Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees [Comic Review]

Halloween is barely two weeks away, so what better time to pick up a chilling new comic book from the twisted mind of Patrick Horvath? Equal parts charming and horrifying, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, published by IDW, transports you to the calm and idyllic town of Woodbrook. Populated by friendly humanoid animals, in the early pages you’ll feel like you’ve been transported to someone’s well-kept Animal Crossing village.

Unfortunately, the reality is far starker than that.

Samantha Strong is on a first name basis with almost everyone in Woodbrook. She’s helpful, considerate, an upstanding citizen through and through.

She’s alsoa serial killer who hides the dismembered corpses of her victims in the woods.

So, there’s that.

Beneath the Trees is a fantastic introduction to the unsettling tale that Horvath has in store. We are introduced to Samantha’s macabre routine, where she follows a handful of simple rules…the most important one?

You don’t kill the locals.

It’s a small town, after all.

Instead, Samantha seeks out a city dweller - just one face out of thousands…easy enough to pluck with a classic damsel in distress act.

Her style of killing is very similar to Dexter: she keeps things tidy. Drains the blood, deconstructs the body…it’s horrific, yet when she says that it helps to center her…in some strange way you can witness her own deranged art style.

While chronicling Samantha’s day to day life in Woodbrook could be interesting enough, the issue closes with a chilling discovery: there’s another killer on the loose, and this one doesn’t abide by Samantha’s rules.

We have yet to see how Samantha plans to engage with this (additional) malevolent force that now plagues Woodbrook, but one thing is for sure: it’s going to get messy.

The dissonance between Horvath’s take on a quaint town and the depravity that he chooses to inflict upon it is delightful to witness. It’s a sort of uncanny valley that will make you revisit certain pages over and over again, as your brain pieces together how the cute bear you were introduced to could do that to another living creature.

I had caught some murmurs about this book a couple of months ago, and now that it’s arrived I can say confidently: it deserves more than some murmurs. This is a refreshingly unique, if haunting, story that will grab on and refuse to let go.

I can’t wait to see what comes next!