No Place Like Home 1 open up with a proverbial splash page of an imminent tragedy brought upon an old couple by a common tornado positioned next to a scarecrow. The book continues with the return of the couple's estranged daughter to attend their closed casket funeral only to discover a town drunk. The town drunk informs her there's a monster in these here parts, and then some girls dies and everyone blames him.
No Place Like Home 2 is where it gets interesting, with the town drunk in jail many more people begin to die slow and agonizing deaths, thus logically to stop the gruesome murders the drunk must break out of jail and force the daughter and her best friend to dig up her parents grave who discover.. monkey bite marks on their necks..
Unashamedly that's when it begins to dawn on the reader.. the title "No place like home," the tornado, the Kansas setting, the scarecrow, the little dog hanging around the protagonists, the girl's obsession with dyeing high heels red, the town drunk's uncanny resemblance to Judy Garland in her later years, the simian bite marks and of course the cover star's a sinister looking flying primate.. it maybe paying tribute to the Wizard of Oz. As the reader can see in iconographically and thematically there's several instances of subtlety when referencing its source material for inspiration.
In execution however the book disregards subtlety for horror, and makes a close evolutionary ancestor truly horrifying. Art wise its pseudo-Richard Corben in inspiration; Gothic in nature, indie-underground in stylization, heavy on inks and finally dark and decadent in colorization. Unlike Corben however it's grounded more in realism, allowing the reader to be engaged in the atmospheric horror rather than be disorientated by the artwork. The pacing and structure of the book is another high point, although initially relying on the psychological elements of the implied horror rather than visual horror, the book slowly builds an intricate sense of tension before revealing the reality of violence and harm enacted upon the body by a common monkey.
Terror and horror are both represented effectively in this little re-imagined world of "Dorothy" and her Little dog too, now how can the inevitable issues showcasing the psychotic munchkins be handled just as effectively?