Houses of the Unholy

It’s a new original graphic novel from the team of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips!  That should be reason enough for celebration, given their track record over the years, right?  You may recall that I didn’t think their last effort, “Where the Body Was,” turned out to be all that great.  A story about the intersecting and intertwining lives in a suburban community wound up feeling more like soap opera rather than real drama.  The hope is that it was just a minor misstep and “Houses of the Unholy” will see them getting right back on track.

The story starts off promisingly enough with a woman, Natalie Burns, checking into a remote forest hotel and getting a bound girl out of her trunk as she goes into her room.  Contrary to appearances, Natalie isn’t the villain here as she’s been paid by the girl’s parents to rescue her from a cult.  Unfortunately things start to go wrong and the girl finds a way to escape and her rescuer is soon found by the cops after a short chase through the woods.

Natalie hopes that the cops will figure out she’s telling the truth sooner rather than later, but that’s not what happens.  She winds up being held until one Agent West of the FBI comes to see her.  The reason why he wants to speak to Natalie is because she was part of what was known as the “Satanic Six” back in the 80’s.  They were a group of children who accused their day camp supervisors of horrific satanic ritual abuse which led to a media circus, a trial, convictions, and suicide.  

Natalie has been trying to put all this behind her, up until when she’s told that three of the other six have been found dead over the past few years.  While this could just be coincidence, the most recent death had ritual aspects to it that caught Agent West’s attention.  He’s convinced that someone is targeting Natalie and her former acquaintances for reasons that aren’t clear yet.  What he does know is that he needs her help in making sure that they all don’t wind up dead.

From there, the story plays out like the kind of investigative yarn you’d expect from this creative team.  Natalie and Agent West follow the leads they have, find some new information at the end of them, and then deal with the circumstances when they turn bad.  What separates this from their previous works is that it has a much more overt horror vibe to the proceedings.  This comes courtesy of the frequent flashes back to the Satanic Panic of the era that Natalie’s incident took place in.

A lot of this is down to the fact that colorist Jacob Phillips gives all of the flashbacks a red-shaded look to them.  It imbues them with an unreal feel that’s only heightened by his father’s typically excellent artwork.  While Phillips the Elder is great with conveying all of the character drama here – from unsure (and one very sure) children, to adults that are convinced, skeptical, and exasperated of the goings on here – his realization of the Satanic stuff is the real highlight of the volume.  Mainly because it gives him a chance to cut loose with rendering the supernatural in a way that this longtime fan hasn’t seen him do since the days of “Hellblazer.”

Phillips’ work in the present day, however, is more expected and consistent with his previous work with Brubaker – up until the collision between the past and present at the end.  The same can be said of the writing here as well.  It feels very much of a piece with what Brubaker has done before, only with a less capable protagonist.  That comes off as something by design as the story is very much about Natalie being defined by, and at the mercy of her past.

For the majority of the volume, that was enough to keep me reading.  While I couldn’t quite tell where the story was going to go, I still had this feeling that it was all going to come together at the end.  Never mind the fact that there were some red flags involving a certain character’s actions, and that Natalie’s tortured thoughts about her past felt more than a little familiar here.  I was still engaged in finding out how her story was going to end.

Then I got to that end and, well… I wouldn’t say that it was bad, as it still manages a sense of nightmarish inevitability given everything that has happened up to this point in the story.  Yet there’s no real surprise to it and Brubaker’s efforts to tie the events of Natalie’s past to our current post-truth era feel both specious and exasperating at the same time.  Not quite as exasperating as what we’ve seen recently from Garth Ennis, but in the same neighborhood.

It all reminded me of a much better ending that Brubaker and Phillips pulled off for their Hollywood noir story “The Fade Out.”  At one point it looked like things were going to end in the worst way possible for its protagonist, but then they pulled off a swerve that elevated the story as a whole.  The ending we get for “Houses of the Unholy” doesn’t have that swerve and feels like a rotely depressing horror movie finale when all is said and done.

While I can’t quite call the story bad, there’s still too much quality craft on display for that, it is certainly disappointing and arguably the least good thing I’ve read from this creative team.  I’ll still be there for their next project, because this isn’t nearly bad enough for me to write them off completely, but it does temper my expectations going into that.  Though, it might be a while since the two are currently working on the “Criminal” series set to debut on Amazon Prime in the future.  Who knows, maybe a lengthy break between projects will be the best way for us to deal with the disappointment from this story.