Adamtine
Hannah Berry
Jonathan Cape, 104pp, £14.99
Horror is notoriously tricky to do in comics. The medium occupies an unhappy midpoint between film and prose, inheriting many of the weaknesses — when it comes to frights — from each, and few of the benefits.
The visual aspect often tempts writers to follow filmic routes to fear: shocks and violence abound, and slasher comics are almost as common as slasher flicks. The problem is obvious. No matter how skilled the author is, the reader controls the passage of time in a comic book. A shock can only come as fast as the turn of a page, and nothing can ever really jump out at you.
At the other side of things, though, comics don’t rely nearly so much on your imagination as prose does. The scariest things are the unseen; but a comic full of the unseen is frequently just a lot of talking heads. It might succeed in inspiring fear, but it’s not using the medium to its full potential.
That’s one reason why body horror gets such a strong showing in comics. It succeeds in unsettling, rather than shocking, and is one of the styles where the longer you look at the page, the more upsetting it gets. Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman’s Animal Man, or Si Spurrier and Javier Barreno’s Crossed: Wish You Were Here (a very NSFW comic, that one) trap the eye on distended monstrosities, which you can’t quite turn away from; while Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ Alias arc “Purple” and Neal Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg’s “24 Hours” in Sandman both presented stories of control and submission in ways which left me uneasy for weeks.
Adamtine can be seen as an attempt to do horror in a more traditional way, while using the quirks of the medium to ratchet up the fear. The mission statement, of sorts, is there on the cover: train tracks disappearing into the darkness, and then, at the very top, in black varnish on a black background, a sunken face peering out. The whole book is filled with motifs like that: hidden images, themes and plot elements which combine to, hopefully, trigger that part of your subconscious which warns you that something is deeply wrong.
The book opens in the aftermath of the disappearance of Rodney Moon, “The Postman”, accused of being a serial killer whose modus operandi was to deliver notes to his victims describing some minor reason for their disappearance. Moon denied being the killer, but admitted to passing on the notes for the real culprit — a “bogeyman”, with no name.
Four people, seemingly unconnected to each other and to the events involving Moon, are on a train out of London. But the train breaks down, and then the passengers disappear, leaving the four alone to face… something.
The plot has a structure similar to the sort of thing early Christopher Nolan films were known for. What seems like an incredibly complicated, multi-layered and time-jumping story comes together at the end in a way which makes you feel smart for being able to put it together into a linear narrative. You aren’t that smart; it’s just well-written. But try to ignore that fact.
There is a second layer to the book, one which rewards a further read-through, and that’s the layer of references and hidden symbols. Adamtine clearly has an entire second narrative hidden away — the one the book opens after the conclusion of — and it’s possible to discern a surprising amount of what happened through careful reading.
It’s also possible to find, dotted throughout, more skull faces like those on the cover; and sly nods to earlier or upcoming events. This only goes so far though. While compelling, it also encourages a tendency to treat the book like a narrative version of Where’s Wally; to overlook the forest because you’re too busy trying to count all the trees.
Where the hidden images excel is in doing something seemingly impossible: providing shocks in a comic. As the creeping unease of the book unfolds, suddenly realising that the page you have been staring at for a couple of minutes has been staring back at you is a very unsettling feeling.
Oh, and one last thing: if you travel by overground rail, don’t read this until the summer. Finding yourself on a train in the dark after finishing it is not a pleasant experience.
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