Cartoonist: Steve Thueson
Publisher: Silver Sprocket
Publication Date: August 2024
Steve Thueson’s new graphic novel, The Night Never Ends, as you can see above, is a slasher comic set in and around a creepy old house in the suburbs. Plot-wise, this is a story about a group of old friends who reconvene to celebrate a 30th birthday. The guest of honor wants to do this by having a séance in a haunted house in the group’s suburban hometown, which they have all left behind. That house on that particular night, however, is also playing host to violent occult activities…and so gory horror ensues. Tagline: Can they get out of the suburbs alive?
This is all well and good. It’s a familiar enough setting — are the suburbs the defacto locale for slasher fiction? I think there’s a case… — and it’s conceptually familiar too. But what sets this book aside is that the execution (heh) is carried out with so much wit and charm, that it elevates The Night Never Ends to being very much its own thing.
Thuen’s cartooning is as clean as it is dynamic. It moves capably from visual gags to ominous background figures, which are perfectly-timed to heighten the horror. It lives in a sort of between space that way, one that disarms you with a silly-leaning aesthetic before splattering blood all over the page. The effect for me was never knowing when I could relax, which worked to perfection.
There’s also a sort of scary normalcy past the genre touches here. Sure, it’s frightening that masked cultists want to carve up our heroes and drink their blood for some kind of summoning ceremony. But it’s equally frightening — if not more frightening — that once the violence starts, one of the only people who interact with our heroes are a gun-toting home-owner trying to keep anyone and everyone off his lawn, even if that means killing him. Basically, these are horror victims who easily escape from the house, and it doesn’t matter because there’s nowhere safe to escape to.
And that’s the real horror of The Night Never Ends. I think other suburban slashers have primarily used the setting because it fosters a sense of familiarity for audiences, and opens up a juxtaposition between quiet normalcy and gruesome violence. This book, however, pushes past that to make this suburb an inherently spooky setting, a cold one where help can’t be found because everyone is so shut up inside their houses. In this book, even the town’s one all-night diner has closed, mirroring a real world shift where suburbs are becoming increasingly run-down and devoid of any public gathering spaces(dead malls, anyone?).
And then, of course, this is also a bantery book that has jokes. Overall, it almost felt like sort of Trojan Horse horror, an innocent and familiar feeling book that sneaks up on you days later, making you reconsider what really scared you and why. If that sounds like your type of thing, The Night Never Ends might be the perfect way to start your Halloween comics reading.
The Night Never Ends is available via Silver Sprocket, and don’t forget to check out The Beat’s reviews section for more graphic novel reviews!
