By Lisa Gullickson — I have always been a vivid dreamer - mostly mundane, always anxiety inducing, with that soupçon of surrealism. Many mornings, I wake on the tail end of a dream agitated, having dreamt that I am missing a final exam for a class I never attended or that my teeth had crumbled in my mouth. As I come to, I slowly sort out what is real and what was just an imagined experience. I heard once that dreams are our brains’ way of processing emotionally intense situations without the constant distraction of our waking senses. It starts with the more accurate content of our memories and then extrapolates, continuously tweaking the variables until the scenario is many interactions removed from reality. It’s as if, to our brains, the content of our dreams and their relationship to our literal experience is not important. The function of our dreams, then, must be related to the way they make us feel.

What compels me to return to the stories of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino is their uncanny evocations of dream logic in both Gideon Falls and Primordial. Their characters, wrecked with personal tragedy and existential dread, are sent tumbling through Sorrentino’s broken panels of free-associated, angst ridden imagery. I am untethered and guessing, is this a nightmare? A hallucination? Or is this reality with all the pretense peeled back, and the painful bits exposed? The feeling is familiar and unsettling.

With The Bone Orchard Mythos, Lemire and Sorrentino are embarking on something potentially very vast - a horror universe of their own design. We got to peek behind the veil of their new mythology on Free Comic Book Day with the single issue Prelude: Shadow Eater, about a writer who goes on a solo work retreat to a lakehouse who is then confronted with a hellish reflection of himself. Before reading Prelude: Shadow Eater and The Passageway, I figured that The Bone Orchard Mythos would be like the works of Stephen King, where Dick Halloran from The Shining is also mentioned in IT. But, for now at least, I consider it to be more like The Twilight Zone — pointing to our means for gathering evidence to discern what is true or untrue and exposing how flimsy it all is. If the writer never knows if the demon he saw at the lakehouse was corporeal or a delusion but it still ruins his life, does that make it any less real?

Sorrentino and Lemire have chosen as their entrée proper into The Bone Orchard Mythos a 95-page graphic novel, The Passageway, about a geologist, John Reed, who takes a fishing boat to a small island off the coast of Canada to investigate a sinkhole. He tells the island’s only resident, the lighthouse keeper Sally, that this hole may threaten the stability of the entire island, but he can only be certain once he’s done a proper examination, which would take a few days. After a fitful, nightmare ridden sleep, John returns to the maw of the sinkhole only to have sudden shock send him plummeting through the darkness and into the crossroads of what is real and what feels true, leaving John, and us, staggering, not knowing what to believe.

If The Bone Orchard Mythos is going to delve into the cracks of our reality, then the geologist John Reed is the ideal introductory protagonist. In order to live our lives, there are certain functional delusions we believe even though we know them not to be true. For instance, we walk around as if the ground is solid, just stillness all the way down, and not a bunch of ill-fitting, grinding plates floating loosely on a ball of boiling hot magma. John has eschewed the comfort of believing that we can trust what is beneath our feet. John has to break it to Sally, the foundation she has built her life on could crumble out from under her, swallowing her and her precious lighthouse.

I have a pet-theory that our brain runs these wild, extraordinary dream scenarios while we sleep to remind us that we routinely survive the emotions that we avoid - anxiety, helplessness, fear. No matter what we may experience, we will eventually shake ourselves awake to find the emotion that we were feeling didn’t actually matter, and we return to a place of sense and understanding. That, in and of itself, is a functional delusion. Throughout The Passageway, John Reed has recurring dreams based on a childhood memory of a tragic and shocking loss. At a very young age, he had one of his functional, foundational delusions - that our loved ones are forever - undermined, and he’s been running away from that emotion ever since.

With The Passageway, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino tug on the loose threads of our certainty, unraveling what we know to be true and daring us to believe in our most outrageous nightmares. Through their layered, paranoid plotting and the uncanny, realism of Sorrentino’s art, with David Stewart’s redolent colors, Lemire and Sorrentino never fail to deliver a sense of prickly, disconcerting awareness that we are all teetering on the edge at all times. Prelude: Shadow Eater and The Passageway are somewhat mirrors of each other. They are both about a man processing inner turmoil and somehow wanders off reality into the unknown. My hope is that with The Bone Orchard Mythos, they can look deeper and give a little shape to their darkness.

ADVANED REVIEW: The Passageway OGN

The Passageway
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Andrea Sorrentino
Colors: David Stewart
Letterer and Designer: Steve Wands
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $17.99
From the creative team of GIDEON FALLS and PRIMORDIAL comes the first book in a bold and ambitious new shared horror universe! When a geologist is sent to a remote lighthouse to investigate strange phenomenon he finds a seemingly endless pit in the rocks. But what lurks within and how will he escape its pull?
THE PASSAGEWAY is the first of a dozen new interconnected projects making up THE BONE ORCHARD MYTHOS from LEMIRE and SORRENTINO!
Publication Date: June 15, 2022
Buy It Here: The Passageway

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Lisa Gullickson is one half of the couple on the Comic Book Couples Counseling podcast, and, yes, the a capella version of the 90s X-men theme is all her. Her Love Language is Words of Affirmation which she accepts @sidewalksiren on twitter.