"How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found" is a 2002 young adult novel by Sara Nickerson, with illustrations by Sally Wren Comport. The book is mostly text, but includes pages of a "comic book" that exists inside the story.
This is perhaps my favorite book that I've read so far this year. Of course, this book happens to involve things that are of special interest to me: islands in The Puget Sound that can only be reached by ferry, and a series of obscure comic books. But even without that, this book manages to do what few books are able to do: to create an atmosphere of magical realism where the possibility of the uncanny is kept alive, without being fully resolved.
Margaret Clairmont is a 12 year old girl who lived with a depressed mother and an annoying little sister. Her mother is functional, but spends most of her time asleep, and the family survives off of frozen food. Four years ago, Margaret's father died, in mysterious circumstances, triggering her mother's depression. This amount of emotional stress hasn't helped her school life, with her doing things like eating lunch in a bathroom stall to avoid social contact. All this changes when her normally sedentary mother takes the family on a trip to a small island in the Puget Sound (presumably one of the San Juan Islands, but it doesn't say that specifically). They find an old mansion, and in that mansion, Margaret finds a package that gives her hints about what might have happened in the past. After they return to home, Margaret decides to return to the mansion to find out what really happened. At the same time, a boy on the island is reading a series of handmade comic books about a humanoid rat, that he gets from a mysterious zine library. When he meets Margaret, they set out to find out how the comic books reveal the secret of how her father died.
When I started this book, I didn't know which direction it was going to go. I thought it might turn into a book-length very special episode where Margaret learns about parental depression, and where she makes friends, learns to be herself and (although the term didn't exist in 2002) becomes a girlboss. Or, I thought, it might have turned into a typical YA fantasy novel where she finds the underground kingdom of the rodent people and finds the three gems that allow them to destroy an evil witch. But instead this book exactly walked the line: it did what magical realism tries, but often fails to do: keep the reader in suspense about how much of what is going on is real.
All night long I'd had this feeling---it was like I'd been stepping in and out of different worlds. And all the worlds were somehow connected, but also completely separate. I was the only thing that linked them together.
And I felt, as I was reading this book, the same suspense, as I couldn't tell whether the book was going to break one way or the other. Only in the climax of the book do we ever get a clear picture of whether anything supernatural was ever happening, and even then, I wasn't totally sure.
As a final note, the setting of the book, on the fictionalized San Juan Islands, has a lot to do with being able to create a setting like that. A zine library full of unpublished, self-made books (and with no apparent financial basis) seems like it might be a matter of total fancy, but I can imagine such a thing existing in the San Juans. The fact that this book takes place in a unique social environment allows me to believe the suspension between reality and fantasy more.