The Book of Murmurs
Creator: Candice Purwin
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: May 2026
The most memorable works of the fantastic remain in our imaginations when they leave a few shadowy corners of their stories unexplored. In The Book of Murmurs, Candice Purwin showcases a dreamlike world of witches and wandering spirits that feels both familiar and unknowable. Purwin’s ambitious debut graphic novel encourages readers to lose themselves in the mysteries of its story rather than search for simple explanations.
The Book of Murmurs opens with a girl moving to a new house with her family. On the night before her first day of school, she has a nightmare about a Shenk, a horrid many-armed creature recounted in a storybook given to her by her mother. When the girl wakes up the next morning, the Shenk is in her house. It has killed her parents and stolen her name, leaving her with no choice but to trust the two neighborhood witches who wrap her in a magical cloak and send her on a journey to an interstitial world called The Fault.
As soon as she arrives in The Fault, the girl meets a small furry goblin whose name has been revoked as a punishment for an unremembered crime. The goblin teaches the girl the basics of spellcraft as they prepare to track down a spirit called the Catwitch, who has taken the girl’s storybook for her own mysterious purposes. All the while, the Shenk pursues the girl through her dreams, and she realizes that she can’t hide from it forever.
The girl’s quest is interspersed with stories from her mother’s book. Though each story stands alone as a self-contained fable, these short interludes help to provide the background details of the many worlds and people connected by The Fault. These fables all touch on the nature of magic as a powerful creative energy. For many years, various forces have colluded to suppress magic, especially the magic of children. Though some of the motives behind this erasure of magic are sympathetic, creative joy can’t be repressed forever.
Much like the magic at the center of her story, Candic Purwin’s art is a textured swirl of motion and color that expresses whimsy and horror with equal brilliance. Using a blend of watercolors and colored pencils, Purwin provides a visually tactile glimpse into her fantasy world, and the beautifully flowing lines of trees and architecture invite the reader deeper into each highly detailed panel. While the scenes in the magical realm of The Fault are characterized by surreal color palettes dominated by vibrant orange and gentle blue, the interspersed folklore interludes shift to a minimalist black-and-cream palette that evokes a mythic atmosphere.
Purwin began sowing the seeds that grew into The Book of Murmurs on her Instagram in 2024 as a series of comics about goblins and giants, and the feeling of fragmentation that characterizes these short pieces has carried over into the graphic novel. In truth, there’s no clear path through the story, whose narrative twists and folds over against itself while continuously introducing new characters and concepts, many of whom shine briefly before vanishing. Having read this graphic novel twice, I suspect that it still contains many more secrets waiting to be discovered.
In a launch day interview, Purwin describes her work as a reflection of her experience as a child growing up in the 1980s, when lush fantasy films like Labyrinth and The Secret of Nimh were suffused with sinister undertones and didn’t always make sense. Purwin says that she created The Book of Murmurs for her younger self, who would stay up late to watch movies like Stand by Me and then spend days dwelling on the unfamiliar imagery while processing a lingering sense of unease.
The Book of Murmurs perfectly captures the sense of fascination with forms and meanings half-glimpsed through shadows, always asking compelling questions that don’t have straightforward answers. By denying an easily consumed narrative, The Book of Murmurs presents a rich and finely detailed fantasy world that demands to be explored. I was completely absorbed by this graphic novel as an adult, and I’m jealous of anyone who has the opportunity to get lost in its pages as a child.
The Book of Murmurs is available from Fantagraphics.
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