Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Mr Lector, Welcome to Twin Peaks!

Joshua Williamson & Mike Henderson “Nailbiter Vol. 1: There Will Be Blood” (Image, 2014)
Did it all start with Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Lector? I’m not sure, but at some point if you had a cop, then you had to have a serial killer.  Based on our popular entertainment, you’d think that America is a nation of serial killers & future victims.

So what happened?  Why are our fictions overrun with sadists with genius level IQs? There’s a sense that Nailbiter is engaging with that question, at least obliquely.  Buckaroo Oregon is the home of 16 of the weirdest serial killers on record.  Of course they all have crazy gimmicks, like 80s WWF wrestlers, because that’s how serial killers roll (see basically every TV police procedural for evidence).  Nicholas Finch shows up in town because his friend and lawman Eliot Carroll calls & says he’s figured it all out.  Of course Carroll has now disappeared (shades of Twin Peaks!).  But Sheriff Shannon Crane is on hand to help search for him.

Their search leads them to murders, bodies, and buckets of gore.  

By the end of this volume I didn’t have all my questions answered.  In fact, I had more than at the start.  But I had been entertained and found myself deeper on the hook than before.  What is with Buckaroo?  I need to know more…
 

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