A few months ago, there was a guy lying dead in the night in Archer’s Peak, Wisconsin. It wasn’t pretty. There was blood everywhere. Exposed ribcage stuck out of the guy’s open chest like fingers that died trying to claw their way out of hell. Maxine Slaughter was there to investigate with a few other white masks. The world of Something Is Killing the Children continues to expand in writer James Tynion IV’s The Book of Slaughter. Artist Werther Dell’Edera’s shadowy realism slickly scrapes along through a turning point in the life of one who wears a white mask. Miquel Muerto handles the colors. 

Snow covers everything. It’s winter around the Great Lakes. Christmastime in fact. The white’s everywhere outside, but Maxine Slaughter feels the need for the white to fall from her face. The hunter of monsters wants to change masks. She had worked in a pack with the rest of the white masks. Now she wants to wear something altogether darker. To do so, she might have to leave Chicago and move on to another house to train with others. It won’t be easy, but she might find that she has little choice. Even her little plushy totem seems to think it’s a good idea. 

Maxine is a really interesting character who manages to capture the imagination without actually saying very much. So much of what Tynion is doing rests between the moments of the story. There’s a lot in the chapter that doesn’t rest immediately in the moment. Tynion gives a sizable number of the 60 or so pages of the issue for straight-ahead background information on the Slaughterverse in the title book. It reads like a sourcebook for a role-playing game. There is a great deal of information that Tynion is laying out in the pages of The Book of Slaughter. The background information is a vividly-delivered text that would serve as a solid starting place for readers unfamiliar with the world of Something Is Killing the Children.

Dell’Edera and Muerto render a breathtaking amount of emotional depth to Maxine even as she wears a mask covering most of her face. The moody shadows of the art allow the central character to say so much without ever uttering a word. The architectural rendering in the backgrounds gives the House of Slaughter a rich depth that amplifies the background that Tynion has grounded the issue in. A few years into the world of the series and Dell’Edera and Muerto continue to maintain a sense of creepy mystery in a world of so much horror and so many masks.

Tynion’s clever delivery of this has Maxine entering the house library to peruse the book before the issue launches into 25 pages. On the next page, Maxine solemnly closes the book and makes a very important decision. For 25 pages, the reader is given direct contact with the text that the main character is reading. It’s a very intimate moment with Maxine. Tynion has a great deal of patience with the narrative to drop everything and outline the background of the series for an entire issue’s worth of text right in the middle of the issue like that, but the patience pays off.

Grade: B