Book review: Graphic novel inspired by bloody legend of Cariboo's Agnes McVee
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 19:00:42 +0000
Text and illustrations by Sarah Leavitt (Freehand Books)
$29.95 | 304 pages
After reading her latest graphic novel Agnes Murderess, it’s safe to say that author-illustrator Sarah Leavitt’s comics class students at UBC’s Creative Writing Program are lucky to have such a talented instructor.
In 2009, Leavitt read a tourist brochure at the 108 Mile Heritage Site which talked about Agnes McVee. The owner of the 108 Mile roadhouse from 1865 to 1875, she was also a madam and — apparently — a serial killer who murdered 50-plus victims over that time.
So began Leavitt’s almost decade-long research into the life of the character of McVee, which culminated in this delightful feminist gothic horror graphic novel.
After obsessive and exhaustive investigation into the B.C. Archives and other historical records, the author determined two things: McVee probably never existed, and her story was one just waiting to be re-told.
Placing emphasis on a dominant theme of loneliness and venturing into topics such as whether evil is something you are born with or acquire with the passage of time and personal experience, Agnes’ complicated character is rendered in stark black-and-white drawings.
The author says the images came to her first. From nightmares about the killer’s face to the bodies of her victims, the visuals informed the prose. Eventually, a tale developed as told through Agnes’ personal journal, discovered after her untimely passing.
Beginning in the harsh, windswept Hebrides and ending with the dramatic Northern British Columbia landscape, Agnes, Murderess is an investigation into the “fake news” that forms so much of colonial history. As the writer notes in the intro, “the first written record of Agnes did not appear until the 1970s when an amateur historian self-published a guide to buried treasure in British Columbia.”
Grim gold rush tales have long deserved to be held in the same esteem as the grim prairie tales that play such a key part in Canada’s literature. Recognizing all such stories have their roots in colonization and settler mythology, Leavitt traces Agnes’ hardscrabble and downtrodden life from the Islands to London to the Cariboo.
There is never a point in her life where the darkness is very far from engulfing her. Haunted by a witch (real or imagined) of a grandmother with the black metal-certified name of Gormul, Agnes truly grows into the legend she’ll become when she arrives “nowhere.”
Leavitt purposely lets the colonizer’s view of the long-inhabited lands come up against reality as well as the traumatic realization that Agnes won’t be able to escape the horrors of the Old World in the New World.
Nowhere is most certainly somewhere for the people who have lived there for generations and it’s also become a continuation of wherever one left. The epidemic of gold fever and greed infects the world around her just as badly in the Cariboo as it did in London, as the stratified society of rich and poor seems eternally inescapable.
By using her wits and, often, considerable cruelty, Agnes lives through it all until the day comes when an event confounds her caustic world view causing her to make a mistake in her meticulous murderous methodology.
Underneath all the cruelty, all the horrible acts, there is something else that haunts this killer. All the gold in the world can’t buy back what she ultimately desires. With that knowledge, she is undone.
It makes for very engaging reading, and Leavitt has crafted a deliciously creepy and unique novel. Just in time for the dark days setting in, Agnes, Murderess is perfect late night fireside reading. Don’t worry about those strange sounds behind you.
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