Speak of the Devil HC

There's a peeping tom prowling the neighborhood. Eyewitness reports vary, but one thing is agreed upon: he wears a Devil mask. This is the story of Val Castillo, a promising gymnast with a strange hobby. She is secretly the neighborhood peeping tom. At first she is alone in this, but when a male friend discovers her doings he joins her in a dark journey of spying and making discoveries about their neighbors that may have been better left alone. Especially secrets that threaten all involved, like Val spying on her own father and stepmother in their bedroom. This snowballs into a journey darker than even the most cynical would care to endure.

From Booklist

Recently, Hernandez has become as prolific as he is proficient. Besides maintaining his half of the Love and Rockets franchise, he has produced compelling original graphic novels, including Sloth (2006) and Chance in Hell (2007) as well as this book, which begins as a quirky tale about a devil-mask-wearing Peeping Tom terrorizing a bland suburban community and escalates into a grisly account of brutal serial murders. If high-school gymnast Val, her busty young cocktail-waitress stepmother, Linda, and moody classmate Paul aren’t as well-developed as we’ve come to expect Hernandez’s protagonists to be, they’re fascinating in their quiet perversity. It goes without saying that any effort by Hernandez, even a relatively minor one such as this, will be marked by deft visual storytelling and pictorial panache. If the suburban setting doesn’t provide the flamboyant vistas found in his Heartbreak Soup stories (Palomar, 2003), its B-movie milieu offers its own expressive opportunities. The worldview here may be dark and cynical, but its over-the-top violence and exorbitant body count suggest a cannily knowing, slightly tongue-in-cheek slasher film. --Gordon Flagg

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