See sample pages from this book at Wink.
Scott Snyder's Wytches really worked its creepy magic on me. This trade paperback edition collects the first six issues of the popular comic series, which has received widespread praise and counts Stephen King among its many vocal fans.
The story concerns a slightly overwound teenage girl named Sailor who is plagued with self-doubt and panic attacks. She and her mother Lucy, a wheel chair-bound doctor, and father Charlie, a best-selling young adult fiction author, move to a new small town after an incident involving Sailor leads to the disappearance of a young girl. The family hopes to start over, but in the new town, deep in the Pennsylvania woods, all hell seems to burst forth from the very ground and forests around them. In the process, we are taken on an ever-accelerating emotional roller coaster through a world of mutated ground-dwelling monsters, creepy townsfolk, internal family chaos and tragedy, and a kid who just wants to get things right and a dad who loves his child more than anything. The air around all of this hangs thick with the repulsive tang of fear sweat.
This effectively scary, visceral, and surprisingly moving story takes key inspirations from real-life events in author Scott Snyder's life. He tells the story in a series of journal-like entries in the back of the book of how his very young son was terrified of the tooth fairy, the idea that some magical creature comes into your house, your bedroom, shoves her hand under your pillow while you sleep, and exchanges money for your teeth was just too much for him. But, no tooth fairly, no money. So, he figured out a workaround. Since he believed that such things as the tooth fairy only exist if you believe in them, he decided he would only believe in her a little, just enough to manage the money-for-tooth exchange, but not enough to give her any real power. Snyder became obsessed with this idea of how we create and then feed the monsters in our lives.
When Scott Snyder was growing up, his family bought a place in the Pennsylvania woods (a place he still owns). He and a neighbor kid would make weapons out of baseball bats and nail spikes and then proceed to go on witch hunts in the deep woods. They were convinced that what you might call feral witches lived in those woods and they would sometimes excite their imaginations to the point where they imagined actually seeing them. Having grown up in very similar woods in Virginia, with rusted cars out in the middle of nowhere and strange objects found decaying beneath thick carpets of leaves, I know the exact creepy, almost malevolent feeling such woods can evoke.
It is the reality of these lived experiences, mashed up into this fantastically rendered tale, that gives Wytches such resonance for me. At its heart, the book is about the very primal fear that parents have over whether they'll be able to keep their children safe. And how far they might be willing to go to protect them.
I can't remember the last time a comic made me cry at the end. Wytches made me cry. I'm really looking forward to seeing where the next chapter of this story takes us.
Wytches
by Scott Snyder (author) and Jock (illustrator)
Image Comics
2015, 144 pages, 6.8 x 10.2 x 0.4 inches (paperback)
