A young couple expecting their first child take a trip to Scotland as a sort of send off to their own youth. They are determined, happy and in love. Though they are scared, they are excited to take the next step in their lives. They know that after the baby is born, they will not get to do anything like this for a long while and they are okay with that. However, sometimes the places you visit have a way of changing you. Sometimes you leave as a different person or you never leave at all.
Double Walker is a graphic novel written by Michael W Conrad and illustrated by Noah Bailey. It was published on Comixology as a “Comixology Original” and if you have Amazon Prime, it’s completely free for you to read right now. I think I can safely say that Double Walker is the best thing I have read as part of the Comixology Originals line so far. A lot of their originals can be hit or miss. I am in no place to really judge the creators that have published on Comixology by no means. Just, some of them feel like they are still trying to find their footing and I think it’s great that there is a place that they can publish their work and get it out there.
I’ll be honest, before I read Double Walker, I had never heard of Michael W Conrad or Noah Bailey. I happened to come across the trailer for it on YouTube and thought it looked pretty cool. I logged into Comixology real quick and ended up reading it all in one sitting. I was so impressed with it, that I went ahead and read their other graphic novel Tremor Dose and once I can get my head wrapped around that one, I’ll probably make a post about it. I quickly learned that these two are legit and I honestly think they are on their way to being main name staples in horror comics. I look forward to reading whatever else these two work on with each other in the future.
That first reading though, I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have. Yes, I loved it. I thought it was complex, well written, and beautifully illustrated. I just wasn’t ready to listen to what it was trying to tell me. That was only 3 months ago. It’s crazy to think about how much just a few months can change you and that is really what Double Walker is about. Change.
The first post I made on this newsletter back at the beginning of September I made a sort of introduction. In that post, I went over how the past year had been a big year for me and all of the changes I was going through. The changes are still happening, they never stop. Each time we experience a change, we ourselves change too. The person I was a year ago isn’t the person I am today. Hell, I’m not even the same person I was when I started this project back in September. I mean, I’m still me but I’m not.
When a young couple, Gemma and Cully, begin their trip to Scotland, they are loving and happy. They seem to be a nice couple that pick on each other and lightly bicker but they are happy. Sure, they are scared about the child that is coming but they are scared in a good way. While in Scotland, Cully embraces the culture head on. Trying to take in all of the Scottish food and even imitating their dialect in good fun. He is the picture perfect image of the annoying tourist. While there, he listens to the local townspeople tell him all about Scottish Folklore and is instantly taken in by it. It’s darker and a little more twisted than the fairy tales he is used to hearing in America.
While at the pub, they hear about the Old Man of Storr. A rocky hillside that is said to be the resting place of a giant who died and body was fed on by fairies. They decide that they have to check it out. While on that hike, Gemma starts to feel ill and can’t finish. She tells Cully to go on without her and she’ll wait for him. He’s disappointed that she can’t continue and reluctantly leaves her to finish it by himself. When he returns, Gemma is laid out on the ground in an almost comatose-like state. He rushes her to the hospital and while the doctors tell him that she will be okay, they unfortunately couldn’t save the baby. What follows after this is a couple struggling with grief and a string of local murders where all the evidence points towards them.
Where Double Walker shines is in its ability to create confusion in all of the right ways. After the incident, Gemma doesn’t appear to be the same. She is distant and not really talking to anyone, especially Cully. When she does talk to him, it’s an outburst of hateful things. After whatever happened on that hillside, she seems so out of character but is she really? She had just lost her unborn child and this strange behavior could be her way of trying to deal with the grief. But one thing Cully can’t help but to notice is that every time Gemma disappears, dead bodies are found.
Cully seems to be trying to handle the situation the best he can but is he just holding back, refusing to let himself grieve? Or maybe he is just grieving in his own way. As Gemma continues to break down and distance herself from him, he spends his time talking to the bartender at the pub and throwing down alcohol. During their conversations, the bartender continues to fill his head full of more stories of myths and fairy tales.
He tells Cully about the Fae and their vicious behavior. How they feed off of people and are always starving. How they will take babies away from families and replace them with a “changeling”. A creature that imitates the child so that it can feed off of the unexpected mother. He then tells Cully the story of Michael Clearly
Michael Clearly was a man who once had to leave his wife home alone while he went away on business. While he was gone, his wife started working on creating her own dressmaking business. She felt happy and independent working on something she had built for herself. However, when Michael returned, he felt his wife was different. She wasn’t the woman that he had left a few months back. He became convinced that she wasn’t his wife anymore but a fae pretending to be his wife. He tortured her for days until he finally burned her alive inside their fireplace. When the police found her body they arrested Michael and he was imprisoned for her murder.
“Are you Witch or are you Faerie? Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?”
Cully’s response to this story is the right one. He is upset that a man could do that all because he couldn’t accept his wife was her own person. It’s remarks like this that we start to see the contradictions of Cully. He wants to be one thing but reacts and responds in ways that are different from those beliefs. He keeps saying that he needs to give Gemma space and be understanding but every time they try to confront each other about what happened they end up fighting. It’s also here that a seed is put in his head and the reader’s head as well. What if Gemma didn’t come back from that hillside as Gemma, but as something else?
For the most part, the story works in a narrative style that pretty much tells us that Gemma is in fact the killer. At face value from everything we are shown, we see her become this horrible monster and brutally murder anyone that comes in her path. However, Gemma isn’t our main character, it’s Cully. We see everything through his perspective and we could be dealing with an unreliable narrator.
Here is where we come to my favorite aspect of Double Walker; Gas-lighting. Gas-lighting I feel is a tough thing to capture in art because it’s a hard thing to identify. Especially if you are the victim of it. At some point in our lives we have all been the victim of gasl-ighting and if we are being honest with ourselves, we have probably done it before to someone else. Even if it was unintentional. As the story pushes towards it’s climax things start getting more and more confusing. It’s also around this time that Cully is getting more and more drunk each night. One night while trying to find Gemma, he comes across her just after she has committed an act of murder. When he goes to ask her what she has done, she beats him to it.
The next morning, he comes home and she is there. Completely happy and nothing like the way she had been the past several days. He’s confused and doesn’t know what to make of everything that is going on. She tells him that she is still pregnant and that he has kind of been out of hand the past several days but it’s okay and that she forgives him. She even references a time from their past where something similar to this might have happened before. He is confused but accepts everything that she tells him. That is until after he takes a shower and notices something sticking out from under the bed. When he goes to look he finds the body of the housekeeper that has been renting her place to them on their visit. He then takes a shovel and murders his wife.
To my understanding of the story, we never really know which of them was the killer and I think that is kind of the point. It doesn’t matter. The purpose of the story is watching a young, seemingly happy couple be changed and corrupted by a place and one horrible event.
There are two detectives throughout the story that are investigating the murders. The impression that is given is that one of them is a rookie cop while the other is more experienced. Throughout the story they never intervene but just watch. This frustrates the rookie to no end, saying that they are just letting innocent people die. However, the veteran cop explains that whenever events like this took place before, it was just best to let them run their course and to not get involved. That every time the police tried to get involved in past instances it always made matters worse. That once the Fae was full it would go away on it’s own.
This is a sentiment that is shared by the bartender that tells all of the creepy fairy tales to Cully. He explains that either him or Gemma have “something” inside of them that needs to come out. But it’s more like a splinter and the more you dig at it, the worst you make it. It’s best to let it work itself out.
While on a literal stance, it’s frustrating to see these cops not get involved, it does make sense on the narrative. As I said before, I went through a lot of changes this past year and found myself in a place emotionally I didn’t want to be. I just wanted things to change so bad and the more I fought against it, the worst I made it. I didn’t have the patience to let things work themselves out. I know that mindset sounds lazy and unproductive but sometimes there are instances where you can’t change what’s going on around you. You have to ride it out and I think that’s a mindset that gets overlooked sometimes in the modern day.
So, why did I ignore what this story was trying to tell me the first time I read it? I guess I was in the same mindset as Cully or the young detective in the story. That there was a problem and I had to fix it right at the moment, even though it wasn’t a problem I could fix. When we get locked in on an idea we become stubborn and shut out any real advice that might be helpful for us and that is pretty much what I was doing. It’s only in retrospect, a few months later, that I can come back to this story and realize it was right all along. Maybe I could have saved myself some pain if I was just open enough to what it was saying.
Doppelgangers are a common trope in horror and If I’m being honest, they are probably one of my favorites. There is something so unsettling about the concept of another you that isn’t you being out there in the world. Double Walker takes that trope and does something with it that I think is fresh and unique. Here the doppelganger and the character are still one in the same while being different aspects of each other. This is where the concept of change is fully utilized in the book. Because events and places and even people change us. We are in a constant struggle of trying to maintain the selves we were before those changes happened, causing a never ending internal conflict. Those same cliched existential questions that we keep asking ourselves. Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?
I feel there is still so much I didn’t touch on with this book because as short of a read as this story is, it’s packed with themes of what it means to be human. It’s layered in themes of mythology, existence, identity, relationships, change, etc. The reason I think it works so well is because of how well the characters Gemma and Cully are written. Michael Conrad was able to write the story in such a way that anyone that has ever been in a long term relationship knows exactly what they are struggling with, even if those concepts are exaggerated here. He is a writer that is brave enough to tackle subjects that I feel a lot of artists would be afraid to touch and I really respect that.
Noah Bailey’s art perfectly captures every struggle they go through and is able to shine with his ability to display contrast. He illustrates a lot of his characters in an almost comic book strip type style but just more detailed. It’s when he can contrast that style with some of the most truly gruesome comic book panels that I have ever seen that you realize that his style was made perfect for horror. He creates what almost feels like a safe place to watch these characters until you are hit with a shot of a graphically mutilated body with all the gory details for display.
So If you have read this entire thing and still haven’t read Double Walker, do yourself a favor and check it out. Like I said, if you have Amazon Prime then it’s available for you to read. Even if I have spoiled a good chunk of the story because like I said, there is so much in this short little book to unpack that I really can’t do it justice. Hopefully it can help you as it did me. Hopefully it can help you confront your double walker and make peace with it before it eats you alive.
Michael Chance