Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
In the small corners of the society we live in, there are stories of the old ways that have persisted, overcoming the likes of religious dogma, the sense of so- called Christian integrity that have gained a foothold on the country’s psyche, the Calvinist ethic, the Methodist belief, the Catholic doctrine, all shrouded in the rituals and observance that allows in many ways the rampaging evil of Capitalism to stoke the furnaces and lay waste to millions of people’s souls every year.
It all depends on your point of view of course, what is dogma for some, is philosophy for others, and for some it is persecution of the mind, something that has been used effectively as control, “The opium of the masses” as Marx once wrote. Hook, line and sinker we have fallen and yet without it we would not have the counterpoint that comes in the shape of the Gothic, the allusions to witchcraft and the probably misjudged sub-genre, Bumpkin horror.
If we have fallen into the realm of hook, line and sinker, then horror has those who see the world in the off-kilter prosaic wrapped beautifully round its fingers, and in the best worlds that have seen the likes of Lovecraft and James Herbert give rise to these particular forays of writing. The graphic novel also embraces the bounty on offer; for in David Hine and Mark Stafford’s collaboration of Lip Hook, the appreciation that would have undoubtedly come from the master of British Horror, James Herbert, would have been overwhelming.
The stories of cults and witchcraft seep into our veins like an injection of visual creeping fear, we have grown to mistrust such practices, consigning them on good days to figures of fun, of parody; there is a deeper reason though, in which the graphic novel is not ashamed to make clear, that this practise, of the Wiccan, of supposed witchcraft, is the fear of women and the power they wield over men’s hearts. It is in the weakest or the most misogynist of men that this fear pervades and its roots go back even before the days in which Salem was surrounded by the ghosts of damned women’s souls, in the days when King James wrote his Daemonologue, this was not fear alluded to the evil of the spirit world but rather a male response to the world in which women sought influence, a registered mass murder, sanctioned by law, upheld by society.
Lip Hook could indeed have been written by James Herbert, a powerful testimony to the writing and artwork of David Hine and Mark Stafford, their characters portraying the gruesome imagery that comes with such horror, the relation of man’s symbolic destructive dance with nature, it is perhaps in a way a striking reveal that lives in books such as Fog, The Magic Cottage and Once…a sense of the remote, of the unreal surrounding and the mysterious figures who come into the village and change the population forever; nothing could be more in keeping with the genre.
A graphic novel of pure ecstasy, one that holds true to the fans of Horror and will cause a revolutionary surprise to those willing to suspend their fear in the search for new knowledge. Lip Hook hits the nail on the head with precision.
David Hine and Mark Staffords Lip Hook is released by SelfMadeHero on October 18th.
Ian D. Hall