Welcome to the table. There is something specifically unsettling about slow-burn Southern horror. When it’s done right, you can taste the dust in the air, feel the warm sun on your neck, and see the sky shift slightly as the sun sinks below the summer fields, full of buzzing flies and rows of crops ready to be reaped.
Be Not Afraid, from BOOM! Studio’s, captures that feeling exquisitely and sets a tone that carries from cover to cover. Written by Jude Ellison S. Doyle and illustrated by Lisandro Estherren, Be Not Afraid tells the story of Cora Rehms who – seventeen years give or take nine months – prior to the story kicking off, called out to the powers-that-be asking for a child. As such stories go, Cora was confronted with an angelic-looking entity who she laid with and through the mystical properties of whatever magics were guiding said entity after a painless pregnancy and without needing to give actual birth, and found herself in possession of a cherubic child name Jordy who had no Earthly father.
The story picks up on Jordy’s seventeenth birthday as he wanders along a dirt path in an outfit that harkens to those who follow, “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.”
Frogs boil at the boys feet, the kindly neighbor lady now stricken with cancer cowers in fear as Jordy comes calling on her, and her husband plucks out his own eyes as he tries to gnaw through his hand to make himself stop. Jordy clearly is in possession of Old Testament levels of power and possesses a hauntingly cheerful, yet wholly unsettling, disposition that lands somewhere between sadistic toddler and cruel dictator. It’s truly a mixture of the most awful kind of man and the way he is written captures it masterfully.
We arrive at Jordy’s house to find Cora preparing a birthday dinner for her awful offspring, and, of course, the horrors, much like the ones we seem to face in the real world at the moment, are unending. Jordy summons Cora’s mother, who is half stripped of flesh down to the bone and sinew and orders Cora to feed her mother cake, resulting in Cora having to snap her own mother’s hand off to escape the undead’s clutches.
This whole book oozes style and tone, giving very little of the actual “why” of the story while setting the stage for something truly unsettling in the best possible way.
Horror can be deflated by over-explanation, so the lack of a full view of the happenings in this story is actually really working for me and has me excited to see what comes next.
Until next time, a monster emulating human mannerisms is such a delicate mechanism when telling a horror story. Too far in one direction and it stops being unsettling and comes off as cringy, as if the creature is mocking you; too far in the other direction and it comes off hollow and the threat or strangeness feels empty, like an old bag not a yawning abyss. The way Jordy is written in this story, with the combination of the color work, the strange stylized art, and the lack of larger world information is so unsettling that I think it nails that feeling of “other worldly threat” without having to resort to showing too much in the way of “mystic” or “magic” powers at work. It plays on iconography established in other stories across the horror landscape and makes use of an economic writing style to really nail home how off things are in this town. All in all, this is a fantastic opening chapter to what I hope is a larger webwork of worrying stories in this strange setting.
Creative Team: Jude Ellison S. Doyle (writer), Lisandro Estherren (art), Francesco Segala with assistance by Gloria Martinelli (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
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