Wytches #2

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock

Sailor's (perhaps perceptive) paranoia from Wytches debut issue takes a more literal—and literary—turn in her father's new children's novel:  young protagonist Taylor slips through the funhouse mirrors into a world where wishes come true, where the sheer force of will and desire makes things happen and transforms the world itself.  If a world of candy, play, and no school holds an ingenuous charm, the dark mirror the Rooks family has fallen into is significantly more sinister, more sincerely nightmarish.  And Sailor seems to be at the gravitational center of this new nightmare.

The night attack by the creature outside her window left her neck lacerated, swelling, and—if the biopsy is reliable, as it likely is in this horrific and supernatural world—infected with the flesh of an older, far older woman.  And there seems to be something fateful about the Rooks choice of the new New Hampshire town, a rural secret whose reach extends beyond just the creatures in the woods.  Her duties at the hospital have brought Lucy to the bedside of a young hit-and-run victim with a miraculous recovery.  But his uncanny physical improvement is made considerably more pernicious by the strange IV drip and Dylan's sudden, crazed visions about Lucy's own car accident:  "I can smell it on you.  Someone by you was pledg-- «cough cough»" (Wytches #2: 12).  But it is his first accusing question—"What'd you really hit?" (12)—that brings half-remembered specters of wailing creatures to mind.

The mysterious man who spotted Sailor on the bus, the man who murmured "pledge" as she passed, he ends up in her room.  Legless, beating Charlie over the head with his prosthetics, the old man suggests himself the same—perhaps exactly the same—as the first issue's Timmy Cray.  For him, being a pledge nullifies family bonds:  "Sorry, Mr. Rooks, but you never had a daughter" (25).  A promise, yes, but also someone laid in surety for something else.  These pledges are hostages, and for their sacrifices it seems the New Hampshire town may be reaping some benefit.  "We're strong people up here, Lucy.  We stick together, and we're fast healers" (11).  A little bit The Shining, a little bit The Wicker Man, Snyder and Jock's Wytches is a slow descent into madness and conspiracy, psychological and body horror of the best kind.