IDW’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is the horror hit from writer/artist Patrick Horvath that nobody saw coming. Featuring a killer bear and other adorable animals, the bloody, brutal series has sold over 300,000 copies, spawned two sequels, and is even crossing over into the DC Universe (no, really).
The book focuses on Samantha Strong, a bear who works at a hardware store in a small, sleepy town that seems right out of The Busy World of Richard Scarry. Every few months, Sam takes a trip to the big city where she… Chooses a victim, takes them to the woods and vivisects them, putting their body parts in jars and burying them in different locations. It’s a graphic, shocking beginning to the book, but that’s just the start in the first series, as a second serial killer in town is making it real hard for Sam to fulfill her urges.
What makes the book work is that Horvath takes it past the initial cute versus horror conceit to craft one of the tensest comics in recent memory. Readers purposefully won’t like the sociopathic, irredeemable Sam — this is not Dexter with bears, or anything — but you still want her to get out of the situation she’s found herself in, even as you get to know the rest of the residents/her victims, and feel for them, too.
Plus, the art captures the soft, inviting look of a children’s book, right alongside seeing a duck-man’s bisected brains and organs.
It’s a fantastic world that, as mentioned, is only expanding. Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees stands on its own as a horror masterwork, but if you want to explore the world further, pick up the sequel, Rite of Spring, which is three issues in as of this writing and has jumped a decade forward and added different perspectives, while making Sam all the more deadly. Oh, and she’s about to fight Superman or something, so that’s pretty weird.
So if you’re looking to get on board before this gets adapted into a movie/TV series/whatever, go Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees.
It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time to curl up with a comic book or graphic novel that will scare your socks off. With that in mind, we’re posting a new horror book to check out every day of October, for our 31 Days Of Halloween Comics. Awoooo! Looking for the rest of our picks? Check them out on the Halloween tag.
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