Billie Baker is the chirpy new curate in the small Cornish town of Tredregyn - but little does she realise she is stepping into THE hotbed of the fight between good, evil and sea monsters! While her colleague, the hawt older man Reverend Penrose, battles things that climb up the cliffs at night, Billie meets the local Church of Satan, a rapturous company trying to develop a local wind farm, and gets stuck in with a witch’s convention. But who is Billie - really?
I’m a huge fan of John Allison’s dearly departed Giant Days but, strangely, I don’t really like much else he’s written (besides the little-known Expecting to Fly) - and so it goes with Steeple, unfortunately.
The setup is promising - local, picturesque seaside town, typically-witty Allison dialogue/characters - but nowt much seems to happen and the religious-themed stories didn’t do anything for me. A lot of things feel underdeveloped. Why are there monsters attacking the town at night? Why is there just one guy fighting them back? What’s the purpose of the Church of Satan - why is Tredregyn such a magnet for all this magical stuff?
The wind farm/rapture thing was confusing, the witches’ convention was a lead balloon - they just show up and that’s it. Billie and her friend Maggie of the Church of Satan feel like weaker versions of Daisy and Esther from Giant Days. And the book closes very abruptly in a flurry of arbitrary, rushed pseudo-endings which were plain unsatisfying - you can tell Allison didn’t expect to shutter the series so early on. I guess IDW cancelled it due to poor sales?
Steeple is like a lot of John Allison’s Scary Go Round comics in that it mixes his usual lightly comedic tone/characters with typical horror genre elements, which is something that does appeal to me so I wish I liked them more than I do but I don’t because they’re just not a good fit. Steeple is a bunch of half-baked ideas, go-nowhere stories and underwritten characters - a disappointingly dull read.
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