Unbagging Houses Of The Unholy

Houses of the Unholy HC

#HC

Release: Aug 14, 2024

Creators

Writer	Ed Brubaker
Artist	Sean Phillips
Cover Artist	Sean Phillips

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Funny how it’s always like that…whatever the conspiracy theory is…someone’s actually doing something just like it…just not the ones who’re being accused…it’s like the world is backwards…

Even though I lived through it, the Satanic Panic never really hit home for me in any meaningful way.

I mean, I was aware of some of the stuff that was going on – claims made about D&D, talk about backwards messages and demonic imagery in Heavy Metal music, thirdhand accounts of animal and human sacrifices and Satanic rituals – but a lot of it passed me by, and it just wasn’t much of a thing that anyone took too seriously where I grew up.

I didn’t know anyone who thought that the Tom Hanks made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters was anything other than ridiculous, and I never heard anyone talk about Michelle Remembers. and if I ever heard anything about the West Memphis Three or the McMartin Preschool Trial, it didn’t really register.

Thanks to the reporting I’d seen, I did find Ozzy Osbourne a bat bit scary when I was young, but by the time I actually heard any of his music I’d moved beyond that and rapidly became a fan.

All of that was, I suppose, a function of where I lived. The isolation and miniscule population allowed most parents’ sense of “It can’t happen here” to overpower any inclination to join in with the nationwide panic and helped insulate me from the worst of it, especially given that the local church was very much not the fire and brimstone variety.

Later in the ’80s when I got into Metal, my mom, who mostly didn’t concern herself too much with what media I consumed, did express some misgivings. One day, when I came home from school with a borrowed copy of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality on cassette, she was a bit concerned, until later that day when she walked past my bedroom where I was listening to it with my headphone, lying on my bed like a corpse with my arms crossed and saying, “Yes, master…” at which point she said, “You little smartass,” and that was the end of it.

All of which, finally, brings us to the latest offering from the dynamic duo that is Brubaker and Phillips, a story focusing on a woman for whom the Satanic Panic was not just part of the background noise of her life but was instead the very thing that defined her life as a child and continues to do so decades later.

We meet Natalie Burns as she’s renting a secluded cabin in the woods and quickly learn that she’s not just a regular woman looking to get away from it all once we see her taking a bound and gagged teenaged girl out of the trunk of her car.

Natalie, it turns out, makes her living tracking down and recovering missing kids, such as this girl who had run away from home and joined a cult.

Things quickly go awry, however, when Natalie finds a hidden camera in the cabin, which ultimately leads to the girl getting away and Natalie behind bars in the county jail where she’s informed that “important people” are looking for her.

Those important people turn out to be the FBI in the form of Agent West who has come to talk to her about her past as a member of the Satanic Six.

At this point we begin to look into Natalie’s past and her connection to the Satanic Panic. She was one of a group of six children who claimed that they were ritually abused at a summer day camp.

The story of Natalie’s past unfolds in flashbacks while in the present we learn that Agent West was seeking her out because half of the members of the Satanic Six have been murdered, and one of the murders seems to have been the kind of ritual sacrifice that had previously only existed in the fevered imaginations of a hysterical public.

Natalie agrees to accompany Agent West as he seeks out the remaining members of the group, a quest that leads to sex, violence, betrayal, and the revelation of a real conspiracy born out of the imaginary conspiracy of Natalie’s childhood.

While those are the events that unfold in the narrative, the real story is found in Natalie’s memories and the way she grapples with them, attempting to understand how, even as a child, she could have believed the stories she told were true, and how she can sometimes almost believe them even now, and how so many of the adults around her could believe them. Indeed, how they were so eager to believe them in defiance of all reason.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has a lot of thoughts on that latter point, and he’s quick to – correctly – assert that the Satanic Panic never really ended, nor did it begin in the 1980s. It’s been going on for centuries, changing as needed to adapt to the times, and part of the reason it’s remained so pervasive – and attractive – is that believing that there are horrible people out there doing horrible things makes it easy to view yourself as heroic. After all, no matter what you do, you’re always going to be better than those Satanic Baby Killers.

Natalie doesn’t necessarily come to the same conclusions, or any conclusions, really, but her experiences, past and present, differ substantially from those of Clark who insists that the true believers in these kinds of conspiracies don’t really believe what they say they believe, they just pretend as hard as they can, trying to convince themselves just as much as they’re trying to convince others.

Ultimately, in real life and in this fictional story, I feel like that’s a distinction without a difference. Certainly, it doesn’t matter much to Natalie if the people who are planning to ritually sacrifice her really believe that ritual will achieve their goals.

Earlier, I mentioned that the Satanic Panic wasn’t really that much of a “thing” when I was a kid and that I was somewhat insulated by it due in part to it not really catching on with the adults around me.

Natalie, we learn in her flashbacks, had the opposite problem in that even prior to the events that would so define her life, Natalie’s mother was a true believer (or really good at pretending), unwittingly planting the seeds of the fantastical and phantasmagorical stories that she would later tell in Natalie’s mind. She continued to believe even as the rest of the world moved on, despite the devastating effects it had on her marriage and on the lives of Natalie and Natalie’s younger brother.

It was particularly damaging as unlike the other families Natalie’s family stayed where they were rather than moving away to find a fresh start.

To the extent that there is one, I won’t spoil the ending other than to say that it is ambiguous and deliberately unsatisfying. Of course, the fact that it’s meant to be unsatisfying doesn’t change the fact that it is unsatisfying, and I have to say that while I don’t think it’s possible for me to actually dislike anything that Brubaker and Phillips produce, this one isn’t exactly my favorite.

It’s a story that’s well told in the typical non-linear structure of their works, and beautifully illustrated by the father and son team of Sean and Jacob Phillips (Jacob on colors). I especially appreciate the lurid reds of the flashback sequences.

Those flashback sequences hold a similar nostalgic power – for people of a certain age at least – as the flashbacks and past settings of their other works, but as is also the case in their other works, it’s not a warm and comforting kind of nostalgia, it’s the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt. It doesn’t harken to a time to which you’d like to return, it’s a time from which you can’t seem to escape.

It’s not the past pulling you back because in hindsight it’s so attractive, it’s pulling you back because it’s got its hooks in you and will not let go.

Most of these hardcover releases from Brubaker and Phillips are often structured as if they’re collected volumes of individual issues, with chapter breaks that are suggestive of reaching the end of an issue.

The examination of the Satanic Panic and conspiracy theories in general via Natalie’s personal history is interesting, if somewhat shallow, but the main plotline is a bit lacking, and the twists aren’t as surprising to the reader as they are to Natalie, whose senses are dulled, as she often admits, by her constant pot smoking.

I did appreciate that to the extent that the modern-day conspiracy and the Satanic rituals in the story are real, they are the result of people trying very hard to turn fantasy into reality, lending no credence to the original claims that inspired the current actions.

As Fred Clark might say, it’s role-playing that’s taken too far by people desperately trying to make the fiction they want to believe into reality.

Though Brubaker does not, as Clark does, tie this to the ancient Blood Libel or to modern opposition to abortion, the motivation for the killers pursuing Natalie do lead to the same desired outcome: power.

Which really is what it all always boils down to.

Despite what I see as its shortcomings, Houses of the Unholy is definitely worth the read – it is Brubaker and Phillips, after all – but it’s not as strong an entry as their last effort, Where The Body Was, or any of the Reckless books.

Honestly, this story might have been better served if it had been told in a Reckless book.

…and now I’m actually thinking about how this could have played out as a Reckless book and I need to stop because it’s starting to make me resentful of how this one played out.

But, again, I’m never going to complain about having new Brubaker and Phillips content, so I wouldn’t recommend reading too much into my dampened enthusiasm.

Besides, your experience of it may be as different as my experience of the Satanic Panic was from Natalie’s and you may find the overall story outside of the flashbacks more engaging than I did, so despite my quibbles I have no qualms about recommending Houses of the Unholy, to anyone interested in the subject or to the gritty noir stylings of this iconic creative team.

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