Reading Western Tales of Terror, which Fialkov both edits and does some writing for, it was easy to see that he was a talent to watch. Elk's Run isn't an anthology, but a single story from Fialkov, and it's a pretty good first issue. It's a bit of a slow burn, and to be honest, I wasn't as taken by Tuazon's artwork as the editor clearly was, but it's clear enough and the mood and suspense are both very effective. The easiest comparison to make is to a Stephen King book, with its focus on young protagonists whose coming of age brings them into conflict with something dark.
The strength of Elk's Run comes in the characters as much as in the situation. Fialkov writes the young narrator of Elk's Run as a somewhat disaffected teenager, struggling with getting older in a small town where the adults don't seem to realize how stifled a younger person feels. It's a universal approach when dealing with small town stories, showing that while adults might find the small town nature comforting, the younger townies find it stifling, even maddening. Fialkov does an excellent job of conveying the frustration of this enforced lifestyle without turning his teenage lead into a stereotype or unlikable character.
Which is not to say that this is a book that rests solely on strong characterization. Fialkov does some good work with teenage friendships and the horseplay that goes on within them, but the creepy heart of this story lies in the feeling of isolation that permeates the book. We've all seen the towns, whether in real life or just in fiction, that seem to have died years ago and yet still have people clinging to the corpse. The coal mining town that no longer has a functional mine, that seems to be a throwback to an earlier era, to be cut off from the rest of the world to some degree. Fialkov and Tuazon really give the town of Elk's Run that sense of being alone in the world, and when something goes wrong in a place like that (as it does about midway through the book), the events feel a lot scarier as a result.
Tuazon and Keating provide artwork that isn't entirely my cup of tea, but which definitely has some strong points to recommend it. The color scheme feels a little oppressive, with its heavy focus on browns and deep reds, but it also helps to give a sense of a continual sunset, enforcing the notion of this town's time having faded already. Tuazon's characters are not the easiest to distinguish, becoming a little blobby and indistinct when he pulls the character back, and some of his more unusual storytelling choices like the car crash lose a bit of clarity for me, but in terms of mood, he's spot on. Even the car crash sequence, which bugged me on first read because I couldn't instinctively grasp what was going on, has nice sense of frozen horror thanks to the multiple close-up panels that frame the main action. The overall style looks a little too sketchy to me a lot of the time, lacking in subtlety when it comes to the characters' expressions or giving a strong sense of place, but the vagueness of it also helps to build on some of the dark mood that Fialkov is trying to establish. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm of two minds about the art, that it's definitely good but at times it doesn't work for me.
The kicker of Elk's Run comes at the end, when Fialkov reveals something far more sinister than a lack of ambition that runs through the adults of this small town. It's a reasonably mundane and believable twist, something that could actually happen, but it's presented in a way that has an almost preternatural level of fear to it, connecting to the reader just what it might be like to discover that the adults in your life were messed up in such a key way. I was interested throughout, but with these last few pages, I became fascinated with finding out what was going to happen next.
Although Elk's Run is more of a full-length story than anthology Western Tales, Fialkov doesn't completely escape the anthology style, including a backup story with art by Nate Bellegarde. It'd be hard to imagine a more disparate tone than the one that carries "Where Werewolf?", which is as silly as Elk's Run is serious. It is a hilariously fun story, though, matching the curse of the werewolf with a hapless office loser and providing a dark, twisted and very funny ending to the whole thing. 7/10
