Have You Read This? And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

 

We trust reality. Or at least we hope reality will always be reliable, that the same rules that governed it yesterday will govern it today and so on. It can be quite upsetting when the little daily bargain you make with reality is suddenly broken. Honestly, if you can’t trust reality, who or what can you trust? That question is what drives this zombie-adjacent novella And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin.

This story is about monsters and about survivors. After a plague that turns ordinary people into monsters strikes, bands of survivors roam the countryside, stealing what they can and taking out any monsters they come across. These monsters might have been friends, neighbors, lovers, or family, but they are no longer human. Spence learned all these hard lessons as a survivor and he’s killed many monsters, but the plague might be something different and he might also have a different kind of body count on his hands.

Devlin’s book is a quick read, but it’s not necessarily an easy one. This is largely because of how it consistently erodes the trustworthiness of its narrator Spence. Spence’s story might not be what he thinks it is, meaning the reader will start to question what exactly is real in Devlin’s book. About the only answer Devlin gives is that reality is ultimately subjective, but this realization is of little comfort to poor Spence. Fans of shorter works like Sara Tantlinger’s To Be Devoured and Joe Koch’s The Wingspan of Severed Hands should like this particular break from reality.

Graphic Content: Phantom Road Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Hernández Walta

 

Jeff Lemire likes to be weird, and the graphic novel medium is the perfect genre to explore that weirdness. Lemire typically doesn’t tell a brief but powerful story; rather, he slowly introduces spooky elements and lets his readers bask in the uncertainty and their own fear. This time avoiding black barns, Lemire takes to the open road and the worlds where those roads lead in his newest series Phantom Road.

Volume 1 of Phantom Road introduces its main characters. Dom is a long-haul trucker who drives so he doesn’t have to think about the mess his life has become. He comes across a young woman named Birdie as she crawls from the wreckage of an accident. Among that wreckage is a strange artifact that attaches itself to both Birdie and Dom. Now, the two are not only thrust together but they must transport this artifact across America and through a world that is full of monsters.

The tagline of this book is “Mad Max: Fury Road meets The Sandman,” and its aesthetic blends both fictional universes. Gabriel Hernández Walta’s art adds the Mad Max element, and not just when he designs the desolate desert scenery, both in the real world and the other world. Dom’s appearance, especially when wielding a crowbar, is just one leather/armor cosplay combo away from Mad Max’s signature look. Walta also adds the Sandman elements that inform the design of the monsters, or lack of designs. Their faceless, vaguely humanoid forms are off-putting and alien enough to make readers uneasy, and uneasiness is where writer Lemire likes to leave his readers.

Much like Gideon Falls, Lemire begins this story with less information and more atmosphere. Even the truck stop with the far-from-lovable bear mascot adds to the unreal setting of the book. This first volume should leave readers wondering how and why the artifact is leading Dom and Birdie on a quest but intrigued enough to read further volumes and find the story breadcrumbs Lemire will leave.

Graphic Content: Playthings by Jon Clark and Travis Williamson

 

Many of us grew up with toys. Toys of all shapes and sizes, from games to dolls, have provided a great deal of our childhood memories. But like clowns and restaurants featuring animatronic mascots, toys that were created with the singular intent of providing joy to children become twisted when portrayed within the horror genre. Imagine Toy Story and Joe Hill’s N0S4A2 had a horrifying baby that lived in the tunnels beneath Fantasyland in Walt Disney World and you might come up with the elevator pitch for Playthings, a comic series created by writer and colorist Jon Clark and illustrator Travis Williamson.

The story begins with Alison Hart waking up in a brightly colored room surrounded by toys that seem to be moving on their own. She’s also tied to a chair and appears to have plastic hands, but that’s not even the worst thing that’s happening to her. Her daughter is missing, taken into this warped wonderland by one of these toys and she will do anything to get her daughter back, even things that she once thought were unthinkable.

Clark’s story might bring up thoughts of Child’s Play and its killer doll Chucky, especially how one doll in particular loves to attack its victims legs, but it differentiates itself through its setting and its protagonist. Alison is not initially portrayed as a good mother, or at least it seems she’s an indifferent one. It isn’t until her daughter is taken that her protective nature emerges. Then she begins her descent into a demented playhouse that is more terrifying than anything Alice ever encountered in Wonderland.

This psychedelic trip that would give Liam Neeson second thoughts is gloriously rendered thanks to Williamson’s illustrations, along with Clark’s choice of colors. Williamson has made the interesting decision of leaving a more cartoonish aspect to his character design (something akin to Image’s The Maxx series for those comic fans with long memories). The people populating this universe don’t look too different from the toys that are supposed to shock when they start coming to life. This aesthetic choice makes the book look less like a bad touch of Christmas magic and more a questioning of reality, leaving the reader constantly guessing as to what’s going on.

Playthings is currently on Hoopla but I hope it gets its own trade paperback very soon.

Screen to Scream: The Lighthouse and Punishment by Hope

The ocean. It covers two/thirds of the planet, yet humanity still fears it. Sure, we swim in it, float boats on top of it, and we even go underneath it for long periods of time, thanks to the wonders of engineering. But the ocean is still frightening. Within its depths, there is no air for us to breathe, the pressure can crush you like an empty beer can, and there are many monsters with teeth, tentacle, and stinger that could easily kill you. In Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Hooper weren’t just afraid of the shark but of the water that was Jaws’s turf. So in a nutshell, the sea can be terrifying and a great setting for horror. Two examples of this are the Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse and Erik Hofstatter’s bizarre tale Punishment by Hope.

The plot of The Lighthouse is pretty easy to explain: In the 1890’s two men (played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe)  try to maintain their sanity while working at a lighthouse on a remote New England island. They spectacularly fail to hold onto sanity. But there’s also a lot going on within the movie itself that goes beyond both men doing their best impression of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. Viewers are given an intimate view of the two men gradually getting on each other’s nerves until those taut nerves snap. Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake is a stern taskmaster, constantly giving Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow a variety of taxing chores while banning him from the lighthouse’s light. Ephraim Winslow, a less-than-model employee, begins to see strange things from sea monsters to mermaids to the man who had his old job. This eventually leads to a violent confrontation between the two men and their mutual ruin. Rife with symbolism and playing on many established myths and tropes, from the siren leading seafaring men to their deaths to the story of Prometheus, The Lighthouse is a hallucinogenic journey down the dark and briney rabbit hole, a mythic tragedy underscoring the dangers of tempting fate, the sea, or whatever lives at the top of the lighthouse.

While The Lighthouse is grounded in the reality of the sea around New England in the 1890’s, Hofstatter’s Punishment by Hope takes place on the sea in an entirely different plane of existence. Nim spends his time longing for a mysterious woman who constantly refuses his advances. No matter how many times he swims to her, no matter what kinds of burdens he carries for her, she rejects him despite her becoming the center of his universe. If Hofstatter’s story plays on the siren myth, it flips the script by having the object of desire actively reject that role. What is assured is the sense of overwhelming tragedy that gradually pulls Nim into a deal that might be called a Faustian deal if it were on dry land, but may make readers, perhaps unfairly, think of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid (not so much the Disney version). To reveal too much about the story takes away from its power, but it also might not even be the point. Hofstatter excels not in creating a tight narrative but in creating a surreal fever dream that reads like epic poetry, carrying readers along on waves of gorgeous metaphors to this tale’s conclusion. Like The Lighthouse and Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods, Punishment by Hope is less like reading a story and more like drowning in the imagery of a painting that draws the eye and sucks you in. Both film and book are works of art where viewers and readers can get lost in the various swirls of black, white, blue, and red that are both artists’ individual palettes.