Review by Frank Plowright
This second visit to the Red Room features another four stories centred around the idea of a website where the exorbitantly rich pay massive amounts to see people creatively tortured and murdered via livestream. The Antisocial Network established something akin to the WWE, but for real and without boundaries, featuring celebrity killers, wannabees and a controlling interest. Be warned, it’s as explicit and possibly stomach-turning as that sounds.
Jumping back and forth through time over four stories remains a series feature, and there’s no need for Ed Piskor to revert to repeats via concentrating exclusively on the livestreaming, although it remains a feature, particularly on the opener.
That again concentrates on Davis Fairfield, a serial killer co-opted into the Red Room. We’ve already seen him in captivity, and Piskor now reveals how that occurred via the clever device of three parallel narratives on the same page. One features his daughter Brianna, who has no clue as to either of her father’s sideline careers, her sequences presented in colour, one features a gruesomely inventive livestream and the activities of Davis himself occupy the third. The clever aspects run beyond the storytelling as Piskor gradually begins to cross cut between the three separate strands in what becomes an utter car crash.
The Antisocial Network mentioned one occasion when the authorities busted into the Red Room, and it’s a theme connecting three of the four stories presented in Trigger Warnings. How it was enabled is shown alongside Piskor glimpsing into the lives of some who, under aliases, comment on the killings as they stream. They’re as hateful as you might imagine, but for cleverly different reasons. That’s the final story before moving on to Crypto Killaz!, and it’s preceded by the weakest inclusion, building to a homage to The Wicker Man, via a Mike McMahon Slaine story according to Piskor’s notes. The idea of a necessary flight and a Jim Jones-style personality cult has possibilities, but they’re never fully realised in a wayward narrative.
The title story opens with the police called to two masked teenagers found hanging in a barn, while a nearby phone features an extended confession, accompanied by Piskor’s illustrations of events. It’s also clever for the mythologising text sometimes contrasted by the ‘truth’ of the drawings.
An intense shocking jolt accompanied the first volume, the explicitness of the presentation pushing boundaries, but with that now par for the course Piskor cultivates his audience via the connections and building on the established world. One slightly weaker offering among four won’t put off the converted or deter new fans.
