If there was ever a book that unearths the malignancy and horrors of the internet, it’s Luana Vecchio’s miniseries Lovesick and its prequel, Doll Parts: A Lovesick Tale. These books are a masterclass in horror – bold and deeply disturbing, not only showing you the darkest corners of the human mind but pulling you deep into their world like spectral arms reaching from the ocean and yanking you down to join them in the icy cold depths.
Yes, there are the standard tropes of any horror story here, with gore and violence aplenty, but these books are loaded with atmosphere, feeling more like Heretic and Midsommar than any banal Friday the 13th-type work. The issues stay with you long after you finish reading them.
Last issue, teenage Madeleine, feeling increasingly isolated from her parents and the world, made the mistake of connecting online with the psychotic pervert P1gG, who runs a dark web site that’s a show-and-tell of mutilations, decapitations and torture, each bloody image and video he posts more gory than the last. After a few exchanges with him, where she opened up to him, Madeleine ghosted him.
In Doll Parts: A Lovesick Tale #3, we see the aftermath of this, as P1gG relentlessly sends her text messages, detailing how he’s going to defile her in every way possible then cut up her body, along with killing her parents. And he knows where she lives. It’s the ultimate nightmare of the internet age, being the target of a deranged stalker who has all your information and is coming for you.
There’s a suffocating feeling of paranoia throughout the first half of the book because Madeleine doesn’t really know what P1gG looks like, though she sees a man with a pig mask occasionally near her house and hanging around her school. He continues assaulting her with abusive text messages and even more abusive voicemails. Also, Madeleine seems to see him everywhere, lingering in the shadows.
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I admit, when I read last issue, I was exasperated with Madeleine, wondering why she would choose this guy of all people to vibe with. I thought it was stupid and self-destructive, but after re-reading the issue, I reflected on my own teenage years and realized yes, I made some pretty awful choices. When you feel like you’re drowning, like the whole world hates you and doesn’t understand you, you’ll reach out to anyone offering a hand to help you, no matter how sinister that person might be.
There’s a certain tragedy to becoming an adult, but we forget that being a teenager is equally filled with tragedy and pain. Even the most popular, well-adjusted kids in high school harbor feelings of insecurity, but when you’re Madeleine, whose parents genuinely see her as a nuisance and who’s besieged on all sides by boys bullying her or trying to score with her, things are infinitely tougher.
The issue’s filled with twists and Madeleine ends P1gG’s stalking in a refreshingly simple way. Because what perverted serial killer can stand against a raging teenage girl who’s fought an eternal war of attrition with herself and has become totally numb in the process?
I love all the visual cues that Ms. Vecchio drops in her artwork throughout the issue, cues that give us insights into Madeleine, like her affinity for teddy bears (including the bear charms dangling from her cell phone) and the way she adorns her hair with a mix of skulls and kittens, accentuating both the dark and the light.
In one scene, the Hole song “Petals” pops up on her iPod. It’s ironic that Madeleine listens to Hole, because lead singer Courtney Love, much like Madeleine, spent years trying to forge her own identity after marrying Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. The title of this miniseries, Doll Parts, is a reference to another Hole song and just about every song they’ve done reflects some aspect of Madeleine and her world, a beautifully unnerving world I always love to visit.
This miniseries continues being one of the most fearless and beautifully disturbing horror books on the shelves. If you’re a horror fan, you need to be getting this!
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