge of the situation. When the dust settled, Derek and Ari had disappeared, sent off to a neighbor’s place. A week later, when Hugh returned to school, a classmate told him that the whole school had “decided not to talk about it.” So he didn’t.
But he was haunted by the murder, seized by spasms of fear that the murderer would return for him. He threw tantrums, broke things, smashed things. His parents said it was “just a phase.” He interrogated his parents relentlessly about what they would do if the murderer came back. Their answers were meant to reassure him, but failed. Life went on. Whispers blamed his neighbor’s husband — a doctor who was at the hospital at the time of the killing — for the murder.
Murder Next Door is told in a series of interleaved scenes of Hugh’s childhood, his adolescence, his contemporary therapy sessions, his life today in Oakland. He interrogates his own motivations for engaging endlessly with online conspiracists. He reflects on the years he spent with his mother, campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment, and how that informed both his lifelong feminist beliefs, and his view of the murder of a woman in the house next door. He comes to see a pathway from harassment and sexist remarks to sexual violence and murder, and to notice how the boys at school exhibited the same sexist attitudes that he was noticing in wider society. He struggles to figure out what masculinity is, and what kind of man he wants to be — a strong man, who protects women from men like the murderer? But the murderer was a strong man, too.
As a young activist campaigning against the first Gulf War, Hugh becomes militant, aggressive, trying to bully his classmates into caring about the conflict as much as he does — to care about the innocents whose blood was about to shed in their name. Their indifference makes him relive, over and over, the murder of his neighbor. It’s as though he knew in advance that she was about to be killed and couldn’t get anyone else to care about it.
Eventually, as an adult DNA analysis identified the killer, a long-dead man who had done some upholstery work for the family a few weeks before the murder. Some of Hugh’s nightmares go away.
The Murder Next Door is a haunting, beautiful meditation on masculinity, trauma, and fear. Hugh is a superb illustrator, particularly when it comes to bringing abstract ideas to life (which is why he’s so valued at the EFF!), and this is a tale beautifully told (with permission from Derek and Ari and other family members). It’s an extraordinary book.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
