Coffin Hill #3 – Review

By: Caitlin Kittredge (story), Inaki Miranda (art), Eva de la Cruz (colors)

The Story: Eve takes a break from home at the insane asylum.

The Review: For a series that claims there’s an evil horror lurking within its pages, Coffin Hill hasn’t been all that scary so far—and I say this as a bona fide scaredy-cat.  I once watched the Japanese version of The Ring while I was home alone and found myself afterward incapable of proceeding down the ominously dark hall to my bedroom for the rest of the night.  I laid in the living room, watching Dharma & Greg reruns, until dawn.  I was eighteen.

Granted, it’s been some years since then (nearly ten—gah, gah!), but Coffin Hill should still have some kind of frightening effect, even if only a slight one, just to live up to the demands of its genre.  Maybe I’ve grown too experienced to get drawn in by Kittredge’s gimmicks, which rely far too heavily on overused witching motifs: rats, crows, flies, skulls, woods, children’s rhymes, etc.  These things are so common to the witch mythology that they lose a lot of their fictional power after a certain age.

On the other hand, the twisted acts of the mentally deranged never lose their ability to provoke some kind of reaction, even a guttural one.  In contrast to the vaguely defined forces that Eve insists are continuing to stalk innocents in the woods, the atrocities of Dr. Sheehan, head of the mental hospital where the (seemingly) catatonic Mel is kept, are easier to grasp and despise.  Unfortunately, Kittredge spends little time fleshing out his character before letting him dig into the flesh of others, making him one-dimensional on top of unsympathetic.

That’s really been the crux of Kittredge’s problems all along: she seems to treadmill over the increasingly worn-out material instead of stepping off and finding new areas to explore.  Even at just three issues, Eve and Nate’s ill-disguised sexual tensions, the disgust Eve feels over her family legacy, and the endless remarks about Coffin Hill’s creepiness have gotten old and repetitive.  It’s like when someone says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” or “There’s something out there,” in a movie.  Instead of feeling apprehensive about it, you’re more likely to shrug in dubiousness.

There’s only one truly unexpected moment in the whole issue, when—spoiler alert—Mel makes a second-to-last-page recovery and saves her would-be rescuer from an incisive death by Dr. Sheehan.  Makes you wonder if she would have regained her lucidity even earlier but for the medication the hospital workers kept pumping into her, or if she’s only come to because the thing which traumatized her in the woods has returned, bearing her stolen sanity, beckoning her to retrieve it.  It does explain her earlier muttered warning about the coming of “[t]he harvest,” and why she flippantly kills Sheehan without a second thought.

Miranda doesn’t inspire the same level of horror here as he did on the Rapunzel arc on Fairest, mostly because the material he’s working with is less inspired.  Even so, he’s clearly extending his stride on the series; the creativity in his storytelling is clearly aspiring to the heights of J.H. Williams III, Yanick Paquette, and the like.  Look at the sequence of Eve breaking into the mental hospital.  We start with her figure, looming large on the left, the tilt of her head pointing to the first panel of the sequence, of her running across the grounds towards the right, drawing your eye naturally to the panel in which she climbs through the window, etc.  There’s a high level of thought in the visual flow of the story, perhaps saving the issue from utter mediocrity.

Conclusion: Kittredge presents the contours of her story so obviously that more often than not you’re ready and waiting for the horror miles before it arrives.  Only Miranda’s art prevents you from sinking into a doze for the entirety of the issue.

Grade: B-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – “Do you know I had to find out what happened to you on the news?  The television told me you’d been shot.”  Is it weird that I find the tone of Eve’s mom eerily familiar?