Something Spooky: ‘Moonshine’ Makes The Prohibition Scary

Welcome to the table,

 

In the landscape of comics that I have read over the whole of my life, few books stand out for me as much as 100 Bullets. The storytelling by Brian Azzarello is twisty and weighted with morally grey to morally wrong main characters and art that was stylized and energetic with dazzling silhouettes and brilliant colors rendered by the incredibly talented visionary Eduardo Risso.

I remember finishing that series and re-reading it again, then again, then again. Over the years I returned to those pages just to sink into those deep shadows and honed panel layouts. So when I found out in 2016 that Risso would be doing a werewolf comic set in rural Appalachia during Prohibition, I was onboard before I even found out the title was Moonshine.

I picked up the first ten or so issues, but life does that thing it does sometimes and I ended up falling off when life happened, as life sometimes does. What’s cool is you can now enjoy this horror-charged story in either single issues from long boxes, graphic novels, or the giant hardcover collection Image put out that is close to 700 pages long.

The basics of the story are that a guy named Lou Pirlo is sent from New York City to negotiate a deal with the top Appalachian moonshiner Hiram Holt. Lou assumes it’s going to be fairly easy but soon finds out that Hiram is even more ruthless and cunning than the crime bosses Lou is accustomed to dealing with.  On top of Hiram standing on business when it comes to protecting his illegal shine operation, he also has a family secret that comes with its own blood-drenched claws and teeth, making the whole situation even more harrowing for old Lou.

Once bitten Lou is cursed to become a werewolf. The fuse from the introduction of the cursed best to our protagonist getting bit and finally becoming one is long and tortured and unlike most werewolf stories that slow burn really provides a chance to sink into the heat and rural earthiness of the setting. From the color pallet to the deep shadows, the ambiance of this particular werewolf story is unmatched in print form as the longer you read it the more twisted and twined you get drawing into the gnarled branches and dense thickets that spill out along the hills like blood from a fresh wound.

Over one hundred pages into the story we get treated to some of the best werewolf attack sequences I have seen in a comic book and I’ve read quite a few werewolf books in my day. A cloud of melancholy hangs over the story as the clock resets and the expectation that another werewolf attack will come. That melancholy gloom hangs over the story as it transitions from the Appalachian hills to the dark and swampy corners of the bayou where Lou needs to travel to find a cure for his newly found curse.

As life happens though, Lou meets with more calamity as he is snatched up by the police and locked up to a change gang doing hard labor on the railroad. The story splits from Lou and takes us on a journey following Tempest and Enos Holt, the missing and presumed dead moonshine man’s children. Enos is a werewolf and goes about killing the gangsters who sent Lou in a manner befitting most tails of family vengeance. Tempest on the other hand continues to operate as an almost puppet master, playing any and all sides including a newcomer to the story, the old but far from frail L’ago. L’ago gives me a deeply unsettled vibe, in the same way Lono from 100 Bullets freaked me out, but for totally different reasons. While L’ago does not rise to the ranks of my favorite character in the story as Lono did, he is used to great effect as he serves as the moral third party, aware of all actions in the story, and playing as a better foil to the werewolf hill folk children of Holt than our protagonist Lou ever could.

The chain gang story is really solid, laced with all the hallmarks of a period piece including the racial tension, the abuse of power, and snakes that strike once and you just… die. Lou is really struggling as the heat, workload, and visions of his dead sister haunt him. The art continues to really carry the story as the color washes and thick outlines drench each page drawing you deep into the dust and sweltering temperatures that were probably present on those long days breaking rocks for corrupt men with stars on their chests and malice in their hearts.

We find out that Tempest and Enos’s father is actually not dead, but a captive of L’ago, and when Enos taps into his werewolf powers in an attempt to free his father and slay the mobsters who hold him captive in this now crime family on crime family war, a sniper in L’ago’s employ with a silver bullet a flair for the religious dramatics cuts him down sending him to his final death as Tempest clutches as his quickly cooling body.

The storytelling is again really effective not for the weight of the dialog or the complexity of conversation, but thanks to the slow burn that comes with anticipating that at some point, Lou is going to transform into a werewolf, and in a close quarters prison camp under heavy guard in the prohibition era southern united states, a large powerful wolf monster is going to wreck a lot of house, and a lot of house it indeed does wreck.

I saw a Mutual of Omaha nature show once. In it, a bunch of English-sounding guys were hunting leopards in Africa. They were using hunting dogs, the kind you see in kids’ movies with long floppy ears. What happens in this book is very similar to what I recall happening when those dogs went into the tall grass. I’m not sure if my memory is exactly correct… but I think it went poorly for those dogs, and it for sure goes poorly for the hunting party out to figure out what happened to the chain gang camp that Lou was in.

The story continues to live in a space where nothing good happens. By good I mean pure or just, as once the cops running the chain gang are dealt with, the surviving members of the chain gang dispatch of the remaining cops, then head out into the world where they promptly attempt to assault a young mother at his small country cabin. Lou in human form happens upon the scene and more bloody chaos is dealt out.

We follow Lou to the Bayou where he reconnects with an old friend and a coven of witches who will help him if he will pay them. Lou goes back to his old ways, dressing the part of a man with money to scam a few local big shots out of their money. His path twines with a man named Jean-Baptiste, who proves to be a manipulative villain for this arc of the story and honestly one of the strongest characters as far as depth and guile in the whole of the series. He’s a monster for sure, but it feels like of all the players in this long and twisted yarn he has the most wits about him in regards to the known world of flesh and bone and the unknown world of magic and mystery.

Lou can’t get himself cured of the curse because his soul has gone missing. This is a curious development in the story and feels slightly weak because it could either speak to the fact that he somehow lost his soul to other works and deeds in his past, or the fact the witches, who I am always going to believe as I have a soft spot for those who practice such crafts, are just con artists and can’t actually take the wolf out of the man as it were.

There are undead conjured and deals struck and all the while Lou is just a puppet for a man who clearly understands manipulation and magic, or manipulation that appears to be magic in such a keen way that he’s hard not to like, save for the parts that make you want to hate him. In all the ways it felt like others have been controlling Lou, be it Tempest, the chain gang boss, the crime family boss, or even greed, Jean-Baptiste is able to step in and move the man once more to murder all the while benefiting of the carnage and chaos he leaves in his wake.

Lou’s witch friends turn the tables on Jean-Baptiste and it all ends in blood and pain as has come to be expected, but this time it’s less tooth and claw and more hot lead and heartbreak as the crime family from New York come calling but they find Lou at the bottom of a bottle and not much more than a broken man.

The story jumps to Manhattan where the crime family is up to some crime and we find Tempest singing in a jazz joint. It’s at this point, as much as I like this book, it gets a little… soft. for me… weak feels too pointed, and lackluster feels wrong… it just softens in a way that eggs do when they are cooked night quite right and the whites are a little too clear and running for anyone’s liking. I say that because they introduce Eliot Ness into the mix. The American prohibition agent best known for his efforts to bring down Al Capone … he shows up.

Something about folding in a real-world figure like Ness in this particular setting with this particular slow-burn storytelling that feels more like long horror-drenched afternoons of artful goodness that occasionally has splashes of dialog, like the ones on a long car ride with someone you know so well you guys don’t have to talk to vibe with each other, it just feels disruptive. It’s not my story to tell, but I was not a huge fan of the choice because it kind of came off at the time and even now sitting here re-reading it like one of those moments in a 90’s sitcom where an actor from another sitcom shows up and pauses for the audience to clap and cheer because they know that guy from the other show that’s on the same channel in another time slot.

There are bodies popping up in and around a shanty town in New York and here is where we find our boy Lou again, still a drunk, still just kind of aimlessly drifting through the muck and mire of life. Where Tempest is in this glammed-up lifestyle being played to by a new crime boss, Lou is out and about just sort of living in the dirt, drinking and trying to forget things he has already forgotten. It’s the dance of the hopeless who can get clean but does not want to because it is too easy to stay in the bottle and too painful to ponder what crawling out would look like.

That is where the real strength and horror of this whole twisted tail sets in. The monster, the bullets, the hoodoo and voodoo and blood and gore is all secondary to someone who is just so deep in the shit, so twisted up in whatever bad bits of brain and memory and grief have hold of him, that there is no saving him. You could cut out the beast, that thing with tooth and claw that howls at the moon, but the real monster is this past that haunts him and his inability or want to do anything other than drown himself in vices to escape it. Not even with joyful inhabiting, it’s a sad, sinking drowning that will only end in heartache. That is the true horror of it all, you see it coming, and you know there is nothing else that can be done.

The story takes a few more interesting twists at this point, introducing a serial killer into the mix who uses an axe.

A kid overhears Lou drunk in a ditch talking to the ghosts in his head and saying he’s a killer and he goes off and tells people about what he heard. This turns into a hunt for Lou by the cops because clearly the implication of one small shanty camp child is enough to implicate a man of murder. It’s such a weird twisting of threads for me, but again, its not my story to tell and it’s a beautiful book so the ride is worth it.

All the while this is happening Tempest is being fawned over by a token-esque crime boss who goes through all the motions of a mobster movie they show on a lazy Sunday afternoon on basic cable. He even sets it up for her to sign a “big-time Hollywood contract” while his closest goons with goofy names try and convince him in Sopranos dialog that he is in way over his head.

Lou gets convinced by an old crime family acquaintance that he has a job waiting, in truth it’s a date with the axe but before he can go into the building to get chopped the aforementioned shanty town kid points him out to the cops and old Lou gets locked up. Now, if you are a werewolf being locked up in a local jail is not exactly going to do much other than put a toothsome monster in an enclosed space with normal humans is a recipe for disaster. However, unlike situations that have happened in the last almost five hundred pages of this story, Lou just gets shot a bunch when he transforms.

Lou wakes up in a morgue, goes back to the shanty town, gets recaptured by the same crime dude who got him before, and then gets taken back to the building to be chopped up by the axe man. The axe man is just a psycho who works for the crime family and who likes hacking people up. There is a fire started by aforementioned historical figures and then the whole thing ends with Lou in werewolf form fighting the axe man and then winning off the panel. It’s such a weird and abrupt end to this chapter of Moonshine. It feels thrown together and while the art never misses, the writing feels like it never really goes anywhere. It’s like if you are watching a show with your significant other, and then they are busy with other stuff for a few nights, so you watch a different show, and it’s kind of the same, but honestly, it’s not the show you started watching and it feels like you are just here trying to get to the end of the first story but have to wait until they are back so you can finish the first story and the second story is fine you guess … but just not as good. It’s like that

We pick up with Tempest being content to be with the crime boss who she was originally just there to kill for killing her brother. Tempest enjoys the life of room service and soft beds, a vast change from the hill living she was doing at the beginning of this story. She does make time for werewolfing though. Her nighttime activities take the form of turning into a monster and hunting people in parks.

Lou on the other hand finally gets his head on straight. He is cleaned up, sober, and dealing with being haunted by the ghosts of the axe killer, one of the crime bosses, Enos the werewolf brother of Tempest, and his little sister. In a lot of ways, it is kind of like American Werewolf in London and I kind of dig the ghosts of those you killed haunting you thin what they are doing. Mostly these spirits provide exposition more than anything but it works for what it is.

Lou goes off and helps some of Holt’s, the moonshiner who’s Tempest’s father, kin take out a crime family distillery where they find a chained-up Holt who then destroys the means of production and declares war on the crime family essentially going to war with his daughter without realizing it.

Lou and Tempest continue to spiral around each other as everything around them catches on fire and burns or bleeds. They are drawn to each other in a primal way that works but is also empty. Not because the writing is bad, but because the whole thing is rotten and sad and self-destructing.

They are rats who are spreading chaos and destruction like a plague and leaving violence and loss in their wake. The story spirals to its inevitable end and while I have spoiled a lot of it up to this point, I am leaving the last few chapters for you to explore if you feel like this kind of yarn is your thing.

As a whole body of work, I really enjoy Moonshine. I find to often monsters are given the good parts of humanity to somehow humanize them but as this story unfolds you find the worst of us in these characters. No one really feels redeemable and the monsters, the beasts within, are as commonplace in this society of criminals as they would be running through the deep primordial forests of your nightmares.

Moonshine does something that few other stories do for me, it scares me. Not because there are monsters and danger, but because it is crafted in such a way that it drags me into a place where I feel actual sorrow and sadness. It hovers over me like a spirit filled with melancholy and when I start reading it I can’t stop till I reach the bitter end. It’s a somber and heavy story rendered in an art style I find beautiful and compelling.

This story hurts, and sometimes something like images and ideas on a page that can actual hurt you is the scariest thing of all.

Until next time, read at your own risk.