Did not finish (DNF)

i couldn't keep up with story and got confused a lot which lead me to lose interest pretty quickly.

120 Pages of Mood and Monologuing

So, two F.B.I. agents walk into a warehouse, and it turns out to be a gateway to their own personal hell. They have some sins left over from their last case, and it may be time to pay up. This Volume 1, which collects the first five issues of the story, starts with a bang, gets stuck on idle/background-fill for the majority of its run, and then ends with a cliffhanger after having made very little progress.

Flashbacks are fine, especially when a story is being set up. But this Volume has multiple flashbacks, some of which are only tangentially related to the story, and the flashbacks contain so little context that it takes a long time to begin to string them together into a coherent backstory. What doesn't help is that every major character is either hiding something or in denial, so every fact has to be teased out of a reluctant speaker. I think that's supposed to be dramatic, but what it feels like is watching a lawyer depose an uncooperative witness. Flashbacks and storytelling just shouldn't be this hard.

But you keep reading because the creepy mood, (and the implicit promise of superior creepiness to come), hooks you. This reminded me a great deal of that Sam Neill cult sci-fi movie "Event Horizon", in which a gateway to Hell opens on an abandoned space ship and some rescuers get sucked down into the void. This may ultimately head that way, but it just feels like it's going to be a long, talky ride to get there.

The art supports the story, but doesn't add much in the way of Wow!. Flashbacks are crisp and clear, so apart from some characters looking alike you get a clean sense of what's happening. The warehouse scenes are all dark and shadowy, so I'm curious to see how it's drawn once we come out of the shadows and the action ramps up. I fear we may just stay in shadows the whole way.

Bottom line for me was that this had a lot of promise and enough successful set pieces inside the warehouse that I'm going to keep an eye on the series and hope that Volume 2 picks up the pace and opens up the story. It could happen.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Unfortunately, this is just issue 1 and the confusion and uncertainty woven into this graphic novel persists still having read it. Setting this aside and trying to be fair in my review I shall try to pass comment and make sense of my jumbled thoughts.
It is the story of a pair of FBI agents on a long-standing case looking for a paedophile ring abducting children across several states. No-one has an angle on where this is going as little progress is made. Then Shaw one of the federal agents the story centres on, along with her partner McGregor takes her hunch to her boss. What if it is just the work of one man.
This story is told in flashback as most of the action takes place in a dark and creepy warehouse. All the agents and response units who have entered the building have been spooked. The SWAT are huddled in their vehicle and the initial two agents to enter the carnivorous warehouse are missing and all contact lost.
It falls on Shaw and McGregor to ‘rescue’ their colleagues. They begin a confusing time within the building that drastically interferes with a sense of reality. They wake up dazed, unsure how long they have been out, unable to find the entrance/exit and pondering how two people can have the same out of body experience or share a drug induced nightmare together.
That they have no discernible pulse but retain memory and logical reasoning is reassuring up to a point. They have no immediate explanation for events other than someone is manipulating their minds and bodies. But they strange things start to happen, and weird events logic cannot explain. As they get further into the horror of a maze, a ghost house they feel ready to give up. They wonder if they have indeed died and this is a walk-through Hell.
Clever set up against terrible crimes and at times a less than proper investigation. You feel that in doing their job they have perhaps crossed the line and gained enemies to perform this elaborate mind game. Truth is the art of reading here is akin to peering into fog.
The complexity of the story is a real challenge. There is little colour to the illustrations and this adds to the mood. What I find striking is the conversations between McGregor and Shaw. This is intense drama not just revealing a story and draws the reader in to the point you feel as helpless as the 2 feds lost in time and stumbling around what appears to be increasingly their own version of damnation.

'A Walk Through Hell, Volume 1' by Garth Ennis with art by Goran Sudžuka is an apt description for reading this strange graphic novel.

Two cops respond to a crime call and find themselves in a labrynthine warehouse of horrors. But before that happens, we see a shooting at a mall and the twitter output that follows. Also involved in this story is a suspect involved in the disappearance and gruesome murder of several children. The cops can't decide if they have been drugged or are dead.

What I can't figure out is why this is happening, and why it is so difficult to be interesting. The plot elements would seem to be good, but the way they fit together feels stiff and disjointed. Maybe further down the series, it becomes clear, but this one was a puzzler. Which is sad because the art by Goran Sudžuka is pretty good.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Aftershock Comics, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

Nope. Sorry. I just didn't get it. I DNF'd 44 pages in, because I was just so confused. There was a lot of flashbacks, without admitting they were flashbacks, the first few pages alone were confusing to follow and understand, and I often felt like I'd stepped into a story halfway through. Not for me.

The story starts with a mass shooting at the mall. It is a chaotic scene. The shooter was a witness for two FBI agents Shaw and McGregor. Shaw and McGregor go into a warehouse where two FBI agents had gone in 9 hours ago and never came back out. A swat team was called in before Shaw and McGregor arrived at the warehouse. The swat team went in and came back out almost immediately saying they didn’t feel right. Once back inside the truck, they decide to do suicide shooting each other in their heads. Why? Will Shaw and McGregor discover what happen to the former FBI agents?

There is no blood or gore in this story but there is a surprising feeling of uneasiness that grows as the story moves forward. As the story twists and turns, I wanted to know what was causing the mysteries in the story. The artwork completes the story. The artist has done an excellent job of expressing the storyline. I want to read volume 2 now so I can hopefully get some answers that weren’t given in this volume.

Brief Summary of the Plot: When two federal agents go missing inside a warehouse, FBI Agents McGregor and Shaw go in to find them. They soon realize that what they walked into is not just an ordinary warehouse, but a fun house...for insane people. If it wasn't creepy enough to fall unconscious and wake up without a pulse, the two FBI agents find one of the missing agents blowing his own head off again and again like some gruesome version of ground-hogs day. Will they ever make it out alive?

My Review: The artwork was really good, and the overall story was creepy as hell. The story alternates from a past case that the partners were working on, which is somehow related to them being stuck in the warehouse. The back and forth between the past case and the scenes in the warehouse got a little confusing at times, but it all pulled together in the end. As this is only Volume 1, I would be curious to see what Volume 2 holds in store for the two agents.

Maybe I'm the target audience for this because I know people who work for the FBI in Los Angeles which makes the book feel very real to me. I could see agents encountering this hellish, mysterious situation and reacting in exactly the way(s) these agents do. Color me intrigued and eagerly awaiting the next volume.

I received a digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.

I couldn’t get into the story... The plot was confusing sometimes and mediocre in general.
The artwork was okay though.

This was a pretty confusing story, jumping around between past and present without any clear indication of where/when the scenes take place. But I was still intrigued enough to stick with it and hope that subsequent volumes will fill in enough details for this all to make sense. You've got a couple of cops chasing a pedophile who might be a serial killer (and who might be able to make people do whatever he tells them to do) who stumble on a warehouse that just might contain a portal (or entrance) to Hell. How exactly that warehouse and the other case connect (and what got the police on the scene in the first place) is not all that clear, but the two head into the warehouse, in search of another pair of cops who went in before and never came back (there's also a SWAT team that goes in and comes back out very quickly, before meeting a terrible end). Normally, I hate comics that make me work to make sense of them and this one really does make you work. But, hey, it's Garth Ennis, so I'm willing to give him some benefit of the doubt. The artwork by Sudzuka is very strong throughout. Here's hoping future issues/volumes bring more sense to this.

“A walk through hell” pretty accurately sums up the experience of reading most of Garth Ennis’ recent output: his second World of Tanks book, the DC books Dastardly and Muttley and Sixpack and Dog-Welder, his other Aftershock book Jimmy’s Bastards, which was a book-length Viz joke, and now this one!

Two Feds go into a warehouse only to find that it’s an inescapable labyrinth of nightmares and/or a portal to Hell. So how does Ennis manage to take any excitement out of this potential setup and turn it into the most boring comic ever?

It’s mostly a police procedural with the two Feds going over the case details of a wealthy pedo, trying to catch him out by going through paperwork and blah blah blah. It’s not helped by Ennis being vague for the most part and the bad guy being a bland businessman/sociopath who doesn’t say or do anything interesting.

These flashbacks are broken up with moments of pointless horror in the warehouse with Ennis in general trying too hard to shock the reader out of the lethargy of his dull story, like the opening scene which involves a baby getting shot in the head. People getting shot in the head is basically the theme of this book - seriously, I think the number of people who get shot in the head here is in the double digits!

There’s no real plot or story or character arcs, it’s just Ennis switching between boring police procedural and boring repetitive and gratuitous horror. I’m amazed a writer as talented as Garth Ennis can produce a book as dreary as A Walk Through Hell and it’s only because he’s a name writer that he can keep putting out one terrible comic after another like this.

Aftershock remains the dumping ground of unsellable comics passed on by the likes of the Big 2 and Image - walk right on by A Walk Through Hell!

I didn't like this at all. The premise sounded super cool and normally I like Garth Ennis comics but this was just bad. The redeeming factor was the art style which I really liked. Weirdly, a Garth Ennis has been a flop for me

Ennis experiments with the narration and plotting. As frustrating as time jumps can be to some readers, they also make Walk Through Hell an excellent puzzle to solve.

I like dark, cerebral horrors that require attention from the reader, and the creative team delivers precisely this.

Goran Sudzuka and Ive Scorcina are a great art duo. I loved detailed panels with subdued and subtle colour palette.

ARC through NetGalley

This was my first time trying anything by Garth Ennis after being disappointed by Preacher a while back, so I wasn't sure what to expect, and even now, having read this, I'm not entirely certain how I feel about it! There's a lot of good, and a lot of bad, too, to be unpacked in this graphic novel.

The good:
- interesting characters
- diversity (2 queer MCs, multiple POC characters)
- interesting social commentary on the current sociopolitical climate in the US and how it affects minorities
- a few really creepy and/or disturbing scenes

The bad:
- you're immediately thrown into a bizarre scenario with no back story or information about what's happening
- there's very little "logic" to what's happening (i.e., how are people chosen? who "deserves" it and who doesn't?)
- volume 1's ending feels very abrupt and premature

So, all in all, this is a pretty mixed bag, but I'm intrigued enough to say I think I'd like to read volume 2 sometime, and the things that I did like about this graphic novel have me weighing the possibility of giving Preacher another try while I wait.

Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

"A Walk Through Hell" is an interesting crime graphic novel. The art is pretty typical, but the story has some strong points.

So, two investigating detectives enter a warehouse and don't come out. Then another two detectives - the main characters enter and weird things start to happen. It reminded me X-files a little but humor is missing. There's jumping around the timeline but not in a confusing way, I did not have a problem to follow the story at all. I still don't have a clue what is going on there and I think that's good because it makes me want to read another volume. The atmosphere in this was built up great, I felt discomfort more and more as the story continued. Also, I liked this wasn't Ennis' usual work full of action and storytelling did not consist mostly of swearing and simple sentences.

This is volume one of a police procedural story which has a twist of horror. In this volume the FBI are chasing a paedophile who is responsible for the disappearance of a number of children. The suspect gets help from other convicted paedophiles who help him kidnap the children but after this the accomplices then commit suicide. The detectives manage to catch up with one such accomplice who then commits suicide in the interrogation room. They do not know what is driving these men to suicide.

The horror really starts when two investigating FBI detectives enter a warehouse which may have been used for the kidnappings and then the detectives don't come out. Two additional detectives are sent to follow this up and despite the unease of the police outside, they go into the warehouse. What happens then is a series of weird events, flashbacks and shadows, as the four FBI detectives encounter all kinds of inexplicable happenings.

This was not really enjoyable for me, not because of the story, but because it was hard to figure out what was actually happening. It might be because this is volume one and the subsequent volumes might provide a bit more clarity to the story. There were a lot of flashbacks and scenes in this volume which were hard to follow. I won't be reading future volumes because this one was just too much like hard work.

Copy provided by publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

Very promising storyline, with both a slow burn introduction and discomfort penetrating, so to speak, every page.