Samantha Strong leads a peaceful life in the town of Woodbrook. She appreciates the close-knit community, composed of mostly uncomplicated, salt-of-the-earth folk—folk who appreciate her dependable self right back. They think she is one of their own.
Samantha Strong hears voices. Whenever they get too loud, she heads out into the city, far enough away from her hometown. There, she picks someone to take into the woods, away from watchful eyes. Beneath the trees, Samantha Strong muffles the voices in her head.
And then somebody else—somebody like her—disrupts Woodbrook’s perennial peace, and the ensuing chaos threatens to overwhelm and overthrow Samantha’s cherished comfort and stability. She’s worked too hard—with so much care and so much diligence—to ever allow that to happen.
And so Samantha Strong goes to work.
Patrick Horvath’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is a beastly, brutal, bloody ride—and I enjoyed every page of it. A simple story, really, but told in an effortless and economical way that makes it, despite all the gruesome events that unfold within, a brilliant reading experience.
“Dexter meets The Busy World of Richard Scarry,” goes the elevator pitch for this hardcore comic. It’s perfectly accurate, although it somehow doesn’t entirely prepare you for what awaits. Horvath’s creatures are significantly less cartoonish than Scarry’s own industrious cast, for one, portraying them—with the help of soft, muted watercolors—in a more naturalistic light, making the darker aspects of the story hit that much harder. When the blood starts to inevitably flow, there’s no moment of shocked bemusement; there’s just the stark, sudden, sobering shift into the somber and the grim.
The choice to go with anthropomorphic animals to tell such a murderous tale is an exceedingly effective one, to be sure, but it’s a testament to how well-crafted and well-executed the writing is that the book could work even without that animal element. Leave just the script, and the book reads like a classic crime drama in the same vein as the work of Ed Brubaker. As it is, though, I’m glad Horvath went with this route. There were scenes here that made my jaw drop all the way down to the floor—something a comic hasn’t managed to do since the early days of The Walking Dead. Stellar, stunning stuff. Everyone, immediately include this in your Hallowe’en reading. You won’t regret it. (Well, only if you’re squeamish.)
ricardo reading 