4 out of 5
A bit rough around the edges as writer Josh Finney finds his way into the story, and artist Patrick McEvoy decides how beholden he wants to be at making his lead look like Robert Mitchum, Casefile: ARKHAM proves to be one of the finer takes on genre-mixing Lovecraft, making pretty good on its “what if Raymond Chandler wrote Lovecraft” pitch.
Some interior monologue appropriately sets the noir stage for P.I. Hank Flynn – our Mitchum-type, with an odd scar on his forehead and a backstory we’ll later hear tied to it. He’s hired by a femme fatale socialite to track down a missing artist, the “brilliant,” and acquired-taste, Pickman. This is the first of several H.P. nods, but you’d likely expect that given the title; still, what Finney does well throughout is that he doesn’t make these nods extraneously, or as fandom bait, which is generally the over-eager fault of these modern Lovecraft takes. Rather, the mystery is centered on Pickman, and the peripherals are included as they make sense; there’s a bit of a bumpy shortcut to tell us that Flynn is already moderately inured to the occult (that’s the backstory), which excuses Finney from having to write in excessive shock over his P.I.’s eventual discoveries, but more positively it means that that mystery centering gives full room to exactly that: the street-beat work of a classic pulp. Hopping from lead to lead makes the front half of the book a bit talky, but it has a sincerity to it that keeps it gripping: you can sense Finney’s respect for the various source materials from which he’s drawing, and he’s doing his best to hammer that into a compelling story. It winds around and around a bit in a way that might work better in strictly text, but that’s where artist McEvoy comes in to deliver a good balance of character and creepiness, using “real” Pickman paintings to juxtapose against the comic art, but going in for the details when some of the scarier or gorier beats demand it. The duo settle in to a solid rhythm of what to show and when, such that once most of the pieces and players are in place, the story really gets going.
That slow-start-to-a-strong-finish structure might rate this more as an average book overall, but the “Lovecraft mixed with X” subgenre is so overstuffed with folks who think they’ve reinvented mashups that this gets extra notability for doing it so well.
