Sandcastle is a French-language Swiss mystery/Body Horror graphic novel written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters. It was initially published in France, before being translated into English by Nora Mahony and released in the United States in 2013.
It's a perfect beach day, or so thought a family, a young couple, a group of American tourists, and a North African refugee who all wind up together in the same secluded, idyllic cove filled with rock pools and sandy shore, encircled by green, densely vegetated cliffs. Unbeknownst to all of them is that this utopia seems to harbor something much darker than what meets the eye.
First, there is the dead body of a woman found floating in the crystal-clear water. Then there is the odd fact that all the children are rapidly aging. Then everyone else starts noticing that they are rapidly aging themselves, at such a rate that they will all likely die of old age by tomorrow morning. Oh, and there doesn't seem to be any way out of the cove.
The graphic novel serves as the chief inspiration for Old, directed, written, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan.
This Comic Book contains examples of
- Downer Ending: Everyone inevitably dies of old age on the beach. Zoe and Louis' daughter is the last surviving person, though in the body of a 50-year-old and will inevitably age to death as well. The last scene shows her building a sandcastle.
- Express Delivery: Zoe, one of the rapidly aging children, ages into a teenager, winds up pregnant after having sex with Louis, and swiftly delivers a baby girl.
- Fan Disservice: There's plenty of nudity in the novel... including children and old people.
- Improbable Infant Survival: The baby girl Zoe gives birth to is perfectly healthy, even in light of the beach's conditions.
- Modesty Towel: The children use towels to cover themselves after they outgrow their bathing suits, but they discard them for the rest of the story not long afterwards.
- No Name Given: We never learn the name of Charles's mother-in-law before her death.
- Playing Doctor: After aging into teenagers, Zoe (who, just to put this into context, is mentally five) inspects Louis's "nice new hair"… and winds up giving him an erection, which she finds cool.
- Rapid Aging: Everyone on the beach ages a few years every half hour, condensing an entire lifetime into just 24 hours.
- Sanity Slippage: As time passes on the beach, Charles begins to develop Alzheimer's, which makes him a danger to himself and others, especially Amesan.
- Separate Scene Storytelling: To calm the kids about what comes after death, Amesan tells them a story of a king who was met with a messenger of Death: a half man. The half man told the king that he will die in seven years and a day. Terrified, the king built a castle designed to keep the half man out, but in the process, he also isolated himself from his friends, family and wife out of paranoia. Seven years and a day later, the half man returned and congratulated him on building his tomb. The king told him he built no tomb, only to realize the castle itself was his tomb. As he died, he came to regret spending his last days living alone and not being able to fulfill his dream of climbing a mountain to see real snow. The moral of the story is that death is inevitable and we should cherish every single moment without fear and regret.
- The Un-Reveal: Levy ultimately never explains why everyone is rapidly aging at the beach. By the end with everyone having died of old age, it's left a mystery and up for interpretation as to why this all transpired.
