Noah Kaplan is your typical Jewish-American artist in 2030s New York. He has an apartment, a dog, a job, and a city life—at least until he’s abducted onto a vast, seemingly empty spaceship as the world explodes. At a loss, Noah turns to his art supplies, which he was carrying at the moment of his abduction. As the last surviving human, he begins to create an encyclopedia of humanity—as best as one idiosyncratic individual can.

A fun, funky book object from the “Hungry Minds” collective, THE LAST BOOK is a visual feast. It’s an illustrated encyclopedia of sorts, but with a free-associating sense of humor reflected in the text itself. Readers are as likely to bump into agent Dale Cooper or Daenerys Targaryen as they are to find a Dodge Firebird in place of the Slavic mythological firebird, or to spot Bob Marley nestled amongst the other great philosophers in a riff on Raphael’s “The School of Athens.” But Noah also draws his surroundings aboard the alien vessel, as well as his self-perceptions, and these elements creep into the purely illustrative imagery: unsettling, seething biomechanical components, fish skeletons and tentacles—drawing freely on H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. THE LAST BOOK is overall an exuberant visual experience.

The text has its ups and downs. At times, Noah becomes sincerely reflective, and these moments can punch above their weight, as when the narrator/encyclopedist ruefully admits, “I’m not an expert in anything but loneliness.” His interests come through in recipes for frog legs, espresso martinis, and more; his foibles come through in claims that scientists “proved the existence of telepathic dreams” in the ‘70s, or that cryptocurrencies make fraud more difficult. But over the course of the text, Noah’s biases become harder to escape. Latter sections on art, for instance, make it particularly noticeable that the narrator regurgitates a largely outdated art history that depicts the torch of culture passing from one Great Man to the next. A few female singers sneak in near the end, but women overwhelmingly go unnamed (Yoko Ono appears, not in the section on conceptual art, but in a throwaway line about The Beatles; and both science fiction and horror get their own spreads, but neither mentions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). It therefore becomes increasingly clear that Noah has quite normal (even old-fashioned!) ideas about the world, merely dressed up in fantastical clothing.

Readers will have to judge for themselves how disappointing that realization is for them. But the journey remains whacky, colorful, and even poignant from start to finish.

By the Hungry Minds collective, THE LAST BOOK is vivid, charming, and unapologetically weird.

~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader