Protagonist Samantha, center, may look like she belongs on your toddler’s bookshelf. But trust me: no. Art by Patrick Horvath.
Samantha Strong is a fluffy brown bear who owns a hardware store in the idyllic town of Woodbrook. Everyone there knows one another. Everyone says good morning. Samantha is kind, thoughtful, and well-liked. And she’s a serial killer.
Samantha narrates our story, first introducing us to her cheery and likable critter neighbors, then turning inward as she guides us with chilling matter-of-factness through the murderous craft she has honed over twenty years.
When a rival serial killer starts killing in Woodbrook, the plot shifts into whodunit mode. Samantha turns her attention to her neighbors, each harboring their own secrets, in a desperate hunt to find the killer—the other killer—before unwanted attention exposes her own crimes.
Two of Samantha’s many friendly neighbors. Art by Patrick Horvath.
Cozy meets carnage
Horvath expertly uses juxtaposition to give the story its edge: fuzzy against bloody, anthropomorphic against natural, cartoon invulnerability against physical frailty.
The cognitive dissonance begins with Horvath’s exquisite illustrations, thoughtfully constructed and rendered by a confident, accomplished hand. His palette is light and welcoming. Smooth lines define the edges of soft, watercolor shapes. Scenes are brightly, revealingly lit, with only the faintest of shadows. Even nighttime scenes avoid ambiguity; details remain visible. No villains lurk in the literal darkness.
Panel layout is orderly. Horvath varies panel size sparingly and with purpose. Panels have soft, unruled borders resulting in breezy eye movement. Lettering is readable and consistent.
Overall, the pages—the ones without blood and guts, anyway—are eye candy. The tone echoes the safe, familiar worlds of children’s fare—such as Marc Brown’s Elwood City, where Arthur lives, or Richard Scarry’s Busytown, home of Huckle Cat—until it doesn’t.
Horror pierces the illusion. Enter profanity, loneliness, mental illness, rage. Add to that serial murder and dismemberment. Very un-Huckle Cat.
The duality of civilized and wild
There is a real Goofy-and-Pluto paradox happening here: some animals are anthropomorphized, while others are presented as animals in their natural form. Horvath uses that split to probe the uneasy, contrived boundary between civilized behavior and our capacity for violence.
Samantha, a brown bear, wears jeans and walks and talks in an articulate way. She crosses paths with wild, blood-stained bears as they tear into one another over a kill.
Cherry “$%&#@” Gherkins is a confrontational, self-righteous, culture-warring pig. She rages at a town meeting and walks past the lifeless, severed heads of pigs displayed in the local butcher shop window.
Chip is an affable fox who works at a newsstand. We also see four-legged, feral foxes attracted to the scent of spilled blood.
In the natural world, blood is not merely accepted as reality. For predators, it is sought out. It excites.
The Pluto-and-Goofy paradox, pushed to the extreme. Art by Patrick Horvath.
Order within brutality
Our narrator’s emotional detachment is chilling, even more so than the killings. The horror surrounding Samantha is not frenzied slasher-movie material. It’s ritualistic. Neat and clean. She plans. She prepares. She methodically places body parts in paint cans before burial, not out of necessity but because, as she puts it, “I don’t want a mess. I just want to be in control.”
She won’t kill in Woodbrook, where a single murder would draw attention. Instead, she hunts in the city, protected by its anonymity. When the rival serial killer shows up, it’s not the violence that causes Samantha to spiral—it’s the loss of control and the breakdown of her own established murder rules.
Samantha is self-aware, to a point. Although seemingly popular in Woodbrook for years, she acknowledges that she has no real friends. She doesn’t “pretend to know what love is.” She recognizes the need for “a conversation with myself that’s been long overdue. A look at what’s beneath the surface.”
Hiding behind facades
The residents of Woodbrook are less self-aware. They live nestled in their protective bubble away from the city. Most prefer superficial acquaintance over genuine knowing, illusion over uncomfortable truth.
Not long after the murder of a prominent character, the locals are back to gossiping as they order meat at Melody’s Hopping Block Butchery, even as blood drips—plip—onto the counter. (Melody is a cat with secrets, by the way. That’s all I’ll say.)
The characters compartmentalize, which leaves gaps—spaces for monsters to sneak in. Samantha describes the danger of monsters like her, who can hide in plain sight: “... none of the normal things work … Chances are, they’ve already made themselves cozy right there with you, behind the locked door … You’ve known them your whole life.”
Final thoughts
If one measure of a good graphic novel is how deeply and how long it lingers with a reader, Horvath’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is a success.
Little bits
I’m a sucker for a well-told horror tale. I have been since I was a kid, with my eyes glued to cheesy horror films on Chiller Theater, Horror Theater, and the like. As long as we’re psychoanalyzing, I wonder why I was so receptive?
Another oddity of human nature—how easily we can be manipulated into rooting for one killer over another. As with The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, the presumptive equation protagonist = good guy can generate some strange rooting interests.
A marquee at Woodbrook’s Bijou Theater advertises the 1975 crime drama Dog Day Afternoon. That film, like this book, probes the complexities of human nature—kindness and cruelty, charm and violence, love and manipulation.
DETAILS
‘Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees’
Creators: Patrick Horvath (writer and illustrator); Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer)
Publisher: IDW, September 2024 (collected edition); 152 pages; paperback
