REVIEW: Behind You: One-shot Horror Stories by Brian Coldrick
Publisher: IDW
Ages: Teen+
Our Price: £14.50
Of all the things to be afraid of – spiders, clowns, the geopolitical state of the world, and so on – there’s none more potent, and none more universal, than fear of the unknown. Some of the best horror uses this to startling effect, letting your brain pick up the slack of filling dark corners with shapes pulled direct from the dark recesses of your mind. Behind You, Brian Coldrick’s chilling collection, captures this feeling over and over again, moving the camera just a touch in order to let you take in the fright of whatever is making the noise over your shoulder.
Behind You is a series of single-panel horror stories, each one tapping into that primal fear that something is lurking just outside your vision, and it can see you just fine. Coldrick’s style brings to mind Junji Ito – distorted, distended limbs, elongated necks and vulpine mouths litter the shadows, and the mundanity of the everyday is sharply contrasted by the unfathomable lurking phantoms on every page. It’s amazing how many different flavours of fear Coldrick manages to offer up on these pages – there is melancholy, abject terror, revulsion and every other variety of dread you could possibly desire. The economy of Behind You is impressive – with one or two sentences and an arresting image, you are given a full story, a moment of apprehension and anxiety frozen for you to savour.
Behind You shows that to do horror, you don’t need pages and pages of gothic scene-setting or centuries of lore, just a well drawn page, a clear idea, and the niggling feeling that there’s something in your peripheral vision. Give it a read when you’re home alone on a cold and windy night – I’m sure there won’t be anything reading over your shoulder.
-Matt Barker
Travelling Man Leeds
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