The last time I remember seeing snow was before the plague began. And even what I remember of it then was a fleeting slurry that hung in the air for a few moments before melting on the ground. It’s been even longer since I’ve seen snow that piled up high enough to support my weight walking across it. But never have I gone into snow so deep that the world is swallowed by it. And this is some of the horror at the core of Lonnie Nadler, Jenna Cha, Brad Simpson, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s Black Stars Above.

Late 1887 was not a kind time for fur trappers along Canada’s Green Ribbon. With many traplines running scarce and the demand for pelts cratering, there isn’t much left in the world for Eulalie Dubois outside of an arranged marriage to a man she’s never met. But when going into town to trade, Eulalie is given an opportunity: deliver a package to a village north of the Green Ribbon. All she has to do to make enough money to escape her current life is survive the trek and not look in the parcel, no matter what. But in the depths of December, the snow piles high and the winds blow hard enough to warp the world. Eulalie is lost right as her journey begins, but it isn’t faulty navigation. There’s something about the woods that doesn’t make sense as a dark star rises in the night and the package she’s hauling whispers to her in an unknown language.

Between the action in the panels and the epistolary narration happening after the fact, there’s a slowness to the narrative that helps to mirror Eulalie’s trudge through a desolate, snow-blasted landscape. And with the pace comes an all-encompassing weight throughout the story as this feeling of dread hangs on every moment. Even when Eulalie reaches the village in the North—always unnamed—it’s not a sense of relief we feel when we arrive. From the panel grids being used to intersperse distant scenes to the full-page moments that give proper weight to Ito-esque horrors happening, everything in the comic serves the purpose of instilling the feeling that something awful is a page-turn from happening. But even in the presence of all that dread, there still remains a sense of hope in the story that Eulalie will somehow make it out of the snow and the woods. 

There’s a delicate balance that comes with horror comics. Enough has to be revealed in order to have a story and there’s only so much that can be left to the imagination when working in a static visual medium. But what Black Stars Above does is it gives us just enough footing that we feel as though we know what is and isn’t real in the story before teetering us further and further toward the edge of oblivion. We never tip into the abyss, but we do get a real good look at it.

Get excited. Get snowy.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.