Graphic Content: Dead Kingdom, Vol. 1 by Etienne Deprentigny

 

A little-known fact about me (at least, I’m still assuming it’s little known) is that I love to play Dungeons & Dragons. Particularly, I love exploring a dark dungeon, gathering up treasure and killing scores of enemies. Also, I love to read stories about said dungeons, treasure, and monsters, not necessarily in that order. As a lover of horror, I am particularly overjoyed when fantasy and horror overlap, where the swords sever lots of limbs and the sorcery is typically used to raise and/or control the dead. This is basically the setup of Etienne Derepentigny’s Dead Kingdom, Vol. 1, which takes the Walking Dead formula and sets it during medieval times.

The story is set in a land that has been torn apart by war. Kain is a peacekeeper and former soldier who has grown tired of battle, but he must once again take up his sword as the land faces a plague of the dead rising and attacking the living. As the bodies fall only to rise again, Kain must make his way across the land, reunite with his wife, and hopefully not die and become part of the undead army.

This world drawn by Derepentigny is not a shimmering fantasy world of shimmering castles and flying dragons that could easily end the zombie scourge with a few fiery blasts. Derepentigny’s world is dingy, full of drab stone walls and muddied, bloody soldiers. When the dead are dispatched, after figuring out that the head is indeed vulnerable, the kills with ax and arrow become a highlight of his book, especially for fans of the Walking Dead. Those fans will definitely see a Rick Grimes template in Kain. Derepentigny, who also writes the book, establishes Kain as a soldier reluctant to fight but is, despite his best efforts, quite good at it. Add in a quest for his wife and this story becomes ideal for fans of both Walking Dead and Dungeons and Dragons, those who wouldn’t mind roving the apocalyptic wastelands while wielding a sword. 

Graphic Content: Empty Eyes, written by Diego Agrimbau and illustrated by Juan Manuel Tumburús

 Childhood is expected to be a time of innocence, but horror has a great way of subverting expectations. In some stories, there are “childhood things” that we are told we need to put away to become adults. These include toys and imaginary friends are ultimately holding us back from being mature and capable adults. In some horror stories, these childhood things (for example, killer dolls) prevent us from growing up by simply ending us, but some childhood things can also protect us from what awaits us in the very cruel, very real adult world. Such is the case of the graphic novel Empty Eyes, written by Diego Agrimbau and illustrated by Juan Manuel Tumburús.

The story takes place during WWI at the border between Russia and Poland. Near the border is the Nurk Orphanage, which now houses only three living children: young Otto, his older sister Ophelia, and Maurice, who has a psychological hold over the siblings, ordering them to bring back fresh meat to feed Maurice’s cannibalistic tendencies. Otto wants his sister’s protection, especially after all the other children died, but they might still be close to Otto, perhaps looking out at him through the dolls that fill the place.

It is easy to think of Guillermo Del Toro’s work as this story shows the contrast between the fantasy world and a real world ravaged by war, but Agrumbau’s story is less fantasy and more horror, as it deals with child death and cannibalism. Tumburus’s artwork even plays with this dichotomy of childlike wonder and horror in his artwork. The children are wide-eyed (when they have eyes) and cherubic and seem to reference the artwork of many popular children’s books. What this ultimately means for young Otto is that the world that exists outside his is not one of bright, safe fantasy. There is no respite, either in this world or the next, for the ravages of war and the horrors born of the human condition. Readers who are fans of Del Toro’s movies will love this particular graphic novel, as well as readers who know childhood always has a dark side.

 

Graphic Content: He Who Fights with Monsters written by Francesco Artibani and illustrated by Werther Dell'Edera

 

Many philosophers and those seeking to understand evil are probably familiar with the following quote from Nietzche: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” (Other versions have it beginning with “Whoever,” but it’s the same general idea) People who use this quote use it to explain how slippery the slope is to being evil, even if one begins the fight with good intentions. It is a well-worn quote, but writer Francesco Artibani and illustrator Werther Dell’Edera offer a unique interpretation of this particular quote in their fantastical WWII drama
He Who Fights with Monsters.

The story opens with the Nazi occupation in Prague. Soldiers are pulling people from their homes, the community is chafing under the yoke of oppression, and the resistance in Prague is looking for anything that will turn the tide. They soon discover something beneath an old synagogue: boxes of mud and instructions on how to create a mythical golem, a protector of the Jewish people. Soon, a golem joins the fight to remove the Nazis from Prague, but this protector’s entry into the fray will affect both friend and foe alike, and all will learn the true cost of war.

Artibani creates a story that doesn’t take the simple road of “Golem turning the tide of battle.” This well-trodden ground of good soundly trouncing evil is even foreshadowed by Dell’Edera, whose action scenes showcase a kind of slam-bang action mentality that would be home in any superhero or war comic. Instead, Artibani looks at those affected by the occupation. The Nazis are still evil, and are depicted as such, but those with the Nazi boots figuratively on their necks also have their personalities and motivations dissected. Even the golem, who might be the most human of any of them, reflects on what war does to people. With the addition of a puppet master, who both frames and plays a significant role in the story, and He Who Fights With Monsters becomes a fractured fairy tale that takes a less-than-black-and-white approach to the effects of war.

 

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? The Bone Weaver's Orchard by Sarah Read

Fans of Harry Potter, as well as many young adult and juvenile books, may be familiar with the trope dealing with the transformative power of a new school/new environment. After living with his aunt and uncle who treat him like an afterthought at best and like a whipped dog at worst, Harry is whisked off to Hogwarts where he finds fame, friendship, and perhaps more importantly, acceptance. But Charley Wilson finds something altogether different in Sarah Read's The Bone Weaver's Orchard when he is sent off to school.
With his mother dead and his father serving in the military, Charley is sent to the Old Cross School for Boys. While Harry Potter enters Hogwarts a celebrity thanks to being "The Boy Who Lived," Charley enters the school as a boy struggling to find a place away from his family. He is able to confide in people like gardener Sam Forster and and motherly Matron Grace, but Charly is still regarded as a troublemaker by many of his teachers and fellow classmates. What purpose he does find begins when a potential friend winds up missing, leading Charley on a mystery involving dark, crumbling corridors, Gothic ruins, and ghastly secrets.
As I read this book, after I tried to stop comparing it to Harry Potter, it reminded me of Disney movies during the 70's and 80's that, before the animated era of talking crabs and blue genies, made live-action movies that terrified a generation. The book started out as something that could have been in the juvenile section of the library, particularly with the child protagonist struggling to solve a mystery that many of his peers and authority figures tell him to ignore. It soon became something genuinely frightening as the school does have some very dark and disturbing secrets, as violent and terrifying as anything dreamed up by Mary Shelley or Clive Barker. Once again going back to the Harry Potter analogy, Sarah Read offers up some real literary magic to combine so many influences from both children's and adult literature to create the story of a plucky, young hero who, while dealing with his own traumas, tries to survive what is waiting out in the burned, dilapidated halls of Old Cross, thus creating a book that serves as the perfect bridge for young adult horror readers who are looking for a genuinely terrifying and disturbing experience.

Have You Read This? The Deep by Alma Katsu

The sinking of the Titanic is one of the most notorious disasters in human history. It has permeated our collective consciousness so much that one could easily find several books about the disaster, a few dozen documentaries concerning the doomed ship, or Google the millions of times it has been referenced in popular culture, and that was even before Rose promised Jack that her heart would go on (I admit I never watched the entire Titanic movie). To take the well-known disaster and example of humanity's hubris and try to make it the backdrop of a novel is therefore a brave undertaking. How does the author avoid doing what has already been done before? Alma Katsu, pioneer of the historical horror genre, has managed to create something new and interesting with her latest book The Deep.
One of the things she does differently is add into the narrative Titanic's sister ship the Britannic, which was recommissioned as a sort of floating hospital and met a similar fate to her sister ship. Katsu's narrative not only jumps back and forth between the maiden voyage of the Titanic and the final voyage of the Britannic, there are also many characters that she reveals to the reader, from two boxers/grifters/starcrossed lovers to a woman whose relationship with her much older husband is more like a business merger than one born of love, to the stars of Katsu's drama, mysterious nurse Annie Hebley and Mark Fletcher, a father with a new baby girl and a dark secret.
Katsu's biggest strength as a writer is her ability to research. Stephen King once said that he needed just enough truth to lie convincingly when writing fiction, but Katsu gives plenty of facts, from people to early 20th century nautical trivia, to create a very real historical setting. Readers will come to the book knowing about the Titanic, which already creates a sense of looming disaster/tension from the first page, but Katsu's level of knowledge makes sure that readers can stay immersed in that setting for as long as they wish. Another strength on display in this book is Katsu's knack for character development. The book jumps around to different people and different perspectives but managed not to make them all feel one-dimensional. The two boxers Dai and Les were easily two of my favorites that I was honestly rooting for. Katsu managed to do this character juggling act throughout the whole book, right till the tragic ending of both ships. The perfect book for fans of historical horror who like a little of the fantastic, The Deep is a book into which you'll happily immerse yourself.

Screen to Scream: The Wind and The Hunger

Horror often involves isolation. If not specifically about isolation, then authors and story creators will put their protagonists in situations that cuts them off from their fellow humans, often physically separated by the environment. While the fact of our digitally connected world may stretch the believability of this isolation (how many places are too far away from cell towers?), this isolation is often internal as well. This is the case for two tales of people foolishly following manifest destiny: the movie The Wind: Demons of the Prairie as well as Alma Katsu's novel The Hunger.
Both movie and book take place on the American prairie and both are relatively understated horror (cannibalism and child death notwithstanding). Not exactly buckets of blood, but both have plenty of foreboding atmosphere. The Wind features Lizzy and her husband Isaac, settlers who have learned to survive the desolate landscape. Soon, they make the acquaintance of another couple Emma and Gideon, who have left a life of comfort behind. The four become friends, but Lizzy hears thing in the howling wind. She sees how what lurks out there affects Emma and it soon starts to affect Lizzie as well. She begins to have her own supernatural experiences while her husband is away and soon her trust in Isaac erodes. There are indeed demons on this prairie and those demons have infiltrated Lizzie's mind and work steadily to destroy her faith and the life she has built with her husband. Told in a non-chronological narrative, the story jumps around in places, meaning you'll have to pay attention to get the whole story, but even if you watch diligently, the movie may leave you with more questions than answers, particularly as to the reality of the events that took place.
The Hunger is a book similar in subject and tone to The Wind. Both books take place on the prairie and both books feel free to play with narrative structure. While The Wind jumps around from one part of the story to the next, Katsu's reimagining of the Donner Party pulls in a lot of epistolary examples from letters and journal entries to explore the lives of the party members before they made their fateful journey. Another similarity both book and movie share is the use of approaching tragedy to create tension. Even readers who haven't read about the Donner Party will have an idea what ultimately befell the settlers in The Hunger, and The Wind starts straight away with a blood-soaked Lizzy and a husband desperate to know what happened. Katsu's book also forces the reader to pay attention as she introduces many characters and backstories, many of which based on real people. However, this plethora of characters shouldn't dissuade readers from picking this book up after watching The Wind. Katsu is deft at not only fleshing out these different characters but tying up their tragic stories by the book's end.

New Arrival: Review of Laird Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods

Long-time readers of fairy tales know that it’s a terrible idea to go into the woods. Not only are there wolves in terrible disguises and old women who love their children medium well, journeying into the woods means straying from the path you know and that you know is safe. Sure, Bilbo had a grand adventure, but there were plenty of times he could have died, a victim of his great adventure. In horror fiction, the dangers in the woods can cause not only physical harm but psychological as well. In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt (a short read despite a long title) is a great example of the woods, the antithesis of civilization, being apt to change you in ways you didn’t expect.

The story is told through a woman simply named Goody, a woman in the 1800’s who narrates how she has gotten lost and is unable to get home to her husband and son. From Goldilocks and the Three Bears to The Blair Witch Project, stories like this have illustrated how not knowing your way creates unease and drives the plot. As Goody wanders, trying to find her way back home, she finds assistance, as well as obstruction, from women she encounters on her journey, including the crusty Captain Jane and the effervescent Eliza, doing everything for her from feeding her to taking her on enchanted boat rides. The story, though short, isn’t necessarily a breeze to read through as Goody’s narration sometimes devolves into stream of consciousness and the very strange aspects of the experience means the very underpinning of logic is suspect. Is what she experiencing real? If it’s a dream, Laird Hunt’s sentences make sure it’s a darkly beautiful one.

Like Jeremy Shipp’s home invasion (and mind invasion) novel Bedfellow, this book is not one to be breezed through. The reader, as they accompany Goody on her journey, will start to doubt what came before, who exactly is who, and what exactly is going on. This book is not a book with a neat, tidy ending. This story owes much of its bones to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” but becomes its own animal by traversing away from the straight-ahead morality tale and letting itself drift on the currents of a fever dream, becoming a fairy tale more about female empowerment than rather than any hard lesson. The wilds of the forest are all around Goody, and the reader, but they may also be inside.  

New Arival: Review of Alma Katsu's The Hunger

Historical fiction is a genre not readily associated with horror. Works from authors like Philipa Gregory and Tracy Chevalier aren’t trying to necessarily teach history and should not be taken as historically accurate. They are, to paraphrase Stephen King, only using just enough truth to tell a convincing lie (a lie, in this case, that becomes a book of over 300 pages). There seemed to be no examples of literary fiction in the horror genre until Alma Katsu’s The Hunger.

What allows this merging of history and horror in The Hunger is the subject matter; namely, the book follows the ill-fated members of the Donner Party as they succumb to the hardships of the trail, eventually resorting to cannibalism before perishing. The reader, thanks to pop culture, has probably heard of the Donner Party and knows their ultimate fate, but this story should be thought of like a tragedy. Tragedies, like trips, aren’t always about the destination but the journey, and Katsu’s story is a wagon train whose journey ends thanks to its people’s hubris and lack of understanding what truly awaits them.

The book takes its time introducing the members of this expedition, from blustery George Donner to his calculating wife Tamsen (who Katsu portrays as maybe having the smarts and gumption to survive this ordeal) to the noble pariah Stanton. Katsu, however, goes beyond these four and introduces the reader to seemingly the entire wagon train, all of them coming from different walks of life but all working toward the goal of traveling west. Katsu manages quite a feat of juggling in keeping all these stories straight, giving backstory through flashbacks and journal entries which reveals a lot about their individual, personal motivations. The reader can know these characters and empathize when the horrors of the trail finally descend on them.  

Make no mistake, this is definitely a horror book, even if the horror comes in drips and drabs. A lot of the book’s content is creating conflicts from without, and especially from within, that slow the group until they and the reader realize just how dire their circumstances are, including ritual sacrifices and the teasing of something waiting for them beyond the woods. Near the end of the book is where the horror really ratchets up, where the characters that Katsu so quietly introduces are all damned by their choices. The denouement of this tale, even when the reader knows the ending, is one that should leave the readers feeling satisfied and perhaps slightly nauseous. The book doesn’t profess to be historically accurate (there are other writings out there with more historical accuracy) but this book fulfills its purpose of letting the reader experience the horror caused by the Donner Party’s isolation and abandonment of hope.