Graphic Content: The Red Mother, Vol. 1 by Jeremy Haun and Danny Luckert

 

The use of horror to explore trauma is perhaps one reason why horror is a constantly evolving genre. As many different horror stories that exist, there are, for each story, multiple interpretations by people who each bring their own unique experiences to the story. Exploring this relationship between horror and genre through the medium of a graphic novel adds a whole other layer because an artist creates corresponding images, giving the physical demons, both literal and metaphorical, a physical weight. Trauma, and the monsters who represent it, are given a very specific shade of red in Jeremy Haun and Danny Luckert’s The Red Mother, Vol. 1.

In a brutal mugging, Daisy McDonough loses both her eye and the man she loves. Trying to put the pieces of her life back together, she attends therapy, reconnects with friends, and receives a prosthetic eye, trying to get back to a normal that is every increasingly out of reach. When she lost her eye, she gained the ability to see things that are after her. When her vision goes red, it signals the coming of the Smiling Man, a figure who appears to serve an entity known as the Red Mother.

Haun, writer of the gripping dystopian noir The Beauty, lays the groundwork by showing Daisy as capable but traumatized, slowly emerging into the world after a violent attack. The supernatural happenings in this story come in drips and drabs, little snippets of red-tinged panels that may reveal the unnerving Smiling Man, a being that artist Danny Luckert depicts as a more inhuman Babadook. People might remember Luckert as the artist behind the disturbing insect imagery in Cullen Bunn’s Regression series, and he displays similar skills with the visions McDonough receives, particularly in a dream sequence featuring a ghostly visitation that looks refreshingly different from the thousands of ghostly visitations that came before. My only knock on this book is that the story feels a bit slow, but I also see that great care is being made to make the reader care about Daisy, so I’m willing to read the next volume in this series to see if Haun might speed up the pacing or, if lacking that, amp up the fear. I am sure that, by reading further, I will learn more about the Red Mother.