‘Where Monsters Lie’ #2 continues its lovable gore by expanding its scope

With a deepening mystery and implications of larger horror, Where Monsters Lie continues to joyfully play with horror tropes.

Colin Moon

February 28, 2023

In this week’s Where Monster’s Lie #2, our driven detective mentions “a series of hit and runs where the car didn’t have a driver.” It’s a small moment, almost tangential to our primary purposes, and yet it quickens the heart of avid horror fans with its homage. Somewhere out there, in the world of Monsters, there is a Christine-like car beast out for blood.

It’s this familiarity and celebration of every avenue of horror cinema that makes Where Monsters Lie such a treat. Writer Kyle Starks and artist Piotr Kowalski could have easily managed with their stable of effective slasher send-up characters—the Jigsaw-homage Puzzleman, the Chucky and Goosebumps-adjacent ventriloquist dummy Franky—and reigned in the scope of their story; it is, after all, a story about a cul-de-sac of killers. The gimmick is in the contradiction of domesticity and horror.

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But all that isn’t enough for our creators; for every Final Girl reference and comedically casual reference to slaughter (as well as a tone that treats gore as unspectacular, every day), there are implications of a larger horror. This is a world in which the events of any given Friday the 13^th sequel might come and go with the commonplace regularity that gun violence has (horrifyingly) taken place in the contemporary U.S., and yet there seems to be something larger tying these villains together aside from their zip code.

The book revels in its ludicrous violence and makes its community of psychopaths downright loveable, and in doing so it speaks to slasher fans and horror aficionados. The gimmick may be goofy and it may play to your sense of humor, but there is something more tender than hilarious here—this isn’t a laugh-out-loud book so much as something grinningly warm.

More, Where Monsters Lie #2 uses the implications of a larger system of horror and violence to hook a reader into a very different type of mystery; we aren’t, like our Detective hero, trying to uncover the identity of our monsters—we know them already, we know whose garden is blooming and who should be kicked out of the Neighborhood Association. Instead, we’re solving a mystery underneath (or looming above) all of that.

It’s a delight to return to Where Monsters Lie with the second issue, and it feels like it will be a delight to return for the next two as it layers on other horrors and ghouls and explores more odd corners of its world.