Reviews by Wade Clarke

I would describe take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die as a linear, emotionally heavy, romantic (in the oldest tradition) semi-animated comic book. In black and white. It draws strongly on comic book aesthetics for its effects and is dynamic about it, pulling reader’s eyes through the word-emphasising visuals and punctuating them with sound effects, all via a simple eight or sixteen-bit look.

The experience opens with the deliberately-vaguely-depicted narrating character looking over a lake at night. Stars twinkle as she relates the finding of the drowned corpse of Elizabeth, a girl who wrote poetry and whom she seems to have been obsessed with. But obsessed with how? Up close, from a distance or in some other way? The speculating prose has a few abstracting moves up its sleeves as it goes on.

As each frame of image and thought-square of monologue appears, the mechanic is to click to continue, however the click has to be placed on the current speech bubble or latest ellipses to register. I found this requirement distracting. The small target moves in almost every frame, often just two centimetres down the screen. I was relieved to learn after playing that it's possible to just hit the space bar instead.

The dynamics of the heroine’s monologue, and also of her later dialogue with Elizabeth’s ghost or echo, are really well executed. For me, the whole was still a little unsatisfying because my taste is that emotion-based stories like this one work with specifics rather than archetypes. This story’s characters and ideas revolve around binaries and twinning; love, hate, free, trapped, creation (writing poetry), destruction (suicide), the narrator, the drowned girl. The name of the eponymous lake (Dioscuri) alludes to the Roman twins Castor and Pollux. And poets, of course, are famous for being suicidal, thought the real situation that created the stereotype - the rise of the romantic tradition and novels like Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther (1774) - is obviously far more detailed than the content of the lakes. the lakes takes that end point of the concept of romantic suicide as a symbol without complexity. Still, I feel a churl complaining about the arcehtypal style of a story that pretty much declares, through its allusion to the Dioscuri, that it could be about archetypes. It’s short, establishes a clear visual and editing style during its stay, and is an entirely sound construction of its ideas.