By Zack Quaintance — I regret not writing about The Nice House on the Lake #7, which to me might be the most interesting issue of the series to date. It’s certainly not the best issue of the series (that honor still goes to The Nice House on the Lake #1), but it’s the most disorienting, intriguing, and quite possibly also the most consequential so far as it pertains to the future of the book. And you really can’t discuss The Nice House on the Lake #8 without considering the nature of the chapter that comes immediately before it.

See, in The Nice House on the Lake #7 we get the first issue back after a long break, three months to be exact (although it felt much longer). When we leave this story at the end of #6, the people within the titular nice house have had their memories tampered with by Walter, the not-quite-an-alien Lovecraftian puppet master of the whole situation who describes himself simply as, something else. They’d started to realize he was keeping them in the house, potentially as an experiment for powerful beings who were soon to end the world, and they were pushing back. He responded by erasing their memories. The last scene of Nice House #6 is of characters waking up with more excitement, as Walter has maybe embedded himself among them.

If I had written about The Nice House on the Lake #7 the week it came out, I might have pondered whether the disorienting feel of the issue was because of the three-month break or if it was intentional, if the creative team was trying to reflect the experience of the characters back at the audience. If the issue was meant to feel fuzzy because that’s what the experience had become for the characters, a nonlinear set of memories that potentially have cracks and impressions leaking through. After reading The Nice House on the Lake #8, I think the answer is maybe somewhere in between.

The second half of this 12-issue story does seem to be getting looser, a bit less surgical feeling than the first six issues. There are more emotions in play here, particularly on behalf of Walter, who notes at the end of #6 that he has been given human emotions and hormones to help him choose what people to save at the end of the world. As this new arc proceeds, it does seem to be getting clearer that Walter is operating from a place that is more emotional and less pragmatic than the being has in the past. Or maybe he always has felt this way, he just kept it in check when he wasn’t executing his experiment with these people. There are flashbacks galore in this story, so the past matters and it matters a lot.

That’s one motif that may be at work here in the book’s second arc. The other piece I feel obligated to discuss has to do with what I take to be this story’s central metaphor, one that takes the experience of living out a pandemic in relative comfort and turns it into a horror mystery box. That’s been my reading of this book since we learned the characters could write whatever they want on a slip of paper and have it delivered. If that reading is correct, a slippage of time and memory could be working to reflect the experience of the middle and later pandemic, when time started to feel immaterial and life before (or even in the earlier months) started to seem distant, and weird.

The Nice House on the Lake #8 felt like one of this book’s stronger issues. There’s certainly a lot of moving forward (or attempts to move forward) being done by the group, who spend much of the book making plans to expand their living arrangements (guided not-so-subtly by Walter, who continues to play along as if he’s trapped too). The book is blocked into sections, themed around the new additions that the characters are building onto the house — spas, observatories, studios, etc. — like Clue rooms but more modern and also during an apocalypse. They are alternately becoming more capable and more fed up with being stuck. They’re doing what they have to, but they’re strained and vocal. There’s a feeling throughout that no matter how badly Walter wants it, there’s just no way this can last. And that’s the choice I like the most in this issue, right up to the excellent cliffhanger.

This issue is also another absolute tour de force by Álvaro Martínez Bueno, who uses perspective in interesting ways to put punctuation points on all the ideas, especially the way this issue ends. The coloring by Jordie Bellaire is also spectacular, seeming to reflect the level of optimism or tolerance each individual is feeling. It’s no small thing, but Bueno and Bellaire work in tandem here to control the tone and ambiance, crucial for horror comics cartooning.

So, whereas las issue left me reeling and a bit disoriented, this issue straightens my mind out and sets it on a track toward what we can expect from the next four issues, and it’s exciting, to be sure.

Overall: If last issue left me feeling disoriented, this issue straightened out my understanding of what is happening here and where it is all headed next. The Nice House on the Lake #8 is a great reminder that this is one of the best books in monthly comics. 9.5/10

REVIEW: The Nice House on the Lake #8

The Nice House on the Lake #8
Writer: James Tynion IV
Artist: Álvaro Martínez Bueno
Colorist: Jordie Bellaire
Letterer: Andworld Design
Publisher: DC Comics - Black Label
With Walter living among his friends in the house, has the impossible happened? Have their lives actually...improved? Perhaps for some-but how are things going for the one housemate whose place Walter took?
Price: $3.99
Buy It Here: Digital / Physical First Trade

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He has written about comics for The Beat and NPR Books, among others. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.