Review: Fractured Shards
"I can see things. It's like a moment has been broken."
A sleazy bar in the District. Dancers with high-tech implants but very little clothing gyrate languidly. Detective Seb Vetro sits alone, drinking. A group of businessmen comes in, celebrating a birthday. Laughing, joking, drinking... One of them bumps him accidentally. Another claps him on the shoulder -
- and Vetro has a vision.
Sees the man leading a small child into the shadows...
Calls the precinct. Sends them a picture. Confirms the stranger's identity and pinpoints him as the probable perpetrator of the the murder of a seven year old girl.
Vetro has these moments often as an enforcement agent dealing with violent crimes. Hallucinations? The product of a broken mind? Too much stress, too much exposure to brutally slaughtered victims, a side effect of the handful of green pills he throws back every morning?
Or something else? His visions are always horrifying, always bloody, always sickening ... and always accurate.
In Fractured Shards by writer Stephen Kok and artist Riccardo Faccini the reader accompanies Vetro through his day-to-day existence: executing a paedophile, waking up from a nightmare next to a woman whose name he cannot remember, going to work at the Districts Enforcement Centre, interviewing suspects, attending an awkward therapy session, fighting with a synthetically-enhanced sociopath... He inhabits a familiar enough cyberpunk-esque dystopia: his city divided into the Lights (home of the elite) and the District (downtrodden slums). Like many a noir detective before him, our protagonist roughly navigates the glittering highways and sordid underbelly of a decadent metropolis, not always adhering to the rules or sticking to the straight and ethical.
Faccini's sketchy but tight style gives the impression of rapidly etched figures driving a story with a bizarre, unsettling energy. The glossy surfaces hide darker truths just below the surface. Someone behind the scenes is watching, manipulating, but to what end?
Vetro is the archetypal conflicted antihero; he has a moral compass (trying to help the dispossessed of the District by working a hopeless old case, doing right by his father's new wife and children) but has poor control of his emotions. In the cold, savage environment of the city, where life is cheap - unless you are part of the upper echelons - it can be hard to find a clear path to a brighter future. Especially when you are haunted by your past.
Literally. Evie is a little girl who teases him now and then, adding sarcastic asides as he lurches from one disaster to the next... a little girl that nobody else can see.
Bodies keep turning up, strangely mutilated. Our hero is determined to make sense of the madness out there. But can he do that with his very sanity in question?
Zak Webber
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