The Nice House on the Lake, Volume 1 Review (James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martinez Bueno)

A mutual friend, Walter, invites ten people to stay in a fancy lakeside house in the country for a weekend getaway. A nice house, far enough away from the hectic pace of modern life to make you think you were the last people on Earth - and then it turns out that you are! Because “Walter” is an alien who has saved his nearest and dearest from the end of the world. What next - imprisonment in some hellish mystery box? Oh…

The pieces are there to make The Nice House on the Lake, Volume 1 a fun book but James Tynion IV fails to assemble them into anything more than a narrative that’s unfortunately more often boring than not.

I dislike Tynion’s verbosity the most - his comics are always overwritten without all the extra verbiage adding to the overall story - and that remains the case here. A hefty chunk of this book is tedious flashbacks from when Walter met the person narrating that issue. The dialogue is always bloated, the stories are always dull, and the flashbacks useless - filler basically. We get that Walter met all these people at some point - these flashbacks do nothing more than underline this again.

The cast are all unmemorable who react predictably to the shocking news, and it’s not interesting to read these reactions. Tynion compounds things by including tiresome and unnecessary page-length blocks of text comprising emails, text threads, social media feeds, and transcripts, which also don’t add much to proceedings. Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s art isn’t bad but it’s not particularly remarkable either - it’s just fine. The ending to this first volume is very weak too - things just stop rather than build to a satisfying conclusion or cliffhanger.

But I did enjoy the various aspects of the story like the weird sculptures scattered around the compound, and the questions arising from the reveals: why is there a symbol for each person, why can no-one remember travelling to the house, how is the world ending and why, and, of course, Walter himself. I wonder if the name is derived from Walter Tevis, the author of, among others, The Man Who Fell to Earth? Walter gives off a vibe similar to Newton from that novel.

There’s a lot more to the mystery but I won’t give anything away here - suffice it to say, they deepen it and were about the only parts of the book I found compelling, sprinkled in amidst the bland group’s past and present witterings-on. The book is good once Tynion gets on with it - it’s just a shame that most of the time he doesn’t and seems satisfied simply relaying dreary conversations between the characters who are just sitting around, like a third-rate Bendis impersonator.

It’s because I have no confidence in Tynion as a storyteller that I feel like this book will turn out to be an unsatisfying comics version of Lost. I might check out the conclusion if only to get the answers to some of the numerous questions posed in this mostly setup book, but I still found The Nice House on the Lake, Volume 1 to be a very monotonous, overwritten and slow-moving comic. Unless unexciting back-and-forths is your thing, don’t expect much entertainment from this book.