Frederik Peeters – illustratör

A tightly controlled mountain town. A disappearance no one wants solved. And something in the surrounding peaks that refuses to stay buried.In the dead of winter, detectives Frank Sangaré and Ms. Umber arrive in Saint-Elme, a remote village in the Alps famed for its mineral water—where residents have learned to mind their own business.The pair is investigating the disappearance of a wealthy young man who vanished three months earlier. But in Saint-Elme, power flows through the Sax clan, and the local police serve at their pleasure. Thinly veiled threats maintain the peace, and everyone knows where the lines are.As Sangaré and Umber push forward, they see the high cost of challenging that order—but then the boundaries start to shift. Frogs have flooded the streets. People are seeing things they shouldn’t. And the case pulls the detectives into something beyond the reach of money or influence.

The inspiration for Old, a Blinding Edge Pictures production, directed and produced by two-time Oscar nominee M. Night Shyamalan, from his screenplay based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. It’s a perfect beach day, or so thought the family, young couple, a few tourists, and a refugee who all end up in the same secluded, idyllic cove filled with rock pools and sandy shore, encircled by green, densely vegetated cliffs. But this utopia hides a dark secret. First there is the dead body of a woman found floating in the crystal-clear water. Then there is the odd fact that all the children are aging rapidly. Soon everybody is growing older—every half hour—and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of the cove. Levy’s dramatic storytelling works seamlessly with Peeters’s sinister art to create a profoundly disturbing and fantastical mystery.Praise for Sandcastle:“Sandcastle truly inspired my film Old. It is a profound mystery sci-fi graphic novel that is illustrated so beautifully and with such humanity. Its theme of ageing had me thinking about my parents and children, and how quickly it all goes by. From the moment I read this, I was changed.” – M. Night Shyamalan“Begins like a murder mystery, continues like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and finishes with a kind of existentialism that wouldn’t be out of place in a Von Trier film.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review“By turns touching, frightening, and strangely believable. It’s a low-key SF gem with heart.” – SFX Magazine“Peeters and Lévy convey some profound, if profoundly unsubtle, truths about the human condition. Weighty stuff, expertly told.” —The Comics Bulletin“Maximally eerie, unsettling.” – Booklist

A sci-fi tale which has all the echoes of a David Lynch film. Almost cinematic in style, in the breathless opening to this graphic novel we get a traffic jam due to a wounded elephant; a blind pigkeeper; an alien-looking grey baby; a cavalier and alcoholic skirt-chasing surgeon; and a beanpole of a Swiss secret policeman. Our heroine, Carice, walks from her car through the woods, as if in a trance, to a hospital to visit her diplomat husband, indisposed from a car accident. Her goodbye note, which she intends to deliver in person, is in her purse. The hospital is vast, remote, and foreboding, filled with suitable loonies. The book’s first third ends with Carice waking an apparently dead body in the morgue with her whistling. Chopin? the body asks. Carice nods. We learn of her too-early marriage, her dashed dreams as a concert pianist, and in the course of conversation realize that the aged cadaver she’s talking to is her future self.