Friday, Book Three: Christmas Time is Here Again

Friday Fitzhugh’s return to King’s Hill hasn’t gone the way she expected it to at all.  From the death of her best friend Lancelot Jones, to the machinations of the members of Acadian Hall, to the supernatural terrors that come for her and her family, everything about this trip has been a surprise.  Fate, however, has saved the best twist for last as Friday now finds herself thrust back in time to the night of Lancelot’s death.  Can she change the past?  Does it even need to be changed at all?  Or are these concerns irrelevant in the face of a greater threat that seeks to consume King’s Hill in the name of vengeance?

I really enjoyed the explicitly supernatural turn “Friday” took with its previous volume and writer Ed Brubaker and artist Marcos Martin double down on it further with this concluding volume.  I’m not just talking about the time travel angle, but there’s another (almost literal) dimension to the supernatural threat facing King’s Hill that’s suspensefully revealed and elaborated upon here.  This is both due to Brubaker’s tight writing that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the versatility of Martin’s art which expertly sells the otherworldly invasion at hand, as well as the mundane but still interesting drama of its human characters.

If there’s any flaw to this final volume, it’s that there are moments where it feels like there’s too much exposition being thrown at the reader.  Brubaker talks in his afterword about how this was originally going to be a four-to-six part project with 20 pages per part that wound up being over 350 pages.  Even though that would suggest an over-long final product, it still feels like the creators had to compress a lot of necessary information in order to make the final product work.  Which still winds up being a thoroughly entertaining homage to certain YA fiction standbys that establishes its own identity in the end, and made me wish there was going to be more of it after this.