I got through another small stack of horror (or horror-adjacent) comics this week, so here’s another small stack as we approach Halloween!
Corpse de Ballet by Megan Kearney
Rosamund Hammond has just arrived at Saint Anselmus, a prestigious ballet academy, in the middle of senior year. She’s filling an unexpected opening because another student took an abrupt leave of absence; she ends up that vacated room with Eugenie, who quickly befriends Rosamund. Eugenie is convinced that her former roommate Giovanna is actually dead and that the school is covering it up for some reason, and she recruits Rosamund to help her investigate. And, indeed, Rosamund starts to experience some strange things—visions of a mysterious young woman, fluttering moths, lost hours.
The academy is gearing up for a performance of Coppélia, a ballet about an alchemist trying to bring a marionette to life, and a young couple whose relationship is strained when the young man falls in love with the marionette. Rosamund works tirelessly to show that she deserves her spot at the academy while also following Eugenie’s instructions, and in her exhaustion it is hard to tell what is real and what isn’t. This graphic novel combines the horrors of an elite arts school—with its elevated expectations and social cliques—with an eerie plotline that echoes the story of Coppélia.
Stagtown: Volume 1 by Punko
This comic book is a print version of a Webtoon series and collects the first season. Frankie is a young woman who has just moved back to her childhood town, Stagtown, and this book is her account of some of the strange things that happen there. It starts with the cameras: Jeremy, in the neighboring apartment, freaks out one day about a camera in the hallway, saying that he’s being watched. Frankie doesn’t think much about it—Jeremy’s a bit of a conspiracy nut and has always been paranoid. But then a camera shows up in her kitchen. And then lots of cameras are all over town, some with insectoid bodies—and nobody can explain them. When she finally agrees to get Jeremy out of town, he never makes it, dying in a freak accident that only deepens the mystery, and now Frankie is determined to get to the bottom of it.
She discovers cryptic clues that Jeremy left behind, and meets his friend Felix who is also interested in figuring out what’s happening. This one has some truly creepy scenes: weird shifting traps, kids wearing animal masks with a terrifying secret, and inexplicable barriers to leaving the town. (That last part reminds me a little of Murmuration, mentioned last week, because of the way the town itself starts to feel malevolent and has many ways to keep people from leaving.) What gives this one its punch is the fact that you really can’t predict what might happen when you turn the page—it doesn’t follow a predictable story arc, and though the various horrors are connected, they are all bizarre and quite diverse in nature.
Soulmates by David Wilson
Kit Summers is all set for his senior year of high school: he’s just been named the football captain, he’s dating the homecoming queen, and he’s got his college plans lined up at his dad’s alma mater. Sure, he’s not entirely enthused that his girlfriend has already planned out their entire future, but his life is pretty good, as long as he sticks to his dad’s strict rules. And then Emma shows up.
Emma was Kit’s best friend growing up, but in middle school she mysteriously moved away, and completely broke contact with Kit. Suddenly, everything is topsy-turvy. Kit starts having visions of people who soon turn up dead, along with a skeletal being that can apparently see him. It also doesn’t help that the visions keep showing up at inopportune times, causing him to wreck his car, flub an important catch, and so on. He obviously still has feelings for Emma, but he tries to keep those buried, along with other things from his past like his artwork.
Emma has her own secrets: she knows the reason that her family moved away, and it’s the same reason her grandmother keeps a tight rein on her activities now. Her grandmother warns her that her friends won’t see her the same way if they found out, but she soon realizes that her secret and Kit’s strange visions are connected.
This one is more horror-adjacent than the others: the deathly visions are a bit spooky (and illustrated in a dark, splotchy style that gives it a dreamlike feel) but it’s more about two kids figuring out who they are despite pressure and expectations from family and friends. And also weird magic.
Things We Lost in the Fire: Four Graphic Stories written by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell, illustrated and adapted by Lucas Nine
This one is an adaptation of a short story collection, though I haven’t read the prose version myself. The original has 12 stories, and Lucas Nine adapted four of them into this comic book version. The illustrations are a combination of photography and paintings, often with a loose, abstracted style that gives more of a vague impression of a figure.
“The Dirty Kid” is about a woman’s encounter with a kid who lives on the street with his mother, who is an addict and sometimes disappears without him. When the news reports that a child has been found, brutally murdered, she is convinced that it’s the same kid and then gets tangled up in the investigation.
“An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt” features Pablo, a tour guide for Buenos Aires Mystery Tours, as he guides tourists around the city, pointing out locations connected to Cayetano Santos Godino, a real-life child murderer nicknamed the “big-eared runt.” After Pablo sees a vision of Cayetano on the bus, he starts to become obsessed with him and the details of his gruesome murders. This story incorporates actual photos of Cayetano, giving it a particularly chilling effect.
In “The Neighbor’s Courtyard,” Paula, recently fired from her job at a children’s shelter, is convinced that a neighbor at their new home has a child chained up in the courtyard—though when she tries to show her husband, it’s no longer there. She decides to investigate on her own, which you know is going to be a bad idea.
Finally, “Under the Black Water” is about a prosecutor investigating the drowning death of a young man, after witnesses say police threw him into the river. When the prosecutor gets a tip that Emanuel turned up in the slums after being in the water for a while, she sets out to get a look for herself, and encounters something much stranger than a simple case of suspected murder.
This book is definitely the heaviest of today’s batch: although some of the horrors are supernatural in nature, the stories also incorporate some of the real-world aspects of Argentina as well: corrupt police, poverty, superstitions. I found the illustrations a little hard to parse at times, and the story endings rather abrupt, without a sense of closure. I wonder if the original prose also has the same unsettled feeling or if there’s something that gets missed in the adaptation—I think the graphic novel might lose a little of its punch because of the way that prose can feed your own imagination’s version without giving you an image to look at, whereas once there is an illustration it feels a little more locked in, something you can see and study and bring into the light.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these titles. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
My Current Stack
I’ve got a small stack of time-travel books on deck—hopefully I’ll have time to write them for next week before I leave for a weekend trip, but if not you’ll hear about those in early November! One of them is actually a graphic novel series that I started reading thinking it would be good for the spooky stack, but it turned out to include some time travel, too. A bit of both, really. Stay tuned!
