The Book of Darryl

by The Goggles

Overview

Darryl’s friendless. Bored out of his skull. It’s the middle of summer, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a fly-blown suburb of Roman-occupied Nazareth. Tough times for a sixteen-year-old boy in any era, never mind two millennia ago, when the only thing to look forward to is the next sandstorm, and you’re spending every waking moment worrying that the spots on your forehead are for sure signs of leprosy. But everything changes when Darryl meets his new refugee neighbor, Jay, who just so happens to be the messiah before he was *the Messiah.*

Jay brings good news to Darry’s life and soaring, otherworldly vocals to his band with fellow teen Nazarenes Mary and Jude. Together, they help each other survive life in the year 16 AD—and miraculously, they invent a beguiling new musical form that they call METAL, one of many epic revelations in this heretofore unheralded early chapter in the greatest story ever told.

This special edition of The Book of Darryl is illuminated by world-famous GIF artist Scorpion Dagger, with images that come to animated life—accompanied by a splendorous heavy metal score—through augmented reality, in a lost gospel here resurrected by leading Darryl scholars and storytelling pioneers Matt Bate and the Goggles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374115319
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.15(w) x 7.84(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

The Goggles are Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, award-winning creators who have spent their professional lives telling stories in compelling new ways. Their interactive documentary, Welcome to Pine Point, received more than a dozen international awards. They are co-authors of the book I Live Here, and their work has been featured on CNN and MTV, and in documentaries for BBC, PBS and Dutch National Television.

Editorial Reviews

2021-01-27
The high-concept Canadian documentarians behind I Live Here (2008) deploy their unique multimedia style in a whimsical biblical allegory.

Advertising is a weird science in its most mundane form, let alone the weird alchemy practiced by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons over the past two decade as The Goggles, multimedia wunderkinds most memorable for the award-winning interactive documentary Welcome to Pine Point and the book I Live Here (2008), which documented life for refugees during wartime. Here they’re aided by filmmaker Bate and digital artist James Kerr (better known as Scorpion Dagger) for a literary amalgamation that is one part John Hughes, a dash of Douglas Coupland, and augmented with a series of .gif animations (which can be viewed through an app) that are fancifully Python-esque. The infrastructure is complicated since the book is fashioned around 16-year-old Darryl's messy, overstuffed personal diary, which chronicles his adolescent angst and potential triumph thanks to the arrival of a dodgy messiah. Darryl is a bit of a cipher, uncomfortable with expressing his thoughts and feelings except to his friend Wade, who “died peacefully in his sleep while hanging from a rafter with a rope tied around his neck.” His rare moments of solace lie in his band, “a bitchin’ power duo” propelled by his drummer, Mary, and egged on by their friend Jude. The milieu for this teenage daydream isn’t John Hughes' Shermer, Illinois, but the Naz—that’s Nazareth, as in “Jesus of,” not the Scottish heavy metal band. The book’s precipitating event is the arrival of Jay, son of God and the spark Darryl needs to transform his White Stripes–esque duo into a full-fledged band, Iron Messiah, which unites Darryl and Jay with the power of ROCK. It wouldn’t be a teenage daydream without some angst-y drama, which erupts when Jay takes over Darryl’s band, going so far as to replace him with a doppelgänger, while Jude aims to make some kind of artistic statement by blowing up Darryl’s only other confidant, a tree named Rooty. All of these shenanigans are illustrated with artful but moderately disturbing renditions inspired by medieval paintings and paired with an original heavy metal score.

An earnest but eccentric and aesthetically anarchic take on Christianity’s familiar mythos.

Kirkus Reviews