Golem Pit 224

It's October and to celebrate this spooky month, I am going to review a bunch of different graphic novels that fit the season. First up is Golem Pit 224, a book I got from a Kickstarter campaign last year. The plot revolves around a couple, Thea and Kelsey, who decide to go on a camping trip to explore an unusual land form, the not-at-all-creepy- sounding Exclusion Zone Golem Pit 224. Kelsey is a research professor who is treating the trip more like an opportunity to collect work samples, and Thea would like to actually have fun and spend time with her partner. Without spoiling too much, they end up having to deal with some psychoactive material and find themselves literally and figuratively on shaky ground.

This book was wonderfully weird and compelling. What I liked about it was that it worked as a horror tale as well as a relationship story. Kelsey and Thea have some unresolved tensions that they need to deal with, and the way those manifest both emotionally and physically throughout the story makes for suspense and high drama. There were also several scares, including one pretty gross one that involved possibly swallowing an alien life form. The plot was pretty unique, and at some points I honestly did not know how or if things would resolve. The artwork does not employ the typical panel borders of most comics, and the floating, amorphous way the figures and events are depicted makes for some interesting developments later in the book in terms of how transformations and mysteries play out. Also, the color palette dealt mostly in earthy, brown tones that create a murkiness that well suited the setting and events of the story.

Golem Pit 224 was written and drawn by Julia Gootzeit. She has mostly published her work in mini-comic form, and her more recent comics can be found on her Instagram feed.

Golem Pit 224 was published by Fieldmouse Press, and they offer a preview and more info about it here.