A deep red sickness.
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter Tomasi
Art: Ian Bertram
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letters: Nate Piekos and Blambot
What They Say:
Sarah Winchester’s house is always under construction—the banging of hammers keeps her demons at bay. Her construction crew of vagrants and murderers build, tear down, and rebuild the mansion according to her visions. But her newest employee, Warren Peck, has brought some demons of his own . . .
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Madness creeps in from the gutters, red, dripping, threatening to overwhelm everyone living in the Winchester House—especially its owner, Sarah. Not even the constant building and the constant bang-bang-banging of the hammers can keep it fully at bay, and it may be the fault of her newest employee—Warren Peck. Peck enters like a cancer, destroying the body of the house from within, letting free the red madness.
God help anyone in that house.
Reading House of Penance is like seeing a fever dream given form. Every aspect of this comic is designed to put you off, like entering a room where the angle of every wall is skewed by a few millimeters: it’s nothing you can put your hands on, but you can feel it. The character designs are rough, almost alien and ugly, and the comic is dominated by sickly reds, yellows, and oranges. The panels—rough-hewed, almost like they were chopped out of something larger and not drawn—suffocate the characters and the reader to the point where any action threatens to break the border and bleed out into the gutter.
The care and attention put into every aspect of this comic is evident on every page, and even if it doesn’t frighten you, it unsettles you. It feels like this second issue draws us deeper into Sarah’s madness. While the first issue gave you some breathing room and concerned itself more with establishing the setting, situation, and characters, issue two plunges us firmly down the rabbit-hole, making us, in a sense, Warren Peck, who also descends into his own madness. The question becomes, will his madness and Sarah’s madness come together to form something worse? Will both their demons band together to destroy everything and everyone in that house? It’s too early to say, but it certainly feels that way.
Like the best horror stories, House of Penance plays with your perceptions, making you question the very nature of reality. In some ways it reminds me of the greatest haunted house novel of all time, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. In that book, you were never quite sure what was going on. It made you question whether you could trust your own senses, or if reality was something other than what you perceived. House of Penance does the same thing, making it almost impossible to tell what is real and what is imaginary. And the frightening part is that there may not be a difference between the two.
In Summary:
House of Penance #2 was just as impressive as the first issue. The writing and art come together to make something that’s both fascinating and disturbing. This issue takes us further into Sarah Winchester’s madness, and, like her workers, we get sucked into its gravity, possibly never to return. Dr. Josh gives this an….
Grade: A+
Age Rating: N/A
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: May 11th, 2016
MSRP: $3.99
