My Cultural Diet

A graphic novel about the “Satanic Panic” by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Where the Body Was, The Fade Out, Reckless)?! Was someone reading my mind? Because this basically sounds like my dream comic. As you’d expect from Brubaker and Phillips, Houses of the Unholy is grimmer than grim as it tells the story of Natalie Burns, a woman forever haunted by her childhood involvement in the Satanic Panic of the ’80s. Trying — and failing — to put it all behind her, Burns is forced to face her childhood head-on when she teams up with an FBI agent to track down a killer targeting others who, like her, claimed to be abused by Satanic cults as kids. I’ve written elsewhere about my own brush with the Satanic Panic as a church kid in the ’80s and ’90s, so in that sense, this was right up my alley. Ironically, though, I think my personal experience actually kind of ruined Brubaker’s story for me; everything was familiar in a way that blunted its impact. Also, Houses of the Unholy felt rushed with a rather abrupt ending, as if Brubaker and Phillips had originally planned to make a longer series, only to cut things short mid-production.

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