From a high-rise apartment, a boy and his pregnant mother witness, in real time, a massive explosion devastate 20 blocks of an Australian city. The cause is never discovered, and in the aftermath, a superhighway is constructed over the site.
Twelve years later, the same mother speeds down the highway toward an abandoned shopping mall to drop off her disgruntled 12-year-old daughter, Hailey, off at a holiday camp. Bored and frustrated, Hailey is wandering around when she meets Jen, a cool older girl who isn’t with the group. Taking the opportunity to rebel against her mother, she joins Jen on a tour of the decrepit building. Meanwhile, two other boys have split off from the group and made an unsettling discovery. Something is biding its time in the building, and it won’t be contained for much longer.
Melbourne-based cartoonist Chris Gooch’s new YA graphic novel, In Utero, is a brief but clever offering that pulls from both modern and classic monster stories. Echoing franchises like “Stranger Things,” “The Last of Us” and Godzilla while nodding artistically to Junji Ito, Gooch hits many familiar beats of sci-fi horror in a tightly coiled narrative about fear, family and the things waiting underground.
In illustrations that flirt with the uncanny (before eventually giving in fully), Gooch utilizes a unique color palette: Alternating between color washes of red and blue over black and white drawings, he evokes the disorientation of looking at the real world through 3D glasses. The color change typically marks a change in scene or tone, and along with the frequent use of dramatic shifts in perspective between panels, the effect is decidedly cinematic.
At just under 250 pages, In Utero functions similarly to a short film: The time frame is minimal; the emotional arcs are intense; and the action happens in short, potent bursts. Much of the reader’s processing will likely occur after the fact.
Though Gooch relies perhaps a little too heavily on abstraction (even for seasoned consumers of surrealism), In Utero presents a compelling universe that is more likely to fascinate than it is to disappoint. It won’t be the consistently high-octane monster story that some might expect, but fans of Tillie Walden or Antoine Revoy’s Animus will enjoy Chris Gooch’s head-spinning take on the genre.