I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus.

[READ: May 9, 2023] Silk Hills

I haven’t been reading that many graphic novels lately.  My daughter made the excellent point that our local library has an excellent graphic novel collection but that it hasn’t been updated in quite a while.  So I was pleased t o see this book at work, especially since it was from Oni Press, a reliably weird publisher.

I don’t know any of the contributors: authors Brian Level (has written for Star Wars and Marvel) and Ryan Ferrier (has written lots of indie books and written for Marvel and DC).  Crank! is Christopher Crank who has done lettering for just about everyone.  Kate Sherron has a very distinctive visual style (which I see a lot of people don’t like).  I thought it was pretty cool and unusual–it reminded me a bit of Jeff Lemire’s style.

I have been listening to a book of short stories from The X-Files, and this book immediately made me think of the X-Files.  It’s also the kind of story that either should have been longer or should have had fewer hallucinatory passages and had more explanatory pages.

Beth Wills is a former Marine turned private investigator.  She lives in New York City but is sent to an unnamed rural community called Silk Hills.  It must be pretty far, as a gas station attendant remarks on her New York plates, but we don’t know exactly where Silk Hills is.

I enjoyed the interactions with Wills and the gas station attendant also a former military man (out six years).

Then we get to the meat of the story.  Wills has been hired by Mr Partridge, the guy who more or less owns Silk Hills.  (A backstory shows how the town used to be a mining town with two major families until Partridge more or less forced the other family out).  Partridge’s son is missing (as we saw in the first couple of very confusing pages) and he has hired her to find him.  We learn later that while her resume is impressive, he chose her because she didn’t know anything about the history of the town.

Beth goes to check in at the local motel and meets Celia, the owner and all around friendly woman.  She is not from Silk Hills but has been her for a decade or so and is well known.  She studies moths.  Every eighteen years a specific breed of moth comes from out of the ground and she wants to see them.  It’s possible she’s been waiting for a decade here just to see them.

I also enjoyed the interactions with Beth and Celia (although their romance moves pretty quickly).

Celia offers Beth some pop (which is very strong) and Beth had a hallucination (maybe) of a deer that has a human head in its torso.  This recurring image is rather disturbing and rather confusing.

Eventually, Beth falls into a mine (she is looking for evidence of the abandoned mines, so that’s lucky).  And in there she sees a mothman (the gas station advertised mothman tours).  But the mothmen are not what they seem.  Are they also hallucinations (like the deer must be?) or are they something else entirely.

The end of the story is pretty wild and confusing.  We see the eighteen year moths, but it’s not entirely clear what happens to Celia when she encounters them.  And by the end, it seems like Beth might be willing to stay in Silk Hills to be with Celia (I think the whole time span of the story is about 20 hours, so that’s a little surprising).

It’s the kind of story where I think, Why did someone feel compelled to tell this story?  To make a whole, complicated graphic novel for it?  There were parts that I liked, but overall, it was just kind of weird.