Early Graphic Novel Review – Forest of the Night (Coffin Hill, Vol 1) by Caitlin Kittredge and Inaki Miranda (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Graphic Novel/Horror
Length: 168 pages
Publisher: Vertigo
Release Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1401248871
Stand Alone or Series: 1st TP in the Coffin Hill series
Source: eGalley from netgalley.com
Rating: 3/5 stars

I got a copy of this graphic novel to review through Netgalley. I was a fan of Kittredge’s Iron Codex series and was curious to see what she would come up with in graphic novel format. It was a gory and creepy graphic novel, I thought the story was okay and the drawing could have been better. It ended up being an okay read, but nothing spectacular.

Eve Coffin is the daughter of the reknown Coffin family, they are known for dark magics and witchcraft. One night her and her friends go into the forest intent on a night of sex, drugs, and witchcraft. When Eve wakes up in the morning she is covered in blood, one friend is missing, and the other has gone insane. Many years later Eve thinks this is all in the past, that is until she finds out that the darkness she unleashed in the forest that night is still on the prowl.

This is definitely an adults only graphic novel. There is a lot of nudity, gore, swearing, sex, etc. I like dark gothic urban fantasy stories, so I thought this was going to be a great read. Unfortunately, while it was okay, it fell a bit flat for me.

None of the characters in this book are all that engaging or likable, for the most part they are all fairly bad people who have done bad things in their life…or at least a lot of stupid things.

Eve was a wild child in her teens and did some very dark and evil magic and it’s coming back to haunt her later in life. She is still quite the determined woman, but I didn’t really find her to be all that interesting of a character.

There are other characters involved as well, but they were fairly forgettable. The plot was actually fairly typical dark fantasy stuff…someone messes with magic they don’t understand, people start dying, and the heroine has to figure out how to deal with the evil she set loose. There wasn’t really much world-building and the plot was very predictable.

The graphic novel flits back and forth between the past and the present. This got a bit confusing, usually there was text telling you what year you were in. However you have to figure out which characters from the past were the same characters in the present and it wasn’t easy or straight-forward to do that…it took a bit to figure that out. It would have been nice to have some pictures up front that just showed all the characters past and present so you could follow the story better.

There was a lot of sex, gore, and swearing that seemed a bit excessive. While I usually love the occasional ultra-violent read (like the Sandman Slim or Jessie Shimmer series) this book just seemed to not have a lot of purpose to all the ultra-violent scenes. There are also some weird things, like Eve’s one eye looks all weird but it’s never really explained. I couldn’t figure out what was going on there and at times it almost looked like poor illustration.

I also didn’t enjoy the illustration style all that much. The characters were a bit blurry and not all the detailed. At times the graphic novel was hard to follow and it was hard to see character emotion. The illustration was full color and I did like the deep colors used throughout, but I felt like the illustration didn’t add to the story as much as it could have.

Overall I was somewhat disappointed in this graphic novel, it was okay but not great. The story is somewhat interesting but has a pretty typical dark paranormal fantasy plot. None of the characters were all that engaging. The illustration was also mediocre…it was hard to follow at times and didn’t capture character emotion all that well. Personally I won’t be reading any more of this series. If you are a huge fan of dark fantasy/horror type graphic novels I would give it a look through before purchasing.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Ebook Reading Challenge
– Graphic Novel Reading Challenge
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
– 100 Books in a Year Reading Challenge