Beneath the trees where nobody sees

Horvath's clever graphic novel debut cozies up to the darkness lurking beneath everyday life. Samantha Strong, a cuddly-looking brown bear and the well-liked owner of a hardware store in the idyllic town of Woodbrook, is a serial killer who makes regular trips to the big city to "play." Sam calmly kidnaps, sedates, and vivisects her victims: "everything neat, and everything tidy." But during Woodbrook's Bicentennial Days celebration, someone else starts to murder town residents, and Sam realizes this new killer's activities threaten to expose her own secret. Deciding that "this town's not big enough for two psychopaths," she investigates. The other townsfolk are also cute animals, from a nervous parakeet to the hound-dog sheriff to a turtle who pulls his head into his V-neck collar when startled. Horvath's charming picture-book artwork, rendered in bright painterly strokes and packed with visual detail, makes the gruesome subject matter all the more disturbing. What could be a simple visual gimmick elevates the story through well-crafted execution and thoughtful moments like Sam's woodland encounter with a normal, non-talking bear. Fans of deceptively cute horror comics like Mike Birchall's Everything Is Fine and Jay Stephens's Dwellings will delight in this hairy twist on the slasher genre. (Sept.)

On her morning walk to work, a brown bear named Samantha greets every one of her adorably folksy anthropomorphic animal friends and neighbors with genuine warmth, which they return wholeheartedly. The hardware store she runs is a sort of unofficial town hall of Woodbrook, an idyllic hamlet Samantha describes as "a place that appreciates a lemonade in the summer and spiced cider in the fall…a cozy fire in the winter and a fresh breeze after the first rain of spring. A place where you can deal with the day on your own time, floating on the scent of cedar, rosemary, and clover." The only thing Samantha loves more than her hometown is taking a drive up to the city, luring an unsuspecting victim into her car, and bringing them out into the woods to murder them so gruesomely that even the most hardened hardcore horror readers might find themselves shaken. VERDICT In his graphic novel debut, cartoonist Horvath's stunningly gorgeous painted artwork evokes classic children's book illustration to create a sense of witnessing raw transgression against all that is good and pure. The effect is both viscerally disturbing and, for fans of horror and serial killer thrillers, immensely thrilling.