Something is Killing the Children: Hope is a Knife Review
You know when your anxiety grows so heavy that it starts to bubble outside you? When your body goes into a freeze state, and the only emotion your psyche seems to be able to muster is fear? When this fear becomes so integral to your personhood that it manifests itself into a physical form? The shadow in the corner of your room suddenly starts to seep its way further into the space. It soon stretches the length of your entire childhood bedroom. Red glowing eyes pry themselves open on what must be the shadow’s face. Your fear has now leapt outside of your mind and taken its own physical form. It’s running away to tear through your neighborhood and there’s nothing you can do to desperately suck it back into you before it harms everyone around you. Wait, you haven’t? Then you must not be a child living in the universe of Something is Killing the Children.
The smash comics series from Boom! Studios is laying a new root with yet another original tale in the Slaughterverse. But this time, writer James Tynion IV has teamed up with horror novelist Kiersten White to jump into a new medium: prose. Hope is a Knife: A Novel takes SIKTC hero, Erica Slaughter, out of the comics and into prose for the first time in a standalone tale set before the events of Archer’s Peak. As both an avid reader of comics and novels, I was skeptically sold on the first announcement. Of course, I was going to read it, but how well would Erica Slaughter and the monsters of this universe translate in only written words? Anyone who reads SIKTC knows that artist Werther Dell’Edera’s artwork is so brutally compelling in this series that it feels like a fool’s errand to strip the characters back to just words. Yet somehow, White and Tynion do pull it off.
Before reaching Archer’s Peak (where the SIKTC comics series kicks off), our central monster hunter, Erica Slaughter, makes a stop in Badwater, Idaho to investigate the deaths of some children. Deaths she severely hopes to be at the hands of an animal, but it’s never an animal, is it? The premise of SIKTC can become somewhat formulaic: children die or go missing, the Order of St. George comes in, they investigate the area, interview the locals, suss out the monster, and take it down. The synopsis of Hope is a Knife led me to believe we’d be getting that same formula in Badwater – and we do, but not quite.
Hope is a Knife kicks off from Erica’s point of view, but the entire story is actually told through multiple points of view. It mainly rotates between Erica, two children (Charity and Mitali), and Charity’s mother. Doing this definitely subverted my expectations as an already avid fan of the Slaughterverse. The alternating points of view almost give the story the feel of small town gossip that Erica needs to piece together. As a reader, you’re omniscient, while each character’s breadth of knowledge differs from the next. Their driving forces are all a bit different, but their main objective is one and the same: to save Badwater. By not having the entire story told from Erica’s point of view, the story becomes much more fleshed out and allows for the town of Badwater to become a character in its own right. Badwater’s mysterious history and the standoffish attitudes of the townspeople help this story in particular stand out a bit more from the similar story arcs found in the comics. There’s a certain life breathed into Badwater that lets the reader visualize the town exactly. It is blatantly clear that there are monsters in every shadow of this town; the bystanders not intervening at signs of abuse; the neighbors alienating people they deem as other or sinful; the charming, yet offputting pastor who’s past no one seems to really know. All of these elements serve to complicate Erica’s mission.
Erica’s overall characterization was well done. There are intricacies to our minds that simply cannot be explored in comics. That’s not a slight to the medium, it’s simply fact. Prose offers space for deeper exploration in passages that would only be seen as dense and clunky if they were used the same way in comics. There was a worry in me that Erica wouldn’t feel the same, particularly since I knew I wouldn’t be met with her piercing green eyes while trying to immerse myself in this story. Yet, Hope is a Knife digs deeper into Erica’s soul. Erica is Sisyphus. She cannot rest while children are dying – and they are always dying. She continues futilely uphill trying to purge the world of monsters. She achingly attempts to create the future she wished she grew into where the Order of St. George is obsolete. A future she knows will never come.
For me, that’s what makes her character so engrossing. The book emphasizes Erica’s connection to the children in a way the comics haven’t necessarily been able to. The narrative quite literally points out how each Black Mask operates: Aaron is by-the-book in his methodology and Jessica gains her insight by schmoozing with locals. Erica, on the other hand, is drawn to the children first. She trusts their experiences above all else and validates their traumas. It’s this humanity in her that gains the trust of the children she meets. Hope is a Knife drives home that Erica does what she does out of hope. The hope that she can alter the course of a storm in a child’s life once they conjure a monster. Hope that both drives her and destroys her. Hope she carries with her still. In spite of herself & in spite of the order.
The most surprising aspect of the book was actually the tone. Hope is a Knife seems to slot more into the Young Adult (or YA) genre. Again, the chapters were quite short. This provided natural stopping points, but also seemed to give it that YA feel. Mitali and Charity’s chapters were very well characterized. Each chapter felt unique to the character’s voice, but this meant that the young girls’ chapters felt younger in tone than the adults’. Whenever the book was in the perspective of one of the girls, it very much felt like the voice of a pre-teen. There were times this tone shift lingered in the adult chapters as well. Charity’s personal plot explored the impact of religious guilt and shame on a child which has yet to be explored in SIKTC. This was, perhaps, my favorite element of the story. Make no mistake, despite the tone the book was still undeniably a horror novel with gore and action.
Overall, Hope is a Knife feels wildly approachable for new fans. The book’s epithet offers an immediate breakdown of the Slaughterverse’s basic elements: monsters exist and are manifested through the deep fear of children, the Order of St. George exists to hunt these monsters, and that the Black Masks will be the focus of this story. By setting this story before the events of the Something is Killing the Children #1, new readers can start here and jump into the Slaughterverse in its native format. It’s the simplest and most brilliant choice in terms of setting and timeline since the scariest leap for most would-be comic readers is not knowing where to start. There’s a stigma in the community that shames new readers and leaves casual readers feeling embarrassed for a lack of knowledge or dedication to the medium that really needs to die out.
Hope is a Knife is a great segue into the comics for anyone who wants to test out the medium. Enough lore is given to provide context, but not so much that the story gets convoluted with the politics of the Order of St. George or the House of Slaughter. As a long time fan, however, I faltered between whether enough context was provided between Erica’s relationships with Aaron and Jessica. Jessica is so integral to who Erica is. Hope is a Knife touches on this just enough to add another stitch in their relationship, but it could have gone deeper. At the same point, not having the context of Jessica and Erica’s relationship may leave these pieces of the story a little more hollow for new fans. In the end, it was likely a necessary trade off to make the novel accessible for new fans and to give the space to expand on Erica’s psychology.
