King Diamond: Abigail by King Diamond, Dan Watters, Damien Worm and others

 

(pb; October 2021: graphic novel, based on King Diamond’s 1987 concept album. Publisher: Z2 Comics.)

From the back cover

“King Diamond’s classic horror story featured on his 1987 concept album Abigail has received a masterful in-depth overhaul and is brought to life in a whole new way in this. . . graphic novel by Dan Watters, Damien Worm, and King Diamond himself!”

 

Review

Summer 1845. Jonathan Lafey, in financial trouble in London, inherits a mansion from his never met and deceased uncle near the rarely visited and superstitious village of Wodenstone. Jonathan flees London with his second wife, Miriam, an eighteen-year-old, talented artist. (His first wife, Sarah, died during childbirth as did their child.)

While traveling through dark woods near Wodenstone, seven shadowy and supernatural horsemen stop the Lafeys’ carriage to warn Jonathan and Miriam to turn back, that the castle is a bad place. Of course, Jonathan scoffs at this (despite his spine-shivery response to the suddenly disappeared horsemen), and he and his wife travel on. Once in Wodenstone, they get a chilly silence when Jonathan asks where La Fey House is—not that they need directions once outside, they can see the mansion atop a nearby hill.

A stink (“It is iron and offal scent of botched surgeries. Of spilled amniotic fluid thickened by blood”) permeates Lafey House, although Miriam claims to not smell it. That’s just the beginning of their troubles in the abode where Count Lafey, Jonathan’s uncle and by most accounts a cruel man, murdered his wife and child—the latter a restless and hungry spirit named Abigail.

King Diamond’s spooky, bloody, and mood-immersive sonic work gets comparable graphic novel treatment, with a nightmare-inducing house with way too many shadowy corners, paintings, and secret places. Damien Worm’s artwork captures well the spirit of Diamond’s melodic and guitar-heavy tale, and Dan Watters’s writing is spare enough to not belabor the source album’s story yet detailed enough to supply further mood-effective details to Abigail.

I’d recommend this graphic novel to fans of Gothic horror, haunted houses and, of course, King’s 1987 album. Here’s hoping Z2 follows this up with a companion work to its 2002 sequel, Abigail II: The Revenge.