Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees

Horvath’s clever graphic novel debut cozies up to the darkness lurking beneath everyday life. Samantha Strong, a cuddly-looking brown bear and the well-liked owner of a hardware store in the idyllic town of Woodbrook, is a serial killer who makes regular trips to the big city to “play.” Sam calmly kidnaps, sedates, and vivisects her victims: “everything neat, and everything tidy.” But during Woodbrook’s Bicentennial Days celebration, someone else starts to murder town residents, and Sam realizes this new killer’s activities threaten to expose her own secret. Deciding that “this town’s not big enough for two psychopaths,” she investigates. The other townsfolk are also cute animals, from a nervous parakeet to the hound-dog sheriff to a turtle who pulls his head into his V-neck collar when startled. Horvath’s charming picture-book artwork, rendered in bright painterly strokes and packed with visual detail, makes the gruesome subject matter all the more disturbing. What could be a simple visual gimmick elevates the story through well-crafted execution and thoughtful moments like Sam’s woodland encounter with a normal, non-talking bear. Fans of deceptively cute horror comics like Mike Birchall’s Everything Is Fine and Jay Stephens’s Dwellings will delight in this hairy twist on the slasher genre. (Sept.)