162 pgs. color | $19.99 hardcover | W / A: Beth Hetland
The best horror stories are the ones that sneak up on you. Beth Hetland’s Tender is very much that kind of story, one that starts from a place of everyday domestic drama and uses masterful pacing to warp into legitimately nauseating (in a good way) body horror, all while juggling themes about the expectations society puts on women, and that women put on themselves. The amount of storytelling craft on display in Tender is simply mind-blowing, all the more impressive for this being Hetland’s debut graphic novel.
In a jumbled-up timeline, we meet Carolanne in the middle of the night, peacefully singing to her unborn child. We see her and her husband Lee, excitedly trying to get pregnant. We see Carolanne, newly pregnant, quitting her job and dedicating herself to nesting. We flashback further, to how Lee and Carolanne first met and fell in love. We flash forward to a scene of tragedy. And then we see things start to fall apart.
If that plot synopsis sounds cryptic, it’s because I’m purposefully trying not to say too much, as this is the kind of story that hinges on unexpected turns, and on things you can see coming from a mile away but you hope and pray they won’t happen, only to have to watch them arrive like a slow-motion car wreck you can’t look away from. It’s also because plot isn’t really the point of Tender: the point is watching how one woman’s psyche warps when everything she’s ever wished for in life falls apart.
Hetland’s art undergoes a similar transformation. Her characters are drawn in a sort of blobby, cartoony style, giving the opening scenes a visual look that’s common to many autobio comics and other adult dramas published under the banner of companies like Fantagraphics or Drawn and Quarterly. But just as we’ve settled into the world of Carolanne’s domesticity, she has a nightmare. The wide gutters between panels on the previous pages are gone, replaced by a claustrophobic 12-panel grid of eyeballs and houses on fire and visions of vomiting up balls of hair and cicadas bursting out of their shells and a hangnail that just keeps tearing and tearing and tearing and…I shudder just thinking about it. Carolanne snaps back to reality, but only for so long. The creepiness starts to creep into Carolanne’s everyday life. We see her practice her smile as she plans to congratulate a coworker on her engagement, and the results are more than a little bit unsettling. We see glimpses of the obsession she had with Lee before they had ever really met each other and it’s a little nuts, but since they ultimately met and fell in love, that just makes it a cute back story to their relationship right? Maybe? Maybe not so much?
In illustrating Carolanne’s descent, Hetland offers a master class in using the craft of comic book storytelling to gradually build dramatic tension. Silent sequences are peppered throughout to slow down the pacing at just the right moments. In just one example of something I’ve never seen in 40-plus years of reading comics, she captures the drudgery of stay-at-home-wifehood with a page packed with eighty-two panels—EIGHTY-TWO!—that gradually shrink in size as Carolanne’s day-to-day becomes more and more routine. The art in these early, everyday sequences is monochrome, shading added with what looks like crayon to give the art a smudgy look as if it were copied on an old mimeograph machine. A handful of dream sequences puncture the domestic bliss with surreal and disturbing imagery soaked in hot yellows and reds. Yet slowly but surely those colors, which we’ve been taught to feel as off-putting, start invading the everyday scenes—a blood-red rare steak, bright red lipstick applied for a first date, a hangnail glowing red with infection. Hetland trains us visually when to expect the worst.
Despite telegraphing when the worst is coming, Hetland still finds way to shock. A trigger warning list would run about as long as the rest of this review, so all I can say is, reader, please take me referring to this story as “body horror” seriously and know that, regardless of what elements of that genre squick you out, it’s almost certainly in this book somewhere. This is most definitely not a book for the faint of heart, or weak of stomach.
And yet, if that doesn’t scare you off, I couldn’t recommend this book more highly. Despite its disturbing imagery, this is a book with a strong point to make, and it accomplishes that without feeling exploitative or like it’s being gross just for grossness’ sake. The early, tranquil scenes let us know Carolanne, and make us care for her, which makes when the rug is pulled out from under her in the book’s back half hit us in the gut that much harder. | Jason Green
For more information or to purchase a copy, visit fantagraphics.com.
