Silverfish - Hardcover

David Lapham is a writer and artist who began his career in 1990 at Valiant Comics. In 1995, he established publisher El Capitan, and began the crime/noir series Stray Bullets, which he wrote, drew and lettered himself. In 2006 and 2007, his series won him Eisner awards for Best Writer/Artist and Best Reprint Compilation, respectively. He has also published Murder Me Dead, and has worked on Daredevil/Punisher, Detective Comics, and is currently writing DC's Tales of the Unexpected.

Home babysitting her asthmatic little sister while her father and stepmother have a weekend vacation, Mia, sister in tow, explores the house with best friend Vonnie and her boyfriend. They discover a suitcase of money, a bloodied knife, and the stepmother's address book. Meanwhile, an apparently psychotic man in another town battles hallucinations of a silverfish and violent impulses. The teens' prank call to a number in the address book puts them and the man in eventually grim contact. Lapham renders Mia, sister, and friends as fresh-faced, while the adults range from shadowed and fractured—the psychotic—to slowly evolving from jagged to regular—Mia's stepmother as Mia's view of her shifts. The eventual violence is hardly gratuitous, and blood spilt in black-and-white isn't as frightening as the tension built by the narrative's sly unfolding. Lapham's thriller handily balances driving the plot and developing characters, sure-footed narrative with detailed and perspective-rich images. Suspense mavens who don't already know how well comics conjure their favorite atmosphere and graphic-novel fans looking for realistically scary stuff must find Silverfish. Goldsmith, Francisca