"Wytches" is a beautifully haunting experience, but ultimately it's a father- daughter tale at heart

Few horror comics have been like Wytches.  A tale about a family's relocation to a small town in New Hampshire and their subsequent encounters with strange creatures that live in the dark woods just outside their new home, it is a haunting tale, full of strange sounds and scary visions which may or may not turn out to be true.  Deep down, however, Wytches is a story about a father (Charlie, a comic book writer) trying to help his teenage daughter Sailor get over a personal tragedy that has left her at odds with most of her high school friends.  In short, it's a tale of teenage angst and her effort to fit in.

Writer Scott Snyder and illustrator Jock get the most out of their talents by creating a world that is at once very real and simultaneously full of the bizarre and the wicked.  The ghouls (or "wytches", as some of the characters refer to them) here are frighteningly looking creatures: tall, thin, deformed, and grotesquely foaming at the mouth of their sharp fangs, which are constantly craving human flesh.  They're like zombies, but zombies of nightmares, the ones who will seldom let you have a good night's sleep, for they're always haunting you via dream whispers and by interrupting your sleeping visions.  When the other townsfolk learn of Sailor and her family's troubles, their reaction is surprising, but not in the way one would expect.

What separates Wytches from other similar graphic novels (Harrow County definitely comes to mind) is that at its very heart, it's a story about father trying to reconnect with his daughter, a daughter he's always trying to prepare for the real world by testing her various fears: her fear of heights, her fear of acceptance at school, and ultimately, her fear of her nightmares.  Charlie isn't like your typical movie or TV show dad: he's a man of conviction, and when faced with a hopeless situation in which even his wife Lucy, Sailor's mother, a wheelchair bound cripple, is shown to have ulterior motives which aren't of the motherly kind, he does the most courageous thing, and all for the love of his only child.

Wytches will stay with you long after you read it.  The atmosphere it creates is memorable and terrifying in all the right ways.  It's a classic horror tale made for those who grew up watching both Rosemary's Baby and The Blair Witch Project.  In other words, readers from multiple generations who know what a good fright-fest is when they see it, be it on a movie screen or on a comic book page.
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