Angel Fire [Paperback]

Chris Blythe (Author), Steve Parkhouse (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006

John Dury is a corporate predator who hunts and kills businesses for money, power, and bonuses paid in designer drugs. The latest drug to hit the city is Angel Fire. A powerful sedative and hallucinogen that seems to open the door to the next world. Instead of finding the keys to heaven, John opens the door to hell - spiraling into a nightmare dimension of ghosts and demons – and the faceless shadow that waits in the deepest blackest reaches of his own soul. Part Faustian fable, part Gothic horror story – Angel Fire is a powerful tale of corruption and redemption.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

For a job so well done that its target killed himself, business-takeover artist Mr. Belial rewards minions John and Zee with the potent, illicit sedative-hallucinogen Angel Fire. When John comes down and goes home, wife Tess isn't there. She was already fed up with his line of work, and today was their second anniversary. Drug-addled weeks pass, then Tess puts out a feeler. When John goes to her, she is dead, an apparent suicide. He tries overdosing on Angel Fire. Coming around days later, he learns he has inherited the haunted, rural Scottish seat of Tess' family, and to it he repairs. There Zee finds him, and an already cold story gets several degrees chillier. Veteran writer-artists Blythe and Parkhouse launch their own imprint with this too-brief ghost story sporting an O. Henry-cum-Ambrose Bierce ending. Parkhouse fills it with younger, less-grotesque kin to the characters in his collaboration with Joe Casey, The Milkman Murders (2005), while Blythe writes and does the coloring, especially impressively on the splash and flashback pages. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Angel Fire is scripted and illustrated by the U.K.-based Daedalus Studio’s Chris Blythe (the hugely influential comic 2000AD) and Steve Parkhouse (How to Draw and Sell Comics, Dr. Who, Warrior). Both are well-established, respected names in the comic/GN world and bring all their knowledge and experience to this superb book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: NBM Publishing (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 095499440X
• ISBN-13: 978-0954994402
• Product Dimensions: 11.6 x 6.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,714,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FRIGHTENING!, April 28, 2006

By 

Tim Janson (Michigan) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Angel Fire (Paperback)

Angel Fire is a book that really took me by surprise with its outstanding art, haunting atmosphere, and terrifying plot. A gem of a story produced by Chris Blythe and artist Steve Parkhouse that is one of the few horror graphic novels I've ever read that actually gave you some tingles down your spine...not often easy to do in a graphic novel that doesn't have a soundtrack appropriately programmed to make you jump at certain points. The story starts out as if it might be a drama as three lawyers greedily celebrate the apparent ruination of a rival firm...a ruination that led to a suicide by the firm's founder. Two men, John and Zee are given a bonus by their boss...an expensive designer drug called Angel Fire as they party the night away with prostitutes. John Dury returns home only to find that he has forgotten his second wedding anniversary. He finds the dining room table still set for a candlelight dinner and the card from his wife torn in half...and his wife gone. Despondent he falls into addiction to drugs and alcohol before getting a message from his wife that she wants to reconcile. He travels to Scotland, his wife's home, to meet with her, only to find that she too has committed suicide.

John is now in the depths of despair and nearly overdoses. What's more this is something...just off into the shadows, watching and following him. He inherits his wife's ancestral home in Scotland, located on a tiny island in a lake that flooded over the original town that had been there centuries earlier. The crucifix from the old gothic church can still be seen rising out of the lake's depths. But once there John is plagued by horrific visions of a nun, bleeding from the wrists that he sees in the water and a voice that warns "beware the shadows". John learns of a novice nun who was raped by a priest and sealed up within a wall in the old church. Now John hears strange voices and movements within the house and picks up blood curdling screams on his tape recorder...meanwhile the menacing shadow with glowing red eyes is getting closer and closer.

Angel Fire is one of the most haunting, moody stories I've ever read, graphic novel or regular novel. Blythe slowly but deftly builds the tension throughout the story and reveals the dark history of the area in gradual bits to the reader, and the nun's story is told partly in flashbacks that have some genuinely creepy imagery. It's a story that would make a great film. Truly a unique work and highly recommended for anyone looking for a good fright. From Nantier Beall Publishing.

Reviewed by Tim Janson