BOOK REVIEW | PIG WIFE | ABBEY LUCK

 

BOOK REVIEW | PIG WIFE | ABBEY LUCK

ABOUT THE BOOK

Accidentally trapped in an underground bunker, a teen girl must navigate the bizarre secrets within. This astonishing indie-horror graphic novel will keep readers guessing—and turning pages!

 Mary had a bad feeling even before they arrived at dead Aunt Pearl’s house. Dragged to a remote mining town so her mom and stepdad can settle Pearl’s estate, Mary can’t wait to escape from her wreck of a family—but she’s stuck with them in the middle of nowhere. After a vicious fight, Mary runs off to hide in an abandoned gold mine. Her escape plan backfires when she realizes she’s trapped inside. Even more terrifying… she’s not alone.

 Filled with suspense, dark humor, and spectacular nightmares, Pig Wife is a shockingly ambitious debut from graphic novelist Abbey Luck, seizing readers by the heart and the throat with a story of isolation, abuse, trauma, and survival.

 In this truly twisted coming-of-age tale, Luck suggests that survival doesn’t depend on our strength and wits alone—but on our ability to love others, even in the most horrific circumstances.

REVIEW

Abbey Luck’s debut comic PIG WIFE tells the story of Mary, a discontented teenager who is dragged along to the creepy farm of her stepfather’s aunt, Pearl.

Pearl has recently died, and Roger (Mary’s Step father) is convinced that the old dear has left a will, and he is hoping to get his hands on it due to the fact that he is somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis financially as he has been found to be embezzling company funds.

After, an argument with her parents, Mary finds herself locked in a secret bunker with two people who have never seen the light of day. It soon becomes obvious that the two men have been cut off from the outside world. She soon discovers that one of the men is the son of her step father’s grandmother who had a history of mental illness and hid the boy away from the world telling him that he couldn’t go outside due to the apocalypse.

Not only that, the men believe that the teenage girl has been sent to their mother to be their wife.

Billed as an isolationist horror, Pig Wife explores a number of different themes, such as what happens if a child is raised with maternal deprivation. It also looks at the relationship between mother and daughter after the family has split.

It’s an interesting one Pig Wife. On one level there are aspects of the story that works really well. Luck is not afraid for her main character to be initially unlikeable and this works as the main arc of the story as she learns about herself and her capacity to care for others.

In addition to that the exploration of untreated mental health problems (it’s very obvious that Pearl, the mother of one of the main characters has paranoid schizophrenia) and the effect that this can have on others.

The art is interesting. It is purposefully ugly, reminiscent of adult swim type animation art.

However, there are a number of things that don’t work that well. For one it is quite obvious that Luck is an animator coming to comics, and at times the book feels more storyboarded in an animation style rather than a comics style. I felt at times that the pacing was slowed down due to this, and it would have been much better if the gutters, the interstitial spaces between panels, was utilised more, thus cutting down on what ultimately felt like a bloated story.

In addition to this, there were several forays into surreal dreamscapes which I felt did not add anything to the story, and whilst it is obvious that Luck knows her stuff in terms of animation, it didn’t feel like it had a place in the comic itself and ultimately felt inconsequential to the narrative.

Now I am not saying that animators cannot be comics artists. Take a look at Blacksad for instance. However, I did not feel that it helped in the case of Pig Wife.

I don’t know if I am being a little harsh here because I think that as Abbey Luck develops she will be an interesting author, and I would definitely like to see more from her as ultimately, the central story of Pig Wife is full of heart that I couldn’t help liking.