After coming home from a long trip into the Midwest and Wisconsin, it’s only appropriate that I dive into a comic that’s been sitting on my shelf for three years that somehow takes place in a very lovely house on a lake in Wisconsin. It really is a picturesque manor by this lake with the mountains framing the land as the sun rises every morning. But then there aren’t mountains in Wisconsin, are there? And the stars at night haven’t been moving how they should. What have James Tynion IV, Álvaro Martínez Bueno, and Jordie Bellaire created in this Nice House on the Lake?

No one has heard much of Walter in a few years. The last time anyone really talked to him, he mentioned that he was going to be busy with work for a while. But then he just sent his friend group—roughly 10 people—an email asking them all to join him at a lake house in Wisconsin for a few days. They all haven’t seen each other in years, so it’ll be a nice chance to catch up. But after everyone arrives, they check their phones. Scenes out of every major city show fire raining from the sky as people combust and melt before their eyes on screen. The friends want to leave, check on their families, but Walter won’t let them. Walter hasn’t been honest with them for the decades they’ve known him as Walter is one of the aliens burning the world down.

The Nice House on the Lake is like a large Hieronymus Bosch painting—you feel like you’ve gotten the full picture from your first look, but the closer you look, the more you find. As this story slowly unfolds, we learn more about Walter and his group of friends. Each issue centers on one of those friends, showing us where they are at the end of the story as well as their friendship with Walter and the slow unraveling of their lives at the lake house. It’s a clever conceit as we know where this story is going to go, but we’re missing the full picture as our focus stays close to one person at a time. Each person in the series gives their own weight to the plot as a result of this focus so we really see those finer details as we march toward the final issue.

Tynion, Bueno, and Bellaire have given us a different kind of haunted house story—one in which the ghosts are all outside and the living are trapped within the house. They’ve also shown us the worst of misplaced intentions—no matter how much you love your friends, you can’t dictate their lives. It’s the phantom echoes of the old world that reverberate across a gilded cage for all of Walter’s friends—everyone he has ever really loved who now want nothing more than to see him dead for what he’s done to them. 

Get excited. Get trapped.

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