Roachwell by Craig Collins and Iain Laurie

A DEEP, dark, deliciously twisted bad trip of a book, Roachwell by Craig Collins and Iain Laurie, delights in its surreal twists and turns and the traps it lays for its unprepared audience. 

Enticing us in with a bold, bloody and brutal cover that depicts a diver emerging from a pool of crimson in the middle of a drab, dirty, dreary kitchenette, replete with kitsch chequerboard tiling, Roachwell makes its motives perfectly clear from the get go. 

It's an arresting and surreal image on its own, but one that only reveals its true intent when lined up with the cover of the duos other book Crawl Hole (Credit where it's due, Collins himself shared that rather macabre party trick with me).

Like Crawl Hole before it, Roachwell is a scattered selection of the dark, weird and wonderful, single page horror stories as darkly funny as they are deeply disturbing.

But Roachwell has a new trick up its sleeve, one I want to try not to spoil as much as I want to sing its praises.

Because Roachwell's unique narrative structure is smarter than you might first think. It urges the reader to look back, to read it again, to re-read and re-assess, and wonder whether if in fact what we've read was as random as we first thought. 

And some of the stories in Roachwell are definitely random. On my first read I found myself scratching my head more than once, and it's only when I let go of a need to make sense of what was on the page in front of me and allow myself appreciate the non-linear nightmare vibe that Laurie and Collins so eloquently craft that I really started to enjoy Roachwell for what it was. 

And that's clearly part of the point, Roachwell does not wish to be easily read, it delights in throwing curveballs at its reader, even going so far as to offer a whole strip in Gaelic, and several other pages written in a code I haven't been able to decipher. 

Laurie is high on my list of talented indie comic artists and it's interesting to see here the beginnings of the style that terrified people all over the world in last year's smash-hit And Then Emily Was Gone. 

The level of detail and personality he puts into his gruesome and grotesque creations drags us in to their stories kicking and screaming, and his masterful use of shadows casts an intense, menacing atmosphere over every panel. 

Collins is on top form here too. His writing style is minimalist, but nuanced enough to create a vivid imagery all of its own, the perfect complement to the juggernaut that is Laurie's striking artwork. 

He has a lyrical edge to his writing, using repetition to accentuate beats in his story that linger in your mind, waiting until the perfect moment to strike that chord again, leaving his words to reverberate and resonate in the reader's head long after putting the comic down. 

Collins and Laurie are remarkably successful in their efforts to craft a comic that is truly creepy here and that's not something to take lightly. 

Plenty of mainstream horror comics I've tried leave me bored and unmoved, where Roachwell has taken up space in a corner of my brain I didn't necessarily invite it into, a place it seems intent on lurking in and continuing to creep me out from for some time, much as Crawl Hole and An Then Emily Was Gone did before it.

But that's not all this twisted team has got, not by a long shot. 

Because as creepy as it is, Roachwell is genuinely funny too. 

It probably takes a certain twisted sense of humour to laugh at Toilet Snorkel Survivor Soup, which sees a man assaulted outside a pub and press-ganged into playing guitar for M People for eternity, or Chilled Monkey Brains, where the main character talks of staying inside somewhere cosy on cold, dark days, only for the artwork to reveal his cosy space is the belly of a monstrous giant snake, but if that's me then sign me up. 

Collins and Laurie are a great double-act and they are masters of a criminally under exploited genre in comics, that when it is done in the mainstream, it's rarely done as well. 

If you see any of their minis at conventions I highly recommend snapping them up and highly doubt you'll be disappointed.