An artist looking for inspiration rents a haunted house - and then discovers it’s actually haunted! But the ghost is not vengeful - quite the opposite in fact. That’s right, it’s time to get the pottery wheel out and fire up the Righteous Brothers for The Me You Love in the Dark!
Skottie Young and Jorge Corona, the creative team behind Middlewest, reunite for another collab. This time it’s a mashup of romance and horror that doesn’t succeed in either genre and comes off as a derivative confluence of pop culture.
What do I mean? The protagonist, Rowena, is basically grown up Lydia from Beetlejuice, and the house too is the same house from the movie. Then Skottie Young decided to make the first half of the book that one pottery scene from Ghost with Swayze and Moore, before switching gears to make the second half like the HAL 9000 part from 2001: A Space Odyssey but with HAL as a haunted house.
It’s underwhelming stuff. I kept waiting for it to become more than it was but it was only ever a possessive boyfriend story. Hmm. The ghost is underdeveloped - no idea what it is or how it came to be - and the romance was never convincing nor was the horror anything more than generic, so it failed to be scary too.
Jorge Corona’s art is quite something though and I loved what he managed to do with the colour black - never showing too much of the ghost was an effective choice, as it usually is in monster stories. The story more-or-less held my attention and I wanted to see where it was going, but nothing much happens to make it stand out as remotely memorable.
A weak story for aping better material that came before it without making it its own, The Me You Love in the Dark is an instantly forgettable faux-romance/horror.
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