Title Miskatonic Author Mark Sable Illustrator Giorgio Pontrelli Publisher Aftershock Comics - 2021 First Printing Aftershock Comics - 2021 Category Horror Main Characters Miranda Keller Main Elements Lovecraftian

Miskatonic Valley holds many mysteries – cultists worshipping old gods, a doctor deadset on resurrecting the recently deceased, a house overrun by rats in the walls – but none more recent than a series of bombings targeting the Valley’s elite.

To Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor of the FBI) chief J. Edgar Hoover, there can be no other explanation than those responsible for similar actions during the Red Scare of the 1920s. But when the brilliant, hard-nosed investigator Miranda Keller is sent to stop the bombings, she uncovers an unimaginable occult conspiracy, one that may cost her both her job and her sanity.

From writer Mark Sable (WAR ON TERROR: GODKILLERS, Graveyard of Empires) and artist Giorgio Pontrelli (Dylan Dog), MISKATONIC is a mix of historical crime fiction and Lovecraftian-horror that dives deep into the American nightmare.

I recently read Moore's Providence, and this one kind of pales in comparison though both attempted to do the same thing. Take the Lovecraftian tales and weave them all together with a dash of real world history. But that doesn't mean Miskatonic was bad, on the contrary, it just took a very different track. In Moore's it was a reporter investigating, but here we have both an ex-cop and an FBI agent (said ex-cop is none other than Tom Malone who knows all this crazy stuff is real).

Now the FBI agent, Keller, is a woman in a world where women just didn't do jobs like this. She's the only female FBI agent and Malone is a sexist bugger as well as a racist. I felt bad about that, since in Providence I kind of got used to him being a pretty nice guy and I grew fond of him (even if he wasn't in the story much), but he's a total jerk here. Of course, after what he experience and is now being forced to face again, I couldn't blame him for being a little on edge and maybe also wanting to protect Keller's sanity.

One problem is that it's only one volume, so it tries to cram in as many references as Providence did, but in one third the page space so it struggled a bit. Needing to sneak in things like "Cold Air" by telling someone to come in out of the cold air, or having someone apologize for having "rats in the wall". So it felt a bit crammed and at times the pace was almost frantic.

It wasn't bad, don't get me wrong, I just had a really high bar to compare it to.

And yeah... J. Edgar Hoover getting his hands on the Necronomicon? Now *that's* scary...