Tuesday, October 21, 2014

THE HOUSE OF MONTRESOR, Part I

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A little while back, I showed everyone the cover for THE HOUSE OF MONTRESOR, my new graphic novel with art by the stupendous Jason Strutz. The story is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's Cask of Amontillado. Jason debuted Part I of the new book at Boston Comic Con, and then I brought it to New York Comic Con two weeks ago.

HOUSE OF MONTRESOR is a graphic novel, set 50 years after the events of Poe's famous story. In Cask, the narrator tells the story of how he, the villainous Montresor, murders his friend/enemy, Fortunato.
Back cover, House of Montresor
Available digitally and in print!
Montresor never reveals why he betrays and murders his "friend." Some vague reference to an intolerable insult. The way he kills him is so wonderfully cruel, that little tidbit didn't intrigue me until many, many years after I first read it. It's funny to me when I think about it now. "Oh yeah, why would a guy just decide to brick his friend into a wall one day? Huh." I was always so impressed by the method of the kill, that important question got lost. And, probably, had I not loved Poe so much, I might have thought to question him sooner.

One more thing struck me: the way Montresor teases at the end of Cask. His heart goes cold for the briefest second before he leaves his buddy alone to starve and rot in the dark behind a wall of stone. The feeling passes, and nothing much troubles him after that. Fifty years later and the guy's still cackling over this funny thing he did that one time at Carnivale, the pre-Victorian equivalent of Spring Break. The smug satisfaction in the telling is so dark and mean, you just know Fortunato wasn't the last guy to piss off Montresor in his lifetime. So, what has he been up to? Why tell the story at all?

So that's where I started writing (gosh, six years ago I wrote the script. So excited it's finally seeing print!) imagining the answers to those questions. Deep hate almost always springs from deep love. Insult only exists when we give a damn what people think of us: at one time Monty must have cared very, very much. And then he was hurt but didn't say a word until he could act without fear or consequence. In that we know Montresor is craven, a coward. What kind of life does a man like that build for himself? What else has he done, and who else will he hurt, now that he knows how to get away with it?

Part I is available digitally and in print in Red Stylo's online store. We previewed color pages from the book here. Reviews so far have been positive--I guess we'll see if the streak continues! And in a few weeks we'll be sharing pages-in-progress from Part II on RedStylo.com.

Enjoy.


P.S. Haven't read Cask? You can do that here: