Tony Black reviews The Hunt #1…
Dream or reality? For a long time, teenager Orla Roche couldn’t tell them apart, and now THE HUNT is coming with its nightmare world of the restless dead. An intense story of survival, THE HUNT is a supernatural horror tale that will give Irish mythology a distinctly modern twist.
In a creepy first issue of Image comics brand new run, The Hunt sets out its stall as a defiantly unusual and pervasive horror drama, grounded very much in real world Ireland. From writer and illustrator Colin Lorimer, it’s a decisively auteur project and one that opens up a compact but immediately quite spooky world of children, parents and literal monsters lurking in the shadows. There’s a rough edged, modern Gothic sensibility to the way Lorimer colours this first issue too that stands out, at times washed out to depict the Irish kitchen sink aspect of the characters lives, before edging towards a mesh of Giger and Lovecraft in the monstrous visages creeping around the edges of these characters.
It’s as you might expect quite a scene-setting issue and consequently that means not a massive wealth of action takes place across these pages. We meet our protagonist, young Orla Roche, who witnessed something as a young girl which has haunted her life in every aspect growing up, and now given her continued propensity to draw what she saw back then, has become something of a pariah in a teenage school system that doesn’t welcome difference. Plenty of traditional tropes exist in Lorimer’s depiction of her life, but they make sense, and his grounded writing punches up any adversities in the narrative here.
All the inflections of the Irish language are present and correct, to the point you feel more immersed in that world than writers who aren’t of that nationality writing these characters would achieve. The Irish setting gives this a freshness to some degree, to the point you’re not always entirely sure where the story is going, and by the end chances are you’ll still be in the dark as to quite what the monster at the heart of this tale is, but that’s fine – that’s the mystery this run is undoubtedly going to peel away.
While not groundbreaking or particularly thrilling, it’s a solid if relatively unremarkable start for The Hunt. Colin Lorimer writes well and he colours even better with that blend of normality and complete terrifying insanity lurking in the shadows, and he establishes the world around young Orla going forward with efficiency. It needs to kick into an extra gear as the plot mechanics roll out, but there is plenty of potential within to be a strong horror drama unafraid to pull some dark, mature punches.
Rating: 6/10
Tony Black
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Originally published July 24, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
