Graphic novel/short story collection written and illustrated by Adam Ellis and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in 2024.
Adam Ellis is a popular Internet cartoonist who drew comics for Buzzfeed, his own website, and put together a few books of comics. He'd written horror comics in the past, and this was his first horror collection, though he's since written another, titled "Let Me in Your Window."
The eleven stories in this collection include:
- "Me and Evangeline at the Farm" - A man reminisces about a movie where a farmer rescues an alien from a crashed UFO and falls in love with her -- but no one else remembers the movie. Where does this strange memory come from?
- "Milk Door" - A woman moves into her new apartment and finds a small door labeled "MILK" in the wall. Supposedly, it's a relic of a time when milk deliveries would be placed there. So why does someone start leaving bones in there?
- "Butter Corn Ramen" - A man visiting Japan gets addicted to a dish called Butter Corn Ramen and soon starts noticing strange physical changes...
- "The Green Ribbon" - A man marries a beautiful woman who always wears a green ribbon around her neck. What disasters will unfold if he ever gives into the temptation to untie it?
- "Forest Fruit" - A boy is the only survivor of a plane crash. When rescuers find him, he tells them he kept himself alive with rain water and the fruit in the forest. Wait, what fruit in the forest?
- "Bus Stop" - Where did that little store come from, just across the road? Why is there never any merchandise inside, except when you really need something?
- "Hangnail" - Absolutely the worst hangnail anyone's ever had.
- "Better Kate than Never" - Hey, kids, it's time for that popular sitcom "Better Kate than Never!" I wonder what wacky shenanigans Kate will get into? Uh oh! Don't go in the basement, Kate!
- "Little House in the Sea" - A girl has lived in the tiny house with her mother on this tiny island in the middle of an endless sea. When her mother dies, is she doomed to live here alone? Or will companionship drift in from the ocean?
- "Murder Party" - A controversial true crime podcaster discovers a new mystery to explore -- one wrapped in a mysterious woman and the coincidences happening around her...
- "Viola Bloom" - A cartoonist named Adam Ellis receives a postcard in the mail with a sepia-toned photo of a woman, identified as Viola Bloom, wearing old-fashioned clothing. And soon, Viola Bloom is stalking him, ready and eager to destroy him. Is there any way to escape?
Most of these stories are pretty good, and a few are truly excellent. "Viola Bloom" is an eerie and tense ghost story. "Milk Door" is weird as hell and extremely well-told. "Better Kate than Never" is wonderfully surreal. "Bus Stop" is a thoroughly strange story, entirely free of rational explanations but satisfying all the same.
"The Green Ribbon" is a familiar story -- it's based on "The Adventure of the German Student," written in 1824 by Washington Irving, which has been retold and re-created by multiple different authors over the past 200 years. (Particularly fun is the fact that this book's green ribbon bookmark was lying in the middle of this story when I bought it.)
Other stories are less enjoyable. "Forest Fruit" is predictable. "Butter Corn Ramen" is unappetizing, both the description of the food and the rest of the story. And "Murder Party" relies on the protagonist noticing a variety of slightly odd things, interpreting them correctly as weird clues left specifically for her, and figuring out the solution of a mystery with those clues alone. The reliance on coincidences just got to be more than I could handle.
Ellis has a very appealing cartooning style with precise and realistic backgrounds combined with expressive characters with big eyes -- I wouldn't really call it manga style, but you can see some influence there. This kind of charismatic artwork helps draw readers in and get them invested before Ellis starts dropping the short sharp shocks of horror into his stories.
And this great expressive charisma gets used for almost everyone, including monsters and supernatural entities. Maybe the best example in the book is the blood-drenched bride with a facial expression that perfectly communicates "You have done me wrong, and you are utterly beneath me -- and you will never, ever escape from me again." And the genuinely helpful and kind shopkeeper in "Bus Stop" always has a pleasant but very bland and neutral expression, which helps emphasize the fact that she probably isn't even a little bit human.
This certainly isn't a perfect collection of horror stories, but it has a lot of excellent and fun stories, told by a skilled cartoonist. If you're looking for some nice scary stories and some stellar cartooning, you can't go wrong with this. Go pick it up.
horrorquest