Tales from The Dark Snow

If you judge the best best stories by their impact and by how long they scratch at your memory, the one that's truly worth the price of admission (less than 4 cents a page!) [The Dark Snow] was written by an artist I had not read before: Brendan DuBois. It is the tale of a man who retires to bucolic New Hampshire, where he is harassed by persistent and increasingly malevolent neighbors. We underrate the pleasure and sheer fun some people get by hurting others. DuBois makes it clear, as he makes clear how difficult it is to cope with forms of harassment hard to pin down and scarcely illegal. Isolated, the flawed hero flounders, but he won't run away and learns to cope by toying with illegality as his tormentors do. A common murderer in the end but an uncommon planner, the hero handles his predicament successfully and to this reader's immense satisfaction.