Writers: Gene Simmons, Dwight MacPherson, Leah Moore & John Reppion, Chris Ryall, Sean Taylor, Tom Waltz
Artists: Matt Busch, Jon Alderink, Grant Bond, Esteve Polls, Steve Stamb, Jeffrey Zornow
Publisher: IDW
Price: $9.99
Release Date: July
Gene Simmons House of Horrors is a comic book horror anthology series (with a little bit of prose), in which all of the stories sit between an intro and outro written by Kiss frontman, Gene Simmons, with art by Matt Busch. Fractal Matter was lucky enough to get an advance copy of the first issue to take a look at.
Things kick off with “Into the Woods” by Leah Moore, John Reppion and Jeffrey Zornow, is the story of a little girl who was born with the compulsion to burn things and one milky-white eye. Now that it is her thirteenth birthday, she somehow knows that she will be free of her compulsions once and for all. Her last one, though, will have her burn the whole town, forcing survivors into the woods. Moore and Reppion create a sympathetic character, using caption narrative and while the idea for the story is solid, it could probably do with fleshing out visually. The art does however looks great, particularly the colouring.
Next up is “Crude” by Tom Waltz and Esteve Polls. This is the story of a special operations team sent out to investigate strange goings on at an oil reserve. They spread out and eventually come across the cause, with disastrous results. The characters in this story are entirely inhuman; simply not nice people, with little motivation. Their dialogue is really badly written, too. Just expletives for the sake of being “adult”, and it’s highly unnaturalistic. The art tells the story as well as it can, but it probably could have benefited from removal of the speech balloons.
After that is Chris Ryall and Steph Stamb’s “Circle Seven” in which a pagan finds his way out of what has been called Hell, only for the US government send a guy down into the same subterranean hole. He must say goodbye to his wife and prepare for what has only been written about by theologians. The writing isn’t too bad on this one, although I’d have preferred if it weren’t so storyboard-esque. The artwork on the otherhand looks good, but doesn’t do a great job of actually telling the story. It’s an experimental style, sort of resembling fumetti. The problem with such a style is how static things tend to look. It gets better once one gets used to it, but I don’t think it’s to be expected of a reader to have to work to read a short story like this.
“Nymph” is the fourth story in the anthology, written by Sean Taylor, accompanied by Jon Alderink on pencils. The story centres around a couple who are celebrating their anniversary in the park, when they have a fight about environmentalism. The woman goes into the woods to walk it off and when she comes back, she finds her husband missing and his shoe left behind. A second woman then approaches her and says she’s lost her husband as well. Taylor does a good job with the characterisation in this story and constructs an interesting plot as well, but he does fall down with the believability of some relationships and situations. The artwork is pretty good as well, and I liked the style as applied to this kind of story. It’s bright and cheery.
“The Basement” finishes the comic book side of things for House of Horrors. Dwight L. MacPherson is on writing duties, with Grant Bond providing the art. The story is about a little girl who has a friend living down in her basement. She tells her mummy and because she disbelieves her daughter, they fight and her mummy cries. The little girl doesn’t want this to happen again. I thought this was a cute little story. The writing is good and tight, despite there being some character moments that were a bit off. The art was also good, and though it would have benefited from being brighter, the pencilling was flawless.
Finally, we have “The Child” by Nick Simmons. This is a prose piece about a girl that is deemed to be ugly and therefore she’s evil and she should be abandoned. The writing is OK, and I understand what the writer is trying to say, but it’s really a little unbelievable to me that the kid was really able to cause a teacher to kill himself because of how she looked. She basically had a birth defect. People deal with that all the time. I’ve seen kids matching the description by the author. Anyway, it’s saying that even the ugliest person has something beautiful about them if you look past it. Which is nice…
Is House of Horrors worth investing in? Maybe. If you’ve got some spare change and would like to read some diverse horror stories, check it out. There’s some good stuff here, but it’s not essential reading.
- Danielle Lavigne is a teenaged writer who resides in Dublin, Ireland. She is passionate about writing, art, style, and nearly all forms of media, particularly comic books. She hopes to one day make a decent living writing comics so as to avoid the long-prophecised "actual work".