Review by Karl Verhoven
Geologist John Reed visits a small island, really no more than a rock in the sea on which a lighthouse has been built. The lighthouse keeper discovered some large rocks had disappeared, revealing a hole about six feet across, and when a stone was dropped into the hole it was never heard reaching the bottom. As seen on the sample page, Reed is equipped with a drone and sends it down the hole.
It turns out the horrors Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino supplied in Gideon Falls were just the opening shot introducing a grim alternate reality, and Father Jeremiah Burke isn’t the only human due to encounter something beyond rational explanation. The remote location instantly awakens the idea of danger with the foreknowledge The Passageway is a horror story, and everything being constructed around three people adds to that. What under normal circumstances would be a perfectly normal comment of “No-one waiting for you then?” instantly arouses suspicion.
That’s partly because it’s on a page where an ordinary conversation is illustrated by Sorrentino, but overlaid with small panels of what look like fossils embedded in rock, coloured by Dave Stewart in bright red. It echoes a very distinctive scene in red a few pages earlier, but as both people talking in the scene are eccentric loners, could it be a visual metaphor? On other pages Sorrentino and Stewart combine for a very different look, larger panels heavy with black areas, yet also with splashes of bright colour. These indicate an event in Reed’s past that he’s never come to terms with.
A passageway is promised by the title, and a passageway duly arrives, an inscription on the entrance anticipating associated graphic novel Ten Thousand Black Feathers. Its presence haunts a rational man of science confronted with something entirely irrational, and to Reed’s previous knowledge impossible. Readers shouldn’t expect any more answers than Reed receives. What is, is, and it’s beyond what you know. This could be frustrating, but it’s actually a satisfying exercise in the creation of mood, and satisfyingly chilling despite answers remaining elusive.
