Jeff Lemire (writer), Andrea Sorrentino (artist) and Dave Stewart (colorist), Gideon Falls (Image Comics)
Volume 1: The Black Barn (2018, from issues 1–6 of the comic)
Volume 2: Original Sins (2019, from issues 7–11 of the comic)
Volume 3: Stations of the Cross (2019, from issues 12–16 of the comic)
These three books were a birthday present from my main comics supplier. I’m reading them promptly in order to lend them to him in this time of pestilence. It turns out this is a horror series, not something that appeals to me.
The first volume opens on an image of a young man in a surgical mask and rubber gloves looking at some roughly sketched garbage. Only a couple of months into the Covid–19 story, it takes an effort to realise that these accoutrements signify anything else besides sensible precautions against infection. But they do, though (not really a spoiler) we still don’t know what they do signify, beyond that the young man is a bit scary, by the end of the third volume.
Two story lines emerge in a fragmented and disorienting manner. A young man in psychotherapy for his obsession with garbage has troubling visions of a black barn that somehow embodies evil. A Catholic priest is sent by a bishop (whose face we don’t see) to a country town – Gideon Falls – to replace the parish priest who died recently, and behold he sees a black barn in gruesome circumstances on his first night there.
The stories progress in tandem, switching from one to the other without warning. There’s a section early on where the text bubbles and images belong to different stories. The effect is to unsettle the reader, slow him or her down, but also to suggest that the two plot lines are intimately interwoven, even though we don’t know how. In fact, even to the end of this first book, the two stories haven’t linked up. The young man’s therapist, who is a Buddhist and doesn’t believe in evil, comes to share his vision of the barn. The priest meets up with some locals who fill him in on the lore of the evil barn, and he finds himself inside the barn where his past wrongdoings come back to torment him. There is more death and bloodshed, though thankfully the artwork focuses more on the psychological fragmentation than the gore.
In the second volume the priest and the sheriff can’t remember their experiences in the barn, or even seeing the barn, but the aftertaste lingers on. Meanwhile, we learn more of the backstory of the young man, whose name is Norton – or is it? About the middle of this book the priest and Norton meet, inside the barn, which they have both separately reconstructed – either I didn’t read carefully enough or the impossible detail of how either of them did this was skipped. The intertwining images of them both at work are wonderful. The monster who inhabits the barn is revealed, up to a point, and we understand that the story is taking place in oddly dislocated time frames.
The third volume takes us into wild territory. There are crucifixions, visitors from the future, apparitions from the past, a gang of people wearing surgical masks, scary cockroaches, a satanic figure who is the heart of the book’s evil, something called the Pentoculus which suggests that there’s a sciency dimension to the horror … and a general sense that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Because these books give no information about their creators apart from giving their names on the cover, I went to Wikipedia for the details at the top of this post. There I learned that a fourth volume, The Pentoculus, is due for publication in April, and a fifth, Wicked Worlds, in May. I may seek them out if my Supplier is interested, but otherwise, meh.
As a no-longer-practising Catholic I’m unimpressed by the use of Catholicism for horror purposes, but I guess it’s an established trope, dating back at least to The Exorcist. When I was young I believed in the devil as an evil force active in the world, and I remember moments of terror, mainly at night, related to that belief. But it was always completely outweighed by belief in the goodness of God. There were devils, sure, but there were also angels who were just as real. I guess in the 21st century it’s tempting for people who have lost any sense of a loving God to think there must be some diabolical force loose in the world. I prefer to look for more mundane explanations, even if sometimes – like when I see the President of the United States boasting abut the ratings he gets for his Covid-19 press conferences – there’s no explanation that will make the reality unscary.
Me fail? I fly! 