The Milkman Murders [Paperback]

Joe Casey (Author), Steve Parkhouse (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2005

After an assault by a mysterious and monstrous milkman, a typical American housewife has finally had too much of her hideous, deranged family, and she takes a simple word of advice from her idol, the perfect 1950's mom on her television screen - "Discipline." From the minds of Joe Casey and Steve Parkhouse comes the most shocking of all Dark Horse's new brand of horror comics. The unraveling of our forlorn homemaker's hopes leads to unprecedented terror, heralded by a demonic vision - The Milkman, a twisted parody of a Norman Rockwell image as painted by serial-killing folk-artist John Wayne Gacy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Everyone recognizes the perfect housewife: thin-waisted, beautifully coifed, apron-clad, with just the right words to solve all of her family's problems. Then there's Barbara Vale: middle-aged and paunchy, hair in curlers for a husband who never notices, cooking meals that manage to turn even the milk sour. The former seems to exist only on television, while the latter is the focus of this graphic novel. Barbara clings to the advertised ideal, trying to hold her dysfunctional family together. Into her unhappy home comes a mysterious milkman who violently assaults her. Unexpectedly, this helps Barbara break free of the tyranny of her family, taking gruesome revenge for their cruelties. The real horror in this comic is not in the gore of the second half of the story but in the portrait of curdled domesticity in the first: the husband's casual violence, the disaffected children's immorality and the mother trying to make her family into the American dream. Casey and Parkhouse use pastel hues to paint the awfulness of suburban life, adding further darkness to this disturbing book. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

While she cooks supper, Barbara watches 1950s family sitcom Leave It to Mother, in which mother is always pretty, smart, and so forth through the matronly virtues. But Barbara's teenage daughter seduces married men, her churlish middle-school-age son kills and flays neighborhood pets, and her husband seethes with frustrated rage that he vents on her. After two scraps sparked by soured store-bought milk, a milk truck materializes out of a dust cloud one morning. Delivering to Barbara, the filthy, slovenly milkman rapes her. That changes her life, and the murders of the title of Casey and Parkhouse's graphic-novel venture into Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs)-Robert Bloch (Psycho territory commence. Though Casey's writing is sharp, it's Parkhouse's artwork that makes this domestic dark fantasy indelible. The lumpy caricatures he makes of Barbara, her husband, and her son; the nearly -polar-opposite rendering, still ugly, of the slutty daughter; and the Jetsons-like sleekness of the TV mother are stereotypes from different comics worlds that collide with train-wreck force, not to mention a surprise ending. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Dark Horse (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593070802
• ISBN-13: 978-1593070809
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 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: #2,314,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Innocence is Merely Ignorance in Disguise, May 27, 2009

By 

Daniel J. Mooney "Going Blind from Reading." (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Milkman Murders (Paperback)

Barbara has a terrible life. Her husband is a drug-addled abusive wreck, who hates her. Her daughter is a slut that seduces older married men. Her son skins cats for fun. Then to add to the misery, a deranged milkman shows up at her house, assaults and rapes her.

Barbara adds to her foul life, by pretending that it is all normal. That they can be the Cleavers if only they all sat down and had a nice family meal together. But that idea, like the milk, is perpetually sour. The old ideas are dead and gone, turned into something terrible. This is personified by the milkman, an image of a supposedly ideal past, now a deranged twisted monster.

The horrible reality of Barbara's life is undercut by a program she watches regularly, Leave It to Mother, a Donna Reed-esque sickeningly sweet family comedy and the polar opposite of this tale. These two ideas of suburban life snake around each other like a Ying-Yang symbol. The TV show is the bright spot on the dark side, which she clings to to maintain hope and the idea that her life may get better somehow. Until Barbara destroys the TV and it all goes black.

Parkhouse's art blends with the script brilliantly. The perceived grime and filth is everywhere. Each character is foully drawn that you can smell the grime and BO wafting off of them. Just looking at them, made me lose my appetite. The ugly caricatures of human beings highlight the underlying message of this story: Innocence is merely ignorance in disguise.