The Last Cel Painter of Termite Terrace

About this book:

In 1969, the Warner Brothers animation department is being dismantled cel by cel, and Arthur Finch—the last man who remembers how to mix the black that swallows light—finds three forbidden frames in his daily tray. Drawn in an ink brewed from bone oil and silver nitrate, they depict a cartoon character that doesn't squash or stretch but *bleeds*, its rotoscoped eyes holding a terror that transcends the frame. The initials in the corner belong to Frank Featherstone, an animator who vanished in 1938 after a projection-room test that made the screen go gray and the drawings step off the cloth into the room.

As corporate shredders close in on the studio's buried vault, Arthur teams with Barney O'Callaghan, a half-blind optical printer who still smells of developer and regret. Together they trace a conspiracy of silence from the Termite Terrace shack to a sub-basement mortared shut by Jack Warner himself, where a master negative waits in a locker opened only by a brass key Arthur has carried for thirty-four years. But the obituary for ink chemist Leo Vance ran this morning, and the cels appeared in Arthur's box by noon—meaning someone else knows the vault's location, and they're willing to burn the lot down to claim what Frank Featherstone recorded at twelve frames per second between the beats of a human heart.

Noir-drenched and steeped in the toxic poetry of acetate and ethyl acetate, *The Last Cel Painter of Termite Terrace* is a love letter to a vanishing craft and a nightmare about what happens when animation stops lying. For readers who crave the atmosphere of *The Name of the Rose* filtered through *Who Framed Roger Rabbit* and the cosmic dread of *Cigarette Burns*—this is the story of the twenty-four lies per second that keep the dark still, and the one truth that shatters them.