“I take you where you want to go, I give you all you need to know, I drag you down, I use you up”
Dave Chisholm is having a bit of a moment, and he draws Plague House, which is written by Michael W. Conrad, colored and lettered by Chisholm, and edited by Bess Pallares with Azat Sayadi assistant editing. 
It’s from Oni Press, it costs $19.99, and it’s 88 pages long.
This book has an interesting premise that works pretty well. There’s a “ghost-hunting team” with a popular channel made up of Del, the leader and true believer, Holland, the skeptic, and Jacob, the priest. They visit a house where something really bad happened two decades earlier, and something happens to Del while he’s in there. Conrad has an interesting take on the idea of haunting — that is, the houses themselves can influence people, not the ghosts that might be in them. But here’s the problem: the story very much relies on what happens to Del while he’s in the house, and I really don’t want to spoil it. It’s very interesting, because it speaks to the idea of what is real and what is fantasy and how those two can become blurred. Del, Holland, and Jacob form a triangle of different viewpoints, and what that means when you’re confronted with something horrible or something completely outside of your comfort zone. It can break your brain, sure, but what happens when your brain breaks? Do you shrivel up and die, do you become insane in one way, do you become insane in another way, or do you ignore it? 
This is largely Del’s story, true, but both Jacob and Holland get spotlights, too, and Conrad makes sure that each character reacts to the events early in the book in different ways, which highlights aspects of their characters. Because of the idea about the houses having the influence, Conrad can bring in the idea of the land itself being haunted, which allows him to bring in brief ideas about colonialism and genocide and such. He doesn’t do too much with it, and perhaps he should have, but it makes this a slightly more interesting take on a haunted house and hauntings in general. It’s been done before, sure, but Conrad does some nice work with it. It’s wildly nihilistic and depressing, as you might expect, but it’s also interesting what Conrad does with it. On a more cultural level, the fact that Del and his two colleagues are on-line is interesting, too. Del becomes a celebrity early on, and Holland and Jacob don’t take it well — his interview with a clueless talk show host doesn’t seem to go too badly, but they both get angry at him. The idea of people sharing in this weird experience and having their own opinions is a decent part of the plot, especially when things start to get darker and darker. It’s interesting to consider how this warps what we do and how we do it and how it affects the way we live our lives. Again, Conrad touches on this only briefly, but it’s pretty keen.
Chisholm is the star of the show, however, as he brings Conrad’s eerie script to life beautifully. Chisholm has a nice, thick line that grounds the weird scripts he draws, and he has a slightly odd angular line that he can also bend and twist nicely to make the strangeness of the story work. 
He uses a very rough pencil for the spot blacks and for shading, which adds wonderful texture to the images. When he wants to, he thins the lines out and uses a bit more delicate hatching, which adds a bit of supernatural stuff to the solid, real-world stuff. He designs interesting characters, from Del’s douchebro-coded spiky hair to Holland’s plaid skirt and boots, and his ghosts — such as they are — are very creepy. He does nice, claustrophobic locations that loom up around the characters and hem them in. His coloring is neat, too, as he uses reds really well both to make the ghosts stand out — they’re always colored red — and to make things heat up a bit as Del’s world spirals out of control. But the coloring is also slightly off from primary, which is nifty because it makes the entire book look a bit sickly, as if the world doesn’t quite work because the colors are a bit off. Chisholm does interesting stuff with the page layouts, too, as the book slowly becomes a bit weirder as it goes on, as Del’s world begins to shift out of “normal” reality. Chisholm doesn’t do quite as much odd stuff as he does in a later comic that’s coming up here, but he does some fun stuff with it nevertheless.
There’s a lot to like about Plague House, and while I don’t give away much, I hope I gave you a bit to interest you! It really is a nice, twisty horror story that doesn’t quite go where you think it’s going to go, and the art is excellent. It’s keen!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
