Park Falls tends to be your ideal mid-sized city. Low crime rate. Basic economic structure. But suddenly things have gone off the rails. There’s been a series of disappearances and murders… seriously gruesome murders… and the cops are baffled. Retired Park Falls detective Derrick Peters finds himself dragged back into the mix one afternoon when Cynthia Ford, the town crazy, shows up on his doorstep and claims she has vital information about the killer. “Zombies,” she says, and even though Peters kicks her out, the bite marks on the bodies and missing bits are a bit on the freaky side. She also claims it’s the work of her former employer, Cline Pharmaceuticals, the company that essentially disappeared overnight just a couple of weeks before the attacks began. Sharing information with Doctor Daniel Howe, sent to the city by a mysterious governmental agency, Peters has to put together the pieces before more people are killed… or he becomes a snack himself.

AWAKENING is a solid, intelligent crime/horror thriller, one that doesn’t play its audience for being stupid. Tapalansky keeps his script spare and tight, not drowning the reader in exposition and avoiding some bad clichés (Derrick’s former boss doesn’t go out of his way to impede Peters’ work; instead, he encourages it in the hopes of cling the case sooner). Tapalansky also keeps the pace moving along just right, not stopping to decompress or speeding past the important stuff, and he uses time judiciously, moving back and forth in order to serve the story (and again, keep a pace that works).

Eckman-Lawn is a terrific talent; he can paint and design at a very high level, making AWAKENING a very pretty book to look at. His weakness, though, lies in the storytelling; his style can get a bit dark and grimy on the page and it can be difficult to figure out exactly what action is taking place in some panels (to be fair, I am working from a PDF and the printed version may come out cleaner). He can also be a bit inconsistent on the level of detail he’s providing in his backgrounds and on the characters’ faces and clothing.

This book is pretty much what you’d expect out of Archaia, which has a well-deserved reputation for smart, high-quality material. These are the first three chapters out of a total of ten, and I’d not hesitate to guess the rest of the journey will be one worth taking.

Marc Mason