Houses are haunted by what we leave behind in them. For instance, a house I used to live in is haunted by the collection of coolers we accidentally left in the attic. In another instance, a house may be haunted by the giant machine designed to peer into the afterlife and make contact with the ghosts there. Either/or scenario. While the former may not inspire much terror—although the family who moved in after us may have been hesitant to open the coolers—the latter contains its fair share of haunts. And that house and machine become the foundation for the new series from James Tynion IV, Christian Ward, and Aditya Bidikar: Spectregraph.

In 1967, Ambrose Everett Hall addresses the occult organization he has been a member of for some time. He decries their beliefs in the afterlife and their pursuit of contact with the dead—a feat he says is impossible. Unless, of course, he is able to create his own afterlife in the mansion he’s building on the California coast. In 2024, Janie Chase is looking to help sell that house as quickly as she can. On her way out, she realizes that she left her infant in his high chair, but she can’t turn back now—the commission on selling this house will help keep her family afloat for a long while. Showing a house shouldn’t take too long. But this house isn’t so much a house as a ritual. You have to punch in the right code with the right key to enter. You have to do things in sequence or else you’ll be trapped in its walls for days. And you’ll be trapped with whatever Ambrose Everett Hall left in the massive machine in the middle of the house. 

As a first issue, Spectregraph introduces its world and its rules before giving us an inversion of those rules. There is no afterlife or ghosts, the Hall mansion is an intricate clockwork of moving parts for an unknown end, and Janie Chase is going to give a tour of said mansion. But as this issue goes on, the creative team topples what we know in reverse order. Janie is not there to give a tour, but to begin the activation of the mansion’s moving parts to create a kind of ghost. Everything in the issue is set up much like the mansion itself—we go in with our own expectations before the subversion within the story. 

Spectregraph‘s first issue gives us a new take on the haunted house. The house isn’t haunted so much as it’s creating its own haunts while Tynion IV, Ward, and Bidikar give us the puzzle at the heart of the house. Considering how they’ve set up this first part of the story, we can start to see how these pieces will fit into the narrative, but as with some of this team’s previous works, there’s always another piece we never consider until it’s too late. 

Get excited. Get haunted.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.