Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, the most reliable duo in comics, are back with a new graphic novel in August, HOUSE OF THE UNHOLY. The tale will deal with cults, satanic panic, and serial killers. Good times! Jacob Phillips supplies the coloring.
The plot outline definitely covers all the bases: an FBI agent from the cult crime beat and a woman with a past linked to the Satanic Panic team up to hunt for a killer with ties to the underworld. Along the way they question whether you can ever truly escape your past (a Brubaker/Phillips perennial theme.)
“Houses of the Unholy is something I’ve been describing as Satanic Panic Noir. It’s somewhere in-between a creepy horror story and a f*cked-up noir, and directly tied to the Satanic Panic craze of the ’80s,” said Brubaker in a statement. “The book really speaks to my obsessions with cult horror, and plays with the demonic tropes of classic horror from Hammer to Carpenter to Stephen King. The fear that was everywhere back then has clearly resurfaced, and that made me want to dive back into those dark waters and try to find a Brubaker-Phillips take on noir and horror at the same time.”
Brubaker and Phillips are known for teaming up for more than 20 years with such tales as Criminal, Pulp, The Fade Out, Reckless, Night Fever, and Where the Body Was – a body of work that explores the dark side of humanity with a style both brutal and elegant.
They’ve also pioneered a fairly unique niche for themselves – releasing a series of standalone (with a few Easter eggs) graphic novels instead of serializing them first. They’re the closest thing comics has to a crime author who turns out reliable bestsellers on the regular.
And they’ll undoubtedly get another burst of attention when a planned Amazon series based on Criminal debuts.
Houses of the Unholy (ISBN: 9781534327429) will be available at local comic book shops on Wednesday, August 14 and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Indigo on Tuesday, August 13, as well as digital platforms, including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play.
