Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals, the hotel and spa in Switzerland, was designed intentionally devoid of clocks so that visitor's sense of time would be suspended and immeasurable. Completed in 1996, there is a legend about a mountain in the village of Vals that is said to have a mountain that periodically swallows people. 

In his debut graphic novel, Swimming in Darkness, cartoonist Lucas Harari builds on this modern mythology. The new publication centers around an architecture school dropout named Pierre, who, after a breakdown, travels to Vals to visit Zumthor's baths, which were the subject of his unfinished thesis. Upon his arrival, Pierre discovers secret rooms within the Therme Vals and attempts to uncover their hidden truths.

This psychological thriller drops the reader into Zumthor's work and uses it as a vehicle to explore this young protagonist's existential predicament. Concerning the work, Lucas Harari said:

I visited the thermal baths of Vals as a teenager and the place strongly marked my imagination. The materials, the play of light, the sounds, the colors, the context, the landscape these are the very heart of the architecture in a place that seemed so extraordinary, so romantic, to me. Those emotions stayed very alive in my mind, and they are what guided me in the creation of the book.

The story begins in the first person, with characters living banal events, and then slowly, this normality cracks to reveal what is behind the door: a world of fiction. In fact, in SWIMMING IN DARKNESS, the thermal baths are the threshold between reality and fiction. Kind of like the cover of a book when you open it, you're entering another world..

Lucas Harari is the son of two Parisian architects. He briefly studied architecture but soon switched to cartooning. 

Published by Arsenal Pulp Press, the graphic novel will be released on Nov. 5.