Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtowers tells the story of a young man – the Salem of the title – who becomes entangled in his late father’s magical struggle against creatures from another world. As the story begins we join Salem Brownstone as he takes possession of the Gothic pile he has been left in his father’s will. There he meets a contortionist called Cassandra and a squad of evil Shadow Boys. What follows is an increasingly bizarre series of encounters, as Salem joins forces with Cassandra and Dr Kinoshita’s Circus of Unearthly Delights in a battle against ‘dark forces’ from the genuinely creepy Midnight City.

This handsomely packaged fantasy horror graphic novel from Walker Books is written by John Harris Dunning and drawn by Nikhil Singh. It started life in serial form and has been brought together in one volume for the first time. The publisher describes it as ‘Victorian-noir’ but the setting is actually a distortion of the contemporary world (there are cars and guns).

 Singh has a lot of fun with the visual possibilities afforded by the assorted circus freaks and demons, and writer and artist clearly work well together. Younger readers might find some of the visuals disturbing. Teenagers, however, will no doubt relate to the gloomy aesthetic. It is - perhaps a little too self-consciously - cool and cultish, with a kind of world weary otherworldliness. The story seems to owe something to horror-writer Clive Barker, the visuals to the grotesque reaches of Japanese comics. It does seem a little thin to me, though. It feels less like a graphic novel than a graphic short story (it is less than a hundred pages long) and at £15, a rather expensive one.

2010-01-29