Underheist understands what crime fiction needs: character. And it delivers without hesitation.
As the first issue unravels and we’re introduced to our small set of characters – series lead David, his wife, and the small crew of lowlives he gathers together to, you know, do crimes. What’s striking about them isn’t that they’re an elaborate, Ocean’s-style group of experts (the getaway driver, the demolition expert, etc), it’s that they don’t need those sorts of archetypes to be distinctive and substantial characters.
With little effort, creative duo Maria and David Lapham just enough detail so that relationships are made clear and personalities are established. There is an undercurrent of history implied between our characters, and with only one flashback to introduce an as-of-yet at play supernatural element, the reader feels within touching distance of that history.
As the heist gets underway – our thieving protagonists are stealing from other thieves – even our baddies get toss-away dialogue instilling them with inner lives.
That heist takes up a very small amount of the issue’s real estate, clocking in as the final third of the book, and yet it feels momentous and action-packed, given gravity by the quick familiarity the reader has established with its players.
A lot of work is done in this first issue, building stakes that other stories might take multiple issues to establish. The Laphams, no strangers to complex and unique crime stories (there are two decades of the classic Stray Bullets to lose yourself in), have distilled the story’s foreplay into a solid, dense experience – and they do this with only a bare hint of the actual story; shortly, that supernatural twist will be applied, and a horror beyond the quiet criminal violence will be unleashed.
Rarely does a book lay such firm foundations in its first issue, and with all the care given to what seems to amount to the first half of an inciting incident, the series promises an easy, substantial complexity. It’s impossible not to want to follow these characters into their next chapter.
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