Graphic Content: Mirka Andolfo's Mercy: The Fair Lady, The Frost, and the Fiend

 

There are some stories where the graphic novel is a perfect medium. Sometimes words pale in conveying the gut-churning cosmic horrors and mutated bodies that permeate Mirka Andolfo’s Mercy: The Fair Lady, the Frost, and the Fiend. However, this work is more than just a hearkening back to when EC Comics could show blood and gore with impunity. Mercy also borrows from many different genres and explores a lot of different themes.

The story itself takes place in Washington State in the late nineteenth-century. The town of Woodsburgh is still reeling from a mining accident that claimed many of its citizens, including the mine’s owner. In comes Lady Hellaine, a mysterious and beautiful stranger who, along with her faithful butler Goodwill, have come with promises to help the community while bringing with them an aura of mystery. However, Lady Swanson, the widow of the mine’s owner and a shrewd business owner, does not trust Lady Hellaine, mainly because Lady Swanson knows more about the otherworldly entities that forced the mine’s closure. Add to this plot a serial killer/monster called the Woodsburgh Devil, and the darkness seething in the mine as well as in the hearts of Woodsburgh’s citizens threatens to unleash something terrible.

This graphic novel is for readers that like their genres mashed up until they are their own unique genre. This story contains everything from historical fiction to cosmic horrors to romance to familial relationships. The undercurrent running through this tale, though, is identity. There are monsters here that wear human faces and seem separate from these identities, but the story shows that identity is not always cut and dry. Yes, these are alien monsters, but in possessing the memories and experiences of those whose skin they wear, do these monsters become capable of becoming human, with all the messy and glorious emotional attachments involved? In other words, how long before a perfect disguise becomes the real thing? Andolfo’s work as artist shows no shyness in depicting these unique monsters, especially delving into body horror as they mutate their human shells. She also uses the story to grapple with heady issues that go beyond mere blood and gore. Yes, it’s an adult comic, but not simply because it depicts sex and violence but because it tackles, if not entirely penetrates, some thorny philosophical issues.

Have You Read This? Crossroads by Laurel Hightower

Many are familiar with the expression “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” This idea has been promoted in fantastical story after fantastical story about wishes. Sometimes, like in Aladdin, the protagonist realizes that what they wished for wasn’t really what they wanted or needed. However, in stories like “The Monkey’s Paw,” making a wish means inviting misfortune because wishes aren’t necessarily free, and sometimes the cost is quite steep. And we can’t forget the ubiquitous Faustian Deal where a wish or desire is granted but the wisher has to give up something at great personal cost, most often one’s soul. This process can seem literal as well as metaphorical, as in Laurel Hightower’s novel Crossroads.

Chris still mourns the loss of her adult son Trey, who died in an automobile accident. She visits the scene of the accident, hoping to be close to him, even hearing his voice while she’s there. But a drop of her blood touches the ground around where her son died, and she soon starts to see Trey outside her window. Chris thinks that her prayers have somehow been answered, that her son has returned to him, but she must still sacrifice. She must literally give more and more of herself in order for Chris to remain among the living, but soon the question becomes how much can Chris give before she completely loses herself.

Hightower digs deeply into Chris’s grief as it has Chris committing acts that might make a more sensitive stomach turn, but this is no novel that’s just shock and gore. Hightower showcases Chris’s emotional pain, the pain of a mother who, in Chris’s mind, could not be there for her son when she really needed him. The novel discusses how Chris is so desperate to get her son back that she is willing to literally give her own flesh and blood to rescue him, playing a sort of guessing game because, unlike most stories of Faustian deals and wishes, whatever is bringing Trey back does not make what it wants from Chris clear, leaving her to guess how much blood and flesh is required. The supernatural, in that sense, takes a back seat to the emotional trauma of the characters, from Chris to potential boyfriend and savior Dan to ex-husband Beau, who has seemingly moved on with a new family.  Fans of Stephen King’s

Pet Sematary will find similar ground dug up in Hightower’s tale, but rather than filled full or reanimated pets and Wendigos, Hightower focuses on the pain of parental grief, the hell a parent endures when he or she has outlived their child, and the emotional and physical bargaining a parent will do to bring that child back.

New Arrival: Children of Chicago

One of the predecessors of horror, before King, before Poe, and even before Stoker, would be fairy tales. Yes, they contain magic and yes, these tales have been sanitized for children depending on the teller, but they also contain many horrific elements, from child-eating witches to predatory wolves to women turning to foam for another man. Writers like Christina Henry and Daniel Mallory Ortberg realize that fairy tales are great fodder for horror stories. One such tale that deserves its own horror story is the Pied Piper, the musician who rid the town of Hamlin and then of its children. Cynthia Pelayo noted this and used the tale of the Pied Piper to create Children of Chicago, a crime story/fairy tale/character study.

The story follows Lauren Medina, a Chicago homicide detective investigating a shooting with graffiti referencing the Pied Piper from the fairy tale. Finding other instances of this graffiti with messages like “Pay the Piper,” Medina finds that the Pied Piper is a supernatural entity whose influence is felt far and wide, especially by young people who can call him via a method like the ones to summon Bloody Mary and Candyman. Once summoned and like in the fairy tale, the Pied Piper is all about receiving his payment once he completes a service, and he typically demands a life as payment. Before the story is over, the Pied Piper will claim quite a few lives as payment as Medina goes deeper into the mystery that is claiming Chicago’s young people.

Pelayo doesn’t just rewrite the Pied Piper for a new generation here; this is a story that has a great many influences. She borrows from the Candyman universe in many ways. One is the Chicago setting that the movies use. This, however, does not seem to be borrowing from the movies but the author’s knowledge and love of the city. Pelayo, it seems, could write a history of Chicago based on the information and history she presents here, not as much to move the story forward but to create a living, breathing setting where these characters live. Another similarity to Candyman is its exploration of how a myth can also become a living, breathing thing. The Pied Piper, within this city and this story, has his story told through the graffiti his followers, his congregation, leaves behind. He gains strength every time his tale his told and every time a follower asks for a favor, regardless of the consequences.

The most intriguing part of this story, however, is the character of Lauren Medina. People familiar with shows like Law and Order or any other crime thriller will see Medina’s influences, just as they notice her flaws. She is dedicated to the job, but often to the detriment of her own health and even the health of her relationships. She also frequently uses people to help her in her investigation even as she actively pushes them away. She also deals with her father’s passing, and a department that feels her promotion to detective was undeserved. What becomes fascinating about this character, though, is that readers will see that others’ reticence to fully trust Medina is justified. Ultimately, the ending to this fairy tale/crime thriller/devil’s bargain tale doesn’t wrap up as neatly as some might like, but as a character study of Lauren Medina, an exploration on the power of myth, and a love letter to the city she and Pelayo love, it is sure to attract readers as surely as its supernatural villain attracted rats and children.

Screen to Scream: Summer of '84 and Cricket Hunters

The past year hasn’t been the best one, and there are a lot of reasons why. It’s pretty tempting then to go back to a simpler time, where life made a bit more sense. From binging the sitcoms you watched in the ‘80s or buy a few discount parachute pants, there are a lot of ways to do our own limited version of time travel. The pull of nostalgia can easily pull one down the rabbit hole of VHS tapes and slap bracelets, but we should also remember that nostalgia, quoting from Mad Men ad man Don Draper, literally means the pain from an open wound. In a nutshell, the past isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the movie Summer of ’84 and Jeremy Hepler’s coming of age book Cricket Hunters are prime examples of this.

Summer of ’84, like its TV show progenitor Stranger Things, draws a lot of inspiration when Reaganomics and horror permeated the American consciousness. The story takes place in Cape May, Oregon, an idyllic small town full of nice houses and manicured lawns. Teenager Davey Armstrong, a fan of urban legends before the Internet, suspects that his neighbor, a well-respected Police officer, is a serial killer responsible for the deaths of thirteen boys. Pulling his three friends and his crush into the investigation, they search for the necessary clues to prove the killer’s guilt to a town full of unbelieving adults. If the plot sounds like something dredged up from too many Hardy Boys books, that could have been the filmmakers’ intention, if only to later subvert them. What starts off as a Rear-Window type mystery soon becomes something much more high stakes and much more terrifying. The resolution of the film should turn that sugary hit of nostalgia viewers were expecting into something more stomach-churning.

This is a similar formula Hepler uses to great effect in his book Cricket Hunters. The story follows Celia Garcia and her friends during an eventful autumn in 1998 and 15 years later, when the kids now adults are still processing what happened to them. Not only is Celia’s grandmother, a bruja, dealing with a sister who is cursed by a rival brujah, but the kids, including Celia’s future husband Parker, must navigate a city full of danger, including a husband stalking his ex-wife, young Abby Powell’s mother, and a nephew of the brujah who cursed Celia’s great aunt. Young Abby disappeared that year and 15 years later, the adult Parker turns up missing. Celia must dig through her past if she hopes to have a future with her husband. Hepler weaves a story that moves through past and present, showing readers how that fateful autumn has affected Celia’s life today, especially as it unravels when she becomes a suspect in Parker’s disappearance. The real joy in this novel is watching Hepler set up our expectations only to gleefully knock them down. This isn’t, however, mere shock value. It merely proves, like Summer of ’84, that the past shouldn’t be looked at through rose-colored glasses lest you miss something important.