“Dear Ambivalence: The Mustachioed One, The Witches And The Suspended Body” sounds suspiciously like an alternate plot for his game The Good Life
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but when the book in question has been written byDeadly Premonitioncreator Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro and is entitled “Dear Ambivalence: The Mustachioed One, The Witches, And The Suspended Body”, you can be absolutely sure I’ll be adding it to my enormous ‘to be read’ pile as soon as I’ve finished typing. First published in Japan last year, Swery took toTwitteryesterday to announce its English translation by Dan Luffey is nowavailable digitally. You might want to sit down for the synopsis, though. It soundswild.
Coming in at a whopping 484 pages according to Amazon’s product stats, the summary reads as follows: “When the naked, hairless, brutalized corpse of a young girl is discovered in the British countryside, everyone finds themselves asking the same question: Who did this, and why…?”
“Normally, this quiet idyllic town’s policemen spend the bulk of their time chasing around lost sheep. But then, one day, they found her… Elizabeth Cole. 17 years old, female… Hanging upside down from the town’s symbolic elm tree… Dripping with morning dew, shaved completely hairless, missing every last one of her organs.
Witch hunts… Magic wands… Milk lorries… Nuts and coffee.
Neverending rumors… Inescapable sins.
Emily, a detective who was recently demoted from her post in London, teams up with a small moustachioed gentleman named Poco in order to bring the truth to light.
I told you it was wild, right?
Indeed, a closer inspection of the cover (see right) does seem to back up my vague theory that it does, in fact, have something to do with Swery’s various games, as both The Good Life and The Missing get name-dropped beneath the main title. I couldn’t tell you how they relate to the mysteries in the book, though. Neither are referenced in any of its five chapter titles, judging by Amazon’s ‘LookInside’ feature, as those all begin with “The Moustachioed One And The…”
Clearly, I shall have to buy it and read it to find out - although if Deadly Premonition’s slightly useless detective Francis York Morgan doesn’t turn up halfway through Chapter 4 (The Mustachioed One, The Colossal Liar, Crime, And Punishment) in some kind of daft cameo, I’ll be sorely disappointed.
If you, too, would like to see what Dear Ambivalence: The Mustachioed One, The Witches And The Suspended Body is all about, you can grab its English Kindle edition now for£8/$10.
