House of Mystery Vol. 1: Room and Boredom
Jack of Fables writers Willingham and Sturges trade places on the masthead of a new, quite a bit creepier series that swirls around a big, elaborate house of many architectural styles with an interior far more expansive than the exterior implies. Perched on an intersection of realities, it’s a place you arrive at unexpectedly and leave only at the seeming whim of the house itself. Attempts to break out short-circuit you back into the place and its grounds. Everyone soon lands in the ground-floor saloon and is expected to tell a tale for admittance; since the length of anyone’s sojourn is indefinite, everyone obliges. So the main story—concerned with Fig Keele, who, fleeing in terror her imploding Austin, Texas, home, runs into the house—is regularly interrupted by drinkers’ yarns, all of the type of which nightmares are made. Luca Rossi draws the main story to look like a literally edgier Fables, and five stylistically disparate artists draw the inserted tales. A little loose, perhaps, but very intriguing. --Ray Olson