The Milkman Murders

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.

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 OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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