Review by Frank Plowright

Mark and Meera are looking for a house in the area where he spent his summers as a child, but the development they’ve just left is small and unsuitable, and he’s disappointed at a large section of forest being cut down to create the estate. Driving away, the road ends suddenly and their car swerves into the forest. They’re uninjured, but can’t find their way back to the road and are soon wandering around a massive area of old forest gradually coming to realise the impossible is happening.

Norm Konyu’s exceptionally designed and stylish digital art creates an atmospheric location where shafts of light illuminate the density of the forest and background blocks of colour suggest heavy foliage. Mark and Meera begin as cheerful, but their expressions gradually reflect their trapped circumstances as they continue to wander without ever getting anywhere.

The art is the star here, as Konyu rolls out what’s a very traditional ghost story from start to finish, with the horror first coming from the possible unknown just around the corner, and then from previously experienced circumstances. Mark and Meera know something’s definitely happening to them, but despite being beyond their frame of reference it’s happening anyway and they seem powerless to affect events.

There is a really good payoff that’s been well foreshadowed, but Konyu spends far too long reaching it, even accounting for a scene-setting prologue in 1902. Konyu follows the classic ghost story form, but this is a stylish short story extended into a full graphic novel.