Review by Frank Plowright

Welcome to Glasgow is an exceptional collection of horror stories absolutely embedded in Glasgow, playing into everyone’s fears about the most deprived areas of the city from the playground urban legend of kidnapper clowns in a van to gangster culture. It sets the bar very high for Blood & Rain, but John Lees and and Alex Cormack don’t falter reacquainting us with the inhabitants of the Sinkhill Estate.

If there’s any thought they will, their opener is the most visceral shocker so far, brutal, explicit and terrifying in showing what it takes to turn someone into a killer. The clowns are shown as more than shadowy figures, their murderous motivations seemingly random, and Cormack draws a largely wordless story in slashing rain with the blood flowing freely. It’s grim and immense, and topped off by Lees titling it after the ‘Death and the Maiden’ theme of classical painting, except changing the title to ‘Death and the Midden’, a Scottish term for a rubbish dump, which is where much of the action takes place.

Over individual stories in Welcome to Glasgow, Lees introduced a diverse bunch of people, many of whom are seen again in the four remaining inclusions, two standalone horrors and a two-parter. The cover primes us for the return of Mr. Fox, and the way Lees achieves that is a masterstroke of deception, a stunningly simple piece of plotting to have readers questioning their attitudes.

Variety is key to Sink, so while characters recur, the tone varies. Comedy encompasses slapstick and absurdism as well as a couple of sitcom sharp scenes, and the horror takes many forms from verbal to visual. If selecting one single shudder-inducing moment, it’s the construction of the clown’s nose, although you may well reconsider pineapples.

The quality of both creators is such that despite the best of intentions, Sink has been on hold since 2019 as they’ve been offered other work, but anyone who revels in creative horror should waste no time searching out the two available volumes.