When people say that the world is on fire, they might mean that figuratively or literally. Just checking the news is enough to fuel a truckload of anxieties, but in particular the climate is worrisome; the news is filled with temperature records being broken and violent storms leaving devastation in their wake. Horror stories are often at their best when they’re addressing these kinds of anxieties. Writer Ryan Cady incorporates climate catastrophe with the classic ghost story in the book Haunt You to the End.
The story is set in the near future (but it still seems like a pretty close future). As the climate spirals out of control, where even the air can be toxic. An unemployed journalist, a compassionate doctor, a TV demonologist, join an eccentric billionaire and his small contingent of military contractors on an expedition to Isla Lodo, supposedly “the most haunted place on Earth,” all to prove the existence of life after death and to give people hope that there is something beyond this life (whether that’s actual hope is debatable). As a superstorm threatening to wipe Isla Lodo off the map approaches, this team discovers that there is something more dangerous than the air and the storm that’s coming. It’s something that wants their very souls.
The horrors that Cady explores seem quite relevant to today, even as the book it set nearly a century into the future, and the characters he populates this world with are the ones you’d expect to find in a by-the-numbers ghost story, from the billionaire who has relatively good but misguided intentions to the disillusioned cynic who is forced to become a believer. There’s even a corporate big bad that not only is keeping what’s happening on Isla Lodo quiet, but they are also responsible for the way the world is. To keep this story grounded, Artist Andrea Mutti doesn’t draw things like flying cars and hoverboards, keeping the technology very much down-to-earth, perhaps to show just how close this environmentally-ravaged world is to ours. However, readers should expect the typical ghastly ghostly images of bodies in various states of injury and reanimation. As for the story itself, it doesn’t break new ground, but its environmental message does evoke some very real-world terrors.
