Something Spooky: ‘Nice House On The Lake’ Is Horror Done Right

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A rich common friend invites ten people to their lake house. They think they’re getting the weekend of their dreams. It’s actually something much, much worse.

James Tynion IV, Alavaro Martinez Bueno, Jordie Bellaire and Andworld Designs kicked off this apocalyptic cosmic horror saga in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though it’s prescient and timely, it’s also strangely timeless. This is probably the story that proved what Tynion is capable of to me. 

Walter is a strange guy, but he’s also completely lovable and relatable. That does mean that when he invites ten of his closest friends to a lake house owned by “a friend” everyone drops everything and comes. But after the group begins to settle in, they’re horrified to discover the truth. Outside, the world is ending, and Walter only invited them to save their lives. These ten may be the last people on Earth.

Tynion did a masterful job in this series (of which season two just ended). The slow build of tension in the first issue is fantastic. We know this is a story about the apocalypse, given all the context clues, but we’re left wondering when the hammer is going to drop. Walter’s friends are all interesting people, but also they’re all kind of, well, dicks. At least in their own way.

And then the hammer drops.

To understand how impactful the twist was, you need to understand the context of the data page. Introduced by Jonathan Hickman in his 2019 masterpiece House of X/Powers of X, supplemental text pages were growing in popularity. To see Tynion use them in a unique way — via the screens of our technology fantastically rendered by Martinez Bueno, Bellaire and Andworld — drew us into the story.

And then the Twitter feed hit.

In a single two page spread mimicking Twitter, a social media site that was many people’s lifeline to the outside world during the COVID lockdowns, the floor dropped from both the characters and the readers. There were only a couple images in the largely-text driven page, leaving the horror to our imaginations, but there was enough to let us know there world had ended. There was no turning back.

And worst of all, it wasn’t a sudden, painless death. It was slow, burning and agonizing.

To rub salt in the wound, Walter knew. He didn’t just know. He was part of the … things (aliens, advanced humans, elder gods, who knows?) that had initiated the apocalypse.

Five years removed, it’s still effective as hell, but right in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic, it was one of the scariest comic books we’d ever read. Even worse, it wasn’t especially graphic or gory. It was just enough.

And I’m underplaying how beautiful a comic it was too. Martinez Bueno’s ink-wash style pencils are gorgeous, making the lake house and its environment truly majestic, while the residents were very pretty people. Bellaire’s colors almost make the art look like paintings. And Andworld does a truly fantastic job with a story in which the text isn’t just a storytelling tool, but a part of the art, the world-building and more.

This is a comic that I haven’t revisited in a long time. I’m so glad I did. It’s a gut punch, especially when you’re reminded of the context it came out in.

It’s definitely the embodiment of why we’re doing this feature, because it’s trust something spooky.