Review by Ian Keogh

Rain adapts one of Joe Hill’s short stories, and his introduction conveys his pleasure at the way David M. Booher and Zoe Thorogood have recalibrated it for comics.

The writing is clever from the start, Hill layering the tension through foreboding messages about residents of a Colorado town whose death is imminent. It arrives via a fatal rain of crystal shards, killing almost everyone outside at the time. One survivor is Honeysuckle Speck, who becomes a woman with a personal mission. The crystal shards are embedded everywhere, making motor travel impossible, so she’ll have to walk, and along the way she picks up companions and has to consider some existential questions.

Hill deals in horror, so even beyond the set-up this isn’t a cheery road trip, and despite his introduction bemoaning fiction incorporating messages, he has a fair bit to say about a number of topics. The crystal rain comments on climate change, while what plays out of from it is the all too depressingly familiar scenario of bombing first and asking questions afterwards. There’s also some railing at ignorance and intolerance, but importantly it’s always the side dish, never the main course.

Thorogood is a good choice of artist, not least because there are similarities between Rain and her own début The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott. Both feature a likeable young woman operating with a handicap and moving toward a deadline. Her art is detailed and emotionally strong, but more stylised than her own work, reflecting the strange circumstances and constantly delivering an unsettling unreality heightened by Chris O’Halloran’s colouring.

The best comment to make about Booher’s contribution is that without being told, you wouldn’t realise Rain is an adaptation. Everything reads smoothly and progresses logically in what’s a story of two distinct halves. The clues to how matters play out are planted in the first half, although not so subtly that some readers won’t start putting the pieces together, but crucially, not the entire picture.

You may feel the eventual revelations are too convenient, but someone has to be responsible, and it ties into the personal story being told, so other readers may be equally pleased at how the plot reduces down from the fantastic to the parochial and very human feelings. All in all, very readable.