Tales from Harrow County Volume 1: Death's Choir
Cullen Bunn, script; Naomi Franquiz, art, chapter breaks; Tyler Crook, lettering, variant covers
Dark Horse Books, 2020
Ten years have passed since the end of the Harrow County series. Emmy left the county, but her close friend Bernice has taken over the stewardship of the supernatural forces there. World War II is in full swing, taking most of the young men away in military service. A series of funerals have left the residents especially susceptible to a new bit of magic: a siren call summoning the dead, calling to one another in the choir of the title. It's an enormous procession of haints, and not all of them are friendly. So, in addition to fighting off some of the haints, Bernice needs to figure out the source of the enchantment so she can stop its nightly return. She forces a group of goblins to help, and is led to a neighbor who wants to reconnect with her dead son. Turns out that there was a bad bargain made--which Stephanie manages to reverse--but in the end she loses her friend, the goblin Priscilla. The story ends with a letter from Emmy, teasing an interesting next installment. The collection concludes with a sketchbook from Franquiz (whose work manages to evoke Tyler Crook's without copying it directly) and Crook's variant covers.
Replies