4 out of 5

I want stories that I can revisit. It’s the primary criteria for what’s built out my media collection, and it’s something I have to continually reassess: I might really enjoy something, but would I enjoy it again? And if the answer is yes – to what extent, and in what way: is to comfort food; or is it something I can imagine myself pulling different experiences and information from each time?

While comfort is good, and not to be undervalued, the latter is really the holy grail. Unfortunately, that can run counter to one of my favorite genres: horror. Not that horror is without its fair share of topics to mull over upon those revisits, but admittedly… whether in books or movies, it’s rarer that that be a focus versus great visuals, or well executed scares / shocks / etc. Expanding upon that, I think I’ve only ever read one horror comic book that’s met that mark: Providence, by Alan Moore. Comics, given their variable pacing but with provided artwork – a halfway between the on-rails of a movie and BYO-adventure of a book – are a really difficult medium for horror, as you can linger on exactly the thing that’s meant to jump out of the shadows and go Boo, while also requiring some structural payoffs that are a bit less demanding in a chaptered book or an edited scene transition in film.

I’m not a Moore stan by any means, but regardless, his writing style, and Providence for sure, are pretty particular. And very much counter to Zander’s style, and that of Sleep; and yet, both are worthy of analysis for how they achieve some deep-seated fears, both approaching a fear of the uncontrollable unknown from different directions and approaches. That said, Sleep is very rereadable due to its relative simplicity (in terms of the digestibility of its art and words) and effectiveness, but beyond some smart clue-hunting and purposeful vagueness to its narrative, I would consider it a more linear experience than Providence, and less commentary / thinkpiece than Kaijumax could be. At a high level, it slots more into a “generic” horror story than Moore’s book, but just as Kaiju was arguably just a soap opera told from a unique perspective, that horror template gets elevated by incredibly sharp storytelling and characters that belie their depth and realness if determined by the amount of words they spout.

Because of that template, though, Sleep is also a book that can be spoiled by talking about its specifics too much. The rereadability still applies, but regardless, the slowburn of the read – and discovering how early it kind of lets you figure out the general What but not the Why – is definitely part of what burns it in as an enduring experience. Top down, a young man in a small town experiences some personal crises of faith and sanity when it seems that something – some beast? – is tearing his town to shreds every time he goes to sleep. Told in washes of gray with splashes of red, Zander already proves he’s doing something slightly different here by not using the red to strictly depict blood, or even necessarily items of import; additionally, he leans very much into lost time experienced by the protagonist, and sticks strictly to that as a storytelling device, in a way that’s not cheap (and probably wasn’t easy to devise), and is in fact integral to, again, how one experiences the story. Cannon readers will recognize some visual tics Zander uses – zooms that crop out outside noise to depict the intenseness of a moment for a character; the way Zander is comfortable framing off-beat moments in a way that immediately humanizes even the most absurd or horrifying scenes – but Sleep is particularly dialed in in their application.

The individual issues feature letters with some process Q&As for Zander (also in the Kaiju books, and always interesting to read), and then a corner where he fields letters that are particular to guessing about what’s happening in the book. The inside cover also features an evolving town map that makes for another storytelling device.

I’ll lastly call out a more spoilery review that covers this stuff way more intelligently than I could have: Sleep by Zander Cannon – by Joshua Leto. I cheated by saving that ’til last, because it probably says everything I would’ve or should’ve.