Glenn Ganges drinks coffee at night and then can’t get to sleep. His racing mind contemplates time. Time. Woah. So vast. And… woah. He also recounts his time at a dot com startup and tries to tire out his mind by reading dull books on philosophy.
And speaking of dull books, Kevin Huizenga’s The River at Night was soooooo damn dreary! Yes, he literally created a book about a tedious idiot who can’t sleep. Why?!
Huizenga’s a talented cartoonist. His art style is appealing and I appreciated the creative ways he chose to present some of the material like skipping inconsequential storylines by showing pages blurring by, or the ways a mind could look as comics pages with some panels obscured by the page physicality, and the ways time could look. And the visuals of Wendy, Glenn’s wife, and her computer game were really imaginative.
But he writes such boring stories! I’ve read some of his previous books so I know he’s not the most exciting storyteller but I’d completely forgotten how downright monotonous his comics could be. Page after page of Glenn droning on and on about trying to fall asleep - it’s so annoyingly repetitive.
The story of the dot com startup was rubbish - Glenn liked playing Unreal Tournament (the space station map gives it away) with his co-workers after hours on a LAN. That’s it?! He even quotes the most mind-numbing philosophy book for pages, and then really gets into the weeds with a geology textbook! Ugh…
He’s got nothing enlightening to say about time besides huge chunks of it (ie. millions of years) are unfathomable for human minds to really conceive, which, duh.
The art may be good but it’s not even close to enough to recommend The River at Night which is one of the most wearisome comics you’ll ever slog through.
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