DC Comics has released this sneak peek of The Nice House on the Lake from James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno, a new creator-owned horror series that kicks off on June 1st.
Everyone who was invited to the house knows Walter. Some met him in childhood; some met him months ago. And Walter’s always been a little…off. But after the hardest year of their lives, nobody was going to turn down Walter’s invitation to an astonishingly beautiful house in the woods, overlooking an enormous sylvan lake. It’s beautiful, it’s opulent, it’s private—so a week of putting up with Walter’s weird little schemes and nicknames in exchange for the vacation of a lifetime? Why not?
“I’ve always thought of myself as a horror writer…I like taking the things that I’m afraid about and turning them into monsters for my characters to grapple with,” said Tynion IV in a press release from DC Comics. “In superhero comics, you can always turn away at the last minute, and boil that conflict down into people in fun costumes punching each other. The Nice House On The Lake is trying to hit at deeper nerve, and the goal is to reach that final last moment and sit with the horror rather than turning away.”
“This isn’t an action comic book,” continued Tynion IV, “this is a character-driven story where people need to grapple with living in a seeming paradise that they KNOW is not a paradise. It’s about the cognitive dissonance of trying to relax in comfort when you know that the world around you is falling apart. It’s also a story about how friendship evolves as you enter adulthood, and how you can’t recapture the bonds of youth in your adult life.”
The Nice House on the Lake is a twelve-issue mini-series.