Zeb Larson reviews Burning Fields #6…
In the wake of the assault on Carapace’s headquarters, Dana and Aban arrive to investigate whathappened to their allies, while Renfro, the killer who is the focus of the manhunt, stalks their every move.
Verge and Carapace are being taken apart by Asag’s minions as we draw ever closer to the denouement of this comic. At this point, Dana and Aban are just scrambling to keep up with the demons, and they don’t really have a plan for how to get out of the mess they’re in. Yet this issue keeps the focus small, with most of the book focused on Renfro and his men or Dana and Aban. It works, but it feels a little slower than other issues, and the next issue cannot come soon enough. I will be discussing spoilers in this review, so consider yourself forewarned.
Decker and his men emerge from the tunnels beneath the city to begin their “work.” While Verge sends a team to deal with Barzani (courtesy of some misinformation from Decker), Renfro beats them to the punch and massacres the group. Dana and Aban manage to get the coordinates off of Harper, but arrive just in time to see the security team be massacred by the assembled ghouls. Dana tries to get a shot off at Decker, but before she can Aban gets attacked, and the pair find themselves surrounded and outnumbered.
There’s a trope that Moreci has avoided that I really appreciate: the horror monster’s weak point. Avoiding that cliché really pays off here. Too many horror stories have some McGuffin that the protagonists are trying to assemble or find to stop the big baddie, and the timing is always too convenient, assembling it just in time to save themselves. There’s none of that here: Dana and Aban don’t really have a plan and are just scrambling just trying to keep up with how quickly everything is falling apart. Dana reaching for her gun to shoot Renfro is a wild hail mary, but it’s not as though she has time to come up with anything better. There’s a genuine sense of desperation and panic, and it keeps the drama of the comic going by leaving it at least somewhat unclear whether or not they’ll save the day.
I’m also loving the dark turn Dana has taken as this series has progressed. Locking Harper in the shipping container with the possessed guy was a cold damned thing to do to a person, but after everything that’s happened it would be unrealistic to expect Dana to be playing fairly or even humanely. She tried to do that once years ago and it failed, and now that a similar problem has come up of course she’s going to stop pulling her punches.
The drama and pacing of this issue balances out the fact that not as much really happens this time around. The sequence with the security team makes for great drama as they slowly find the remains of Barzani’s people and the trail leading to Decker, which of course leads to their death. It all unfolds slowly, but that builds up the tension even though the outcome is inevitable from the beginning. However, the downside is that the time spent with the security team or with Verge is time spent away from the main characters.
We’re also just so close to the end that one can’t help but wonder what Asag’s end game is and how Decker will try and bring that about. It’s inevitable that in a horror mystery, eventually you’ll want to race to the end to see what happens, and that happens a little bit here too. Now I really can’t wait for the penultimate issue.
Rating: 8.3/10
Zeb Larson
Originally published July 22, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
