Review: Greyman

What if there was a conscious state between life and death? And what if that state held all the creatures from our nightmares , creatures that want nothing more than to feed on your soul?

That’s the premise behind Glenn Arsenau and Andy Gray’s Greyman, a unique graphic novel of terrifying proportions. The adventure follows an innocent young man named Adam Grey as he and his attractive fiancée, Sarah, meet with a tragic accident on the road. But that’s only the beginning.

In the crash, Sarah is thrown into a coma. Adam, on the other hand, quite literally meets with a fate worse than death. After his soul is taken from his body, he is attacked by a nightmarish monster and given a choice: be left alone and never again see Sarah, or let the monster possess him and use him to wreak havoc—and possibly again be reunited with his beloved.

The story takes place in several different planes of existence. The evil present is clear to see — but the good is brought into question both for Adam and for the reader. The thrill of bad decisions comes into play, and one mistake could endanger Adam and Sarah for eternity.

At times, the complexity of the story confused me as a reader. It was hard to tell, in this nether-realm, who was who and had which power and what desire. How much control does Adam have over himself, and how are his thoughts separated from the thoughts of the monster within him? Fortunately, many of my questions were ironed out as the plot continued and things started clicking into place. And most of the revelations that came to me were accompanied by chills at the very thought. Best of all was that it keeps going. Just when you think you’ve seen the darkest, most horrific point to the story it gets worse, stretching into the darkest points of your imagination. It’s complete with all the traditional terrors of glowing red eyes, creepy old men, tentacles, and alien eggs, and there’s also a lot of less commonly used but equally horrifying scares.

Greyman is certainly daring for a graphic novel. It goes places most stories wouldn’t dare to go, and it faces even the darkest of possibilities and brings them to light. For readers who want a thrill and don’t mind being a little horrified and disturbed at the turn of events, this is definitely a comic worth checking out. It’s also worth a read even if you just want to find out whether poor Adam and Sarah will ever be together again — an emotional thread that is surprisingly well maintained throughout the story and brought to a conclusion in the end (though I won’t spoil it by saying what conclusion that is).