Pig Wife

Artist and animation director Luck’s multilayered graphic novel debut starts out as a straightforward horror story and develops into a dense and disturbing phantasmagoria. Misanthropic recluse Pearl Harlow dies, leaving behind a pig farm, a house full of junk, and the deed to mining property worth a fortune. Her nephew Roger arrives in search of her will, along with his harried wife Vanessa and rebellious stepdaughter Mary. The family is barely hanging together—Roger is fleeing embezzlement charges—but things take a turn for the far worse. Mary runs away following a heated fight with her stepfather, attempts to hide, and finds herself trapped in the abandoned mine tunnels with two goofball troglodytes, Tommy and Ed, both of whom want her for their bride. Mary keeps the simpleminded duo at bay with quick thinking and dark humor—“I can’t walk down the aisle and choose between two incels in crop tops”—but the more she learns about their situation, the more grotesque it becomes. The art, cramped and unlovely in the narrative passages, opens up into spectacles of horrific beauty when Luck delves into the characters’ inner lives. Dreams and memories are depicted as hallucinatory spectacles in Hieronymous Bosch–style tableaus. This tale of abusive legacies and isolation burrows under the reader’s skin. (Jan.)