The arcane dread of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s ‘The Bone Orchard Mythos’
Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Andrea Sorrentino are creating a shared horror universe titled “The Bone Orchard Mythos”; this narrative universe will allow the creative team to produce standalone stories in various formats, with the stories connected by an underlying mythos. While the lore of this mythos has yet to be revealed, the first installment of The Bone Orchard Mythos provides clues about this horror universe’s possible arcana and establishes an atmosphere of supernatural dread.
Released on May 7, 2022 as part of the Free Comic Book Day promotional event, Shadow Eater is a single-issue comic book prelude to The Bone Orchard Mythos. The comic features an unnamed writer and his dog Russ visiting a rented lake house. The writer hopes to benefit from the house’s quiet seclusion as he attempts to escape his marital problems and finish a script.
Suffering from writer’s block, the writer takes Russ on a nighttime stroll and discovers a nearby derelict house. Exploring, he finds an unsettling artifact that will have a significant role in the story, and readers get a glimpse of the mysterious graffiti etched on an interior wall.
These etchings include glyphs and text such as “Kul Ren Labashi” along with “Marduk” (an apparent reference to the mythological Babylonian deity) and drawings of vertical structures labelled “7 Spires” and a circular image annotated as “Silver City?”
The protagonist seems not to notice these etchings as he focuses elsewhere, but the palette of the comic’s colorist, Dave Stewart, draws reader attention to the text and glyphs provided by letterer Steve Wands, and the mystique of those etchings haunt the imagination. What does “Kul Ren Labashi” mean? (Google Translate provides no translation; the software approximates it as Turkish, but it clearly is not.) What is the “Silver City” (a reference to an ethereal metropolis, or the New Mexico town?) and what are the “7 Spires”? Why does the name of an ancient Babylonian god appear on the wall?
It is currently unclear what these etchings mean in the context of the story’s larger mythos, but the combination of the art and mysterious text, along with the strange artifact the writer discovers, and the isolated setting, create an atmosphere of dread in the story.
In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” celebrated writer H. P. Lovecraft outlines the importance of establishing an atmosphere of dread in horror fiction:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
In Shadow Eater, the wall’s arcane etchings are the comic’s first visual signal that something strange is at work in the story. Later, when the writer returns to the lake house, he notices a string of letters and numbers typed onto his script document.
The unknown context of the typed characters is unsettling: Who typed the string of numbers and letters? Are the string’s characters merely random? Is there a deeper meaning? (The author of this article attempted several decryption methods, including the Caesar, Atbash, and keyboard shift ciphers, among others, and found no discernable message.)
Both the wall etchings and the mysterious string of characters, along with Sorrentino and Stewart’s deft artwork, unnerve the reader by suggesting the presence of something strange; this suggestion is not confirmed until page 14, more than halfway through the comic, a heart-pounding payoff for the reader’s feelings of dread that were well established in the comic’s earlier pages.
While the arcane text and images generate readers’ unease, the creative team’s work in establishing the writer as a sympathetic character invites reader investment in the story. The writer is a well-realized protagonist whose personal challenges are relatable and engaging; many readers will be thinking about him long after finishing Shadow Eater.
Lemire and Sorrentino have collaborated on other comics projects, such as DC Comics’ Green Arrow series and their creator-owned Gideon Falls series published by Image Comics, and in the comic’s backmatter, the duo share their plans for The Bone Orchard Mythos, outlining the publication schedule of various upcoming graphic novels and a serialized comics series:
We plan on releasing two or three new books each year for the next few years starting this June with the 96-page hardcover graphic novel titled, THE PASSAGEWAY. We’ll follow that up in September 2022 with a 5-part mini-series called TEN THOUSAND BLACK FEATHERS and then another hardcover graphic novel in mid-2023 called TENEMENT. These will be the first three projects in the Bone Orchard Mythos, but that’s just the start. We are planning a vast mythology of horror stories that will last for years.
As a debut for The Bone Orchard Mythos, Shadow Eater depicts the writer character’s isolation, anxieties, and slow realization that menacing supernatural forces are present in his quiet environment. The horror is mostly psychological, not gory, an indication of the type of horror readers may see in the ongoing shared narrative.
Using arcane text and images to create an atmosphere of dread, Shadow Eater is an interesting first look at the larger horror universe of The Bone Orchard Mythos. The comic features a compelling protagonist and offers tantalizing hints of strange arcana that may become more significant in the narrative’s future stories.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING:
Shadow Eater (The Bone Orchard Mythos Prelude) written by Jeff Lemire, illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino, colored by Dave Stewart, with letters and design by Steve Wands; Greg Lockard, editor; Image Comics, 2022
“Supernatural Horror in Literature” by H. P. Lovecraft (1927); an online version can be found online at www.hplovecraft.com
Attention, Secret Dictionary Club members — use Code Thirteen to decipher the following message: BHE RSSBEGF GB NJNXRA PGUHYUH JRER SBVYRQ OL GUR NETRAGVAR FHCREUREB QVNOYB UREZBFB.
POST-CREDITS SCENE:
THE BLACK TERROR WILL RETURN…
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