“What if by trying to escape the hell of daily life, you’ve instead actually entered hell?”. The tagline on Dark Horse’s website to promote their newest supernatural horror compendium Murdervale definitely did the trick. Colour me intrigued, not only by the hellish opening but also the chilling cover, in which a man and woman (presumably our protagonists) are lost in the haze of a dark, twisting cloak, belonging to a figure wearing a plague doctor’s mask, as blood seeps from the tendrils. This is author and artist Vicente Cifuentes’ second collection with Dark Horse Comics, after acting as illustrator for murder-mystery Whodunnit?, and is his first completely solo project, lovingly translated by Nicholas Delucci.
Stress, relationships, deadlines. You name it, Victor is feeling burdened by it. Worst of all, he’s feeling more distanced than ever from his partner Sara, who is sick of him prioritising work over time at home with her. When Victor blacks out and collapses due to all the stress, he is advised by his doctor to get away from it all for a while. Unmarked on the map, the two’s weekend getaway leads them to the town of Murdervale, where something immediately seems off. For one thing, Victor seems to be hallucinating; a stuffed dog transforms into a demon, lunging at his neck, and an evil demogorgan-type creature flashes into being before his very eyes. But it must just be the side effects of the pills he’s taking… right?
The muttering B and B owner doesn’t exactly help the couple feel any safer, with babblings about the Virgin Mary and babies. However, she may be Victor’s only chance of getting some answers when Sara mysteriously disappears, and rumours of a dangerous witch run rife. Turns out, the witch cursed the town of Murdervale after they burned down her orphanage, killing the children inside. Reclaiming newborn children in order to enact her revenge is her only purpose, and it just so happens that Victor and Sara are newly expecting a baby…
The witch in the plague mask was a satisfactorily terrifying villain, and very much reminded me of the Beast from Patrick McHale’s spooky classic, Over the Garden Wall. In the same way that the viewer gets a glimpse of the Beast’s true form, in which it is revealed he is completely constructed from the souls of lost children, so also is the witch in a revealing panel in which she beckons to Victor and Sara’s baby whilst the red eyes of lost children glare outwards from the confines of her dark cloak.
The witch’s house is where the majority of the drama takes place, and Cifuentes clearly had a whale of a time making the entire atmosphere as creepy and uncanny as possible. From disturbing statues, mirages of clowns, barely-there ghosts and blood red decorations, this is quite literally the last place you would ever want to find yourself. In a fun twist on the ‘eye’s following you around the room’ trope, the witch’s eyes literally look through peepholes in her portrait to watch Victor as he navigates the rickety house, with its winding stairs and hidden passages. The monsters that Victor sees are also awful; Lovecraftian in nature, with tentacles, sharp fangs, eyeless holes with blood pouring out, and drawn in all-consuming blood-reds and whites, as their jaws open for the kill.
The back and forth between reality and nightmares was a little convoluted for me at times, but was nonetheless, incredibly creepy. Murdervale is an ongoing comic series, with the next collection of issues appearing to veer towards a different set of characters in the Murdervale world. The idea to switch out the characters but keep the same creepy backdrop at the centre of the narrative has worked wonderfully well for other horror publications and, I’m sure, will allow Cifuentes to experiment and expand the world of Murdervale even further.
Vicente Cifuentes (W/A), Nicholas Delucci (T) • Dark Horse Comics, $19.99
Review by Lydia Turner
