A couple of weeks ago I went to Elliot Bay Books to see their new digs.

I ended up buying Pixu, a newish graphic novel by Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lobos, Gabriel Bá, and Fabio Moon.

I will admit to being a diehard Becky Cloonan fan and I’ve always liked horror movies if only because they usually end up being totally mockable and silly. So a graphic novel that plunks itself into that genre was intriguing.

It ended up surprising me with how wonderfully complex the plot was- it was impossible to tell who was ‘good’ and who was a villain, and the evil that comes to consume seems to originate within the characters’ moral ambiguities, crimes, and perversions. A horror story where the terrorizing evil is driven by the characters themselves is new to me. Usually the monster is an ‘Other’ figure that has no direct line of creation with its attractive, easily separated-from-the-herd victims. Speaking of attractive victims, I absolutely love the twist on their hot-blonde-protagonist.

The visuals didn’t surprise me at all- every single one of the creators is an absolutely incredible artist. Their styles played together really well, as they tended to shift with the scenes in a really natural fashion. There were just enough disturbing images to leave me satisfyingly creeped out, if not haunted by a couple of them. But nothing was overdone and the gore was never approached in that pornographic style that you see in a lot of slasher flicks- where the special effects people go nuts and the result is too gruesome to be taken seriously.

If you want to have your expectations rocked, and if you want to get more than a little scared, go read this book. And then read it again-I found it to be even better the second time around, when the layers of meaning in the dialog become more legible.