Have You Read This? Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill, Leomacs, and Dave Stewart

 Looking once more at the offerings by Hill House Comics, it's high time I got to Joe Hill's main contribution to these titles, largely because it was the one that peaked my interest in Joe Hill's return to the graphic novel format. The cover of Basketful of Heads features a figure wearing a yellow rain slicker, face obscured in shadow. One arm holds a wicker basket with an America flag draped over it (one can assume it is the aforementioned basketful of heads). The other hand holds an archaic looking battleaxe (one can assumed it was used to sever the heads residing in the basket). Just by looking at the cover, you know what the story is about and what the major appeal of the book is. 

There is a story to the basketful of heads. It takes place on the island of Brody Island (if you watched Jaws, you'll either love the constant references to the movie or roll your eyes at them). It also features two young lovers June and Liam, who are trying to decide what to do with the rest of their lives as summer winds down on the island and all the tourists leave for the summer. She and Liam are then tangled up in a plot involving murder, corruption, and escaped convicts. Liam is captured and June, in fighting off a man in a prison jumpsuit, discovers an axe that has a strange enchantment: whenever you cut off someone's head with it, the head remains alive. June tries to track down Liam using the enchanted axe and her collection of severed heads that reveal more and more of the story. 

Yes, there is a mystery here, but it's not one that leaves a great many jaw-on-the-floor surprise twists. The only real mystery is how someone in the scene is going to lose their head and be added to the basket. However, the story isn't really the point. Joe Hill did the right thing calling this story Basketful of Heads because the title is basically the point. Sure, Hill shows his flair for dialogue and interesting characters that helped fuel the success of his seminal work Locke & Key, but this story is all about the hijinks one can get up to with a severed head. There's no Agatha Christie level of mystery here, or even a Flannery O'Connor deep dive into the human soul. This book is for fans of movies like Re-Animator and Evil
Dead that explores some really fun body horror humor. Even the art by Leomacs and Stewart harkens back to DC's Vertigo titles, which showed many adult situations in ink and paint. This book has a particular audience, but Joe Hill seems to know exactly what that audience wants. 

New Arrival: The Dollhouse Family

 If many horror stories are to be believed, childhood things should not only be put away when one gets older, but maybe even burned to ash, followed by a salting of the earth it was burned on. The closet in your bedroom? There's a monster in it. Your favorite toy? There's something evil looking at you from that toy's glass eyes. Childhood is often looked at through the rose-colored lens of nostalgia, so horror just loves coming in and flipping that love of childhood and its memories on its head. If your home currently has a dollhouse in it and you read M. R. Carey's The Dollhouse Family from Hill House Comics, you'll probably consider selling it on Ebay. Or burning it. 

The Dollhouse Family is a generation-spanning tale featuring a antique dollhouse, an ageless family that lives inside it, and a girl whose life is fundamentally altered by it. Young Alice receives the dollhouse as a six-year-old and it becomes an oasis from her turbulent home life. By speaking some magic words, she is able to enter the dollhouse and spend time with her loving surrogate family. But such magical things often has very large price tags, and what lives beyond the Black Door will eventually try to collect. An adult Alice soon finds that what lives in the Dollhouse seeks entry into our world. 

Less like an actual dollhouse and more like a grandfather clock, this story has a lot of moving parts, from Alice's ancestor, to the family that occupies the Dollhouse, to Alice's struggles as a single mother. These plot points all vie for attention, but adult Alice's struggles as a mother from a broken home resonate the most as she finds herself doing the best for her daughter, even as she must come to terms with what the Dollhouse actually is. M. R. Carey, much in the same way he wrote about zombies in The Girl With All The Gifts, doesn't go for the low-hanging fruit of haunted dollhouse. This tale involves demon hunting, domestic terrorism, as well as whether it's preferable to live in a safe fantasy versus a painful reality. Add the art from Peter Gross and Vince Locke that introduces an Adult Coraline vibe, and you have a very twisting and twisted fairy tale for adults. The ending may be too out there for some, but the journey of Alice's family shows strong bonds and abiding love that no demonic children's toy can kill.
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Have You Read This? Andy Davidson's The Boatman's Daughter

Read and find out 
what happened to this guy

Like westerns, fantasy, and science fiction, Southern Gothic fiction uses the environment as another character. Often full of tall grasses that seem to soak up the sweltering heat, lush and massive trees where evil lurks behind and within, and murky marshlands, swimming with hidden dangers, this landscape serves as both the backdrop for the characters’ various misdeeds and its own character, as much alive as the people who plot and murder within its confines. This is the setting of Andy Davidson’s latest book The Boatman’s Daughter, a beautifully fantastic, Southern gothic tale of dark magic and darker stains upon the soul.

The protagonist Miranda Crabtree grew up in the swamps of Arkansas. After losing her father at an early age, she is adopted by a mysterious witch, earning herself an adopted brother, and soon begins working with a cast of shady characters. Miranda’s world is upended when a mysterious girl comes into the swamp. The girl has strange powers, and some bad men want her, men willing to burn down or tear through whatever gets in their way. The girl’s entry into Miranda’s life also upends everything she thought she knew about her life and her makeshift family, even as she strives to defend both.

The Southern gothic tradition boasts such luminaries as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and even if Andy Davidson’s writing doesn’t transcend the prose of these luminaries, he shows his love for the genre, perhaps even an innate understanding of it, through the prose he writes. The land that he writes about is as textured and thrumming with menacing as the diabolical preacher Billy Cotton and the sadistic constable Charlie Riddle. The book could take place a year ago, five years ago, and even twenty years ago, the setting so alien and separate from what we know that the intrusion from the outside world, the world beyond the swamp, is minimal. Davidson’s prose draws you into this world, as fantastical as anything Frodo walked through, but grounded in a gritty reality familiar to fans of noir and suspense. Readers will marvel at the spectacle of the world Davidson paints even as they watch their steps for water moccasins.