HOUND OGN

In Freeman and Romesburg’s graphic novel, a soldier encounters a strange cult on the front lines of World War I.

In this graphic novel, a moldering old diary tells an astonishing story: A young man named Barrow (a thin, innocent waif) is sent to the front lines of the British troops in southern France while fighting in WWI, told by his commanding officer that he’ll be serving in an unusual regiment nicknamed the Hounds because of the long snouts of their omnipresent gas masks. With the Hounds, Private Barrow journeys to a ruined house in the shattered countryside where, to his horror, he finds that his new comrades are far darker than they seem: They’re keeping a group of brutalized German prisoners in the house, and worse is to come—when they release these prisoners, the Hounds devolve into semi-human monsters to hunt and consume the fleeing men. “Before my arrival, I feared the change the trench would force upon me,” Barrow reflects; “I had forgotten that the trenches were dug by the hands of men.” Private Barrow and the Hounds embark on a collision course that will see the young soldier descend to the farthest depths of tragedy that the war has to offer. “I’ve always believed people can turn,” Private Barrow writes in his journal, “from good to bad, then back again. But this … this feels different.” This stark, unsettling story is told by Freeman and Romesburg with confidently effective understatement—they seem well aware that excess verbiage is the enemy of mood. And that mood is greatly enhanced by Vásquez’s vivid, jittery, full-color artwork, full of scratchy line-work that underscores the gruesome horrors that Private Barrow both witnesses and perpetrates; as he’s told when he’s a boy, “In this life, we will hurt those that don’t deserve it.”

A visceral and neatly executed graphic parable of war’s dehumanizing power.