"Swiss horror master Thomas Ott returns with the first
full-length graphic novel of his career. When clearing up the cell of a
prisoner who has been sentenced to death and subsequently executed, a
prison guard finds a small piece of paper with a combination of numbers on
it.
On the spur of the moment, he puts it into his pocket.
As the guard lives a solitary, monotonous life, the numbers on the
paper awake his curiosity. To find out their hidden meaning could add a new
meaning to his life as well, so the guard stumbles into situations in which
the number or part of it seem to achieve a certain importance and offer him
hints and possible solutions. And the numbers signal a radical change in
his luck. He gets to know a woman, falls in love with her, and one night,
in a casino, he wins a huge amount of money when gambling on these
numbers.
But the next morning, the woman and money have disappeared.
The man goes in search of the woman and the money. But from that day
on, his luck changes and the numbers bring him only bad luck, sending him
inexorably into an abyss that he might not recover from. Thomas Ott's O.
Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The
Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, or modern masters
like filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan; his hallucinatory, hyper-detailed
scratchboard illustrations will haunt you long after you've put the book
down." -Fantagraphics