The Nice House on the Lake: the Deluxe Edition

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And, the very last line of the book? Yeah, to me, it felt cheap. It's the whole, "stay tuned, there's more to come" when we should have just been left with a "holy shit, what are they gonna do now?" ending. You’d need to get us better invested in the characters. Do cool time jumps, or leap to other cells of lab rats, introduce us to other Walters more/less sentimental than Walter-proper (and their little cells too). Let the walls of the other cells touch and clarify the scale, where we really are. Show us the world burning for real. I dunno. But the form and the delivery both need a refresh. All of the characters are a little hard to keep apart from one another, which is the main reason I'm only giving this 4 stars: I think a cast of characters this large doesn't work well in a graphic novel unless the art style lends well to telling everyone apart, and that isn't the case here. (They're also mostly obnoxious and fairly unlikable people, which is something I weirdly enjoy in stories, but if you don't, YMMV on the overall storytelling.)

all abstractions, all generalizations, treat words and images and people and thoughts as units existing in some matrix of comparison. the doctor, the pianist, the politico, the artist(s), etc. et al, all the participants in this study taking place in a nice house on the lake... all treat the story as substance. all treat their own selves as having some substance, a genuine identity, rather than a label or title to be fulfilled. all attempt to communicate. all fail. their last communication, for now, for when, is a bullet. it fails. but that was the plan all along, to fail. to fail is to keep living? All of them were at that moment in their lives when they could feel themselves pulling away from their other friends; wouldn’t a chance to reconnect be…nice? In The Nice House on the Lake, the overriding anxieties of the 21st century get a terrifying new face—and it might just be the face of the person you once trusted most. Bait-and-Switch: The Ryan from the present day is wearing bandages on her face and holding a spear, indicating something bad has happened. She also puts on a N95 respirator, indicating that perhaps there is something toxic in the air...until we get to the beginning of the story and see that she already had the respirator due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Unfortunately, he fell into the same trap of having set up something so large, so earthshaking, that he had to come up with an explanation-heavy and over-complicated plot device to bring it to a (sort of) ending. Trans Tribulations: Norah being trans isn't usually a source of angst, but towards the end of Cycle One it's revealed that she feels Walter never fully got over the fact she's not the "boy" he had a crush on in high school and hasn't really accepted her, on top of her realization about how much he's manipulated her entire life from the moment they met. Walter also transparently uses her dysphoria to manipulate her into helping him by offering her access to the reality controls that can alter the guests' physical forms.And that is only a basic outline of the otherwise character-driven series. What makes Nice House such an essential story is not its science-fiction-tinged horror plot—Martinez Bueno's body horror is strangely gorgeous and unparalleled—but rather its unflinching look at complicated human relationships. As the characters' relationships to each other and to their old friend Walter unfurl over the course of the series, readers come to understand that the horror doesn't arise from the aliens and the apocalypse. The horror is Walter's betrayal of their trust—and so their betrayal of Walter in return. I kind of hoped this would be the end of it, but no, these volumes are only 'cycle one'. Means there must be a bicycle coming.

Although things end with the inhabitants of the eponymous house assuming that Walter has been killed and that they now live under some semblance of freedom, that couldn't be farther from the case. Not only is Walter still alive, but he knows that things are about to get harder than ever for his so-called friends. Even if his alien masters aren't aware of the trouble that has been caused in Walter's ecosystem, it is only a matter of time before they are. This is because the humans within it are so close to colliding with their fellow survivors elsewhere.Stars Volume 2 collects issues #7-12 of the comic. This was supposed to be a limited 12 issue series but the ending of this leaves so many questions unresolved that I have to assume there will be more issues. Will I read them though? Probably not. Affably Evil: Walter tells his friends that he genuinely loves them, which is why he is saving them...but the rest of the world is going to die. read this amazing essay "Fragmentation of the Self" that has nothing to do with a nice house on a lake, but I stole some phrases and ideas from it anyway: I appreciated the diverse representation amongst the characters. That said, for being a diverse group they were all pretty similar. With the exception of Ryan, everyone in this group is in their 30s, educated, and established in their careers. Yet not one of these people have any children? That's pretty convenient. It's also feels like a missed opportunity. Separating a character from their child would have added another level of horror to the story and helped with the moral and ethical debate the story seems to want readers to be pondering. The closest we ever got to that was Molly mourning her husband Cam. Intrepid Reporter: Sam 'the Reporter' is the one most determined to solve the mystery of the House and its separation from the world.