Gideon Falls Volume 1: The Black Barn

Written by Canadian comic writer Jeff Lemire, the first arc of the Gideon Falls saga follows two parallel storylines. The first is Norton, in treatment for delusions of a mysterious black barn that appears and disappears across a city. While combing the city’s trash, Norton believes he’s been finding pieces of the cryptic building. Meanwhile Father Fred, a disgraced priest, is tasked with taking over the parish of Gideon Falls, a non-descript rural North American town with a legend about a disappearing black barn. Is this a case of mass hysteria, or something more sinister and supernatural (well, there’s 6 volumes, so…)

I’ll be focusing on Jeff Lemire’s writing for this review, because the Horror Hoser is focused on Canadian Horror creatives, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the gorgeous, Lynchian-nightmare artwork of Andrea Sorrentino, and the colours of Dave Stewart, of Hellboy fame. 

Lemire first came on my radar during an undergrad English course, sometime around 2011. A very “hip” professor taught Lemire’s seminal work, Essex County. Essex County is a graphic novel about the lives of people growing up in rural Southern Ontario, spanning decades and generations. Though not a work of Horror, Essex County introduces readers to Lemire’s aesthetics. There are intentional panels and pages of sparse fields and blank space, as wide and vast as the Ontario farmlands feel. There are great examples of this aesthetic, drawn masterfully by Sorrentino, throughout Gideon Falls, especially in Father Fred’s story. 

Lemire has a penchant for big world building on a scale surpassing Stephen King. Past works of Lemire’s include Sweet Tooth (soon to be a Netflix series), his run on Old Man Logan, and his very own superhero universe in the Black Hammer series. The first volume of Gideon Falls sets up a similar vast world that readers crave to explore further. After I finished Vol. 1 for the first time, I immediately bought the other 5. 

Both in writing as well as his artwork, Jeff Lemire creates characters you care about without typical comic book exposition dumps. It’s little things, like a dream a character has, a well-placed sigh, the raise of a single eyebrow, that all culminate in people you feel like you really know, people you really care about, people you don’t want to see killed off by a menacing smile in the darkness. 

If you’ve never read any Lemire before, make Gideon Falls your entry point to a vast and wonderful rabbit hole. 

5 tantalizing piles of garbage out of 5

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Review by Ian A. Bain

@bainwrites on Twitter

I purchased this book