This is an author and illustrator team that brings a gritty edge to the comics page. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely for those who love a good yarn in visual form. Glad to see that Image is taking the storytelling on and giving these creators, a venue for their narrative work.

Brubaker and Phillips are a powerful duo; I love their Reckless graphic novel series, and felt that Houses of the Unholy felt very similar; a bit of a graphic thriller which involves satanic panic, FBI agents, and abductions. It doesn't have the most exciting art in the world, but I still really enjoyed the story and would recommend it along the authors' other works together.

First I would like to thank Net Galley, Image Comics, Ed Brubaker, and Sean Phillips for my copy of Houses of the Unholy. This was my very first graphic novel ever. I found it to be very enjoyable. I loved the 80's horror religious cult vibe of the story. I found it to be entertaining and I liked ow the art style meshed well with the story. I also enjoyed the flashback sequences of the graphic novel and being able to see the events that led to present day. Overall I found this to be very enjoyable and easy to read. I would definitely check out more titles by this author in the future.

Great art and an interesting take on the satanic panic and an idea of what could of happened to people involved afterwards. I did finish this graphic novel with a bit of confusion but that didn't really take away anything from it I just wish a little more work was done to flesh the ending out a bit more.

I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It was dark and very interesting. If you like cults and demons . This graphic novel is for you. The graphics and the colors were awesome. This was a good quick read. I love dark graphic novels. Also that ending!! I hope there will be more.

A horror graphic novel is right up my alley- I really enjoyed this one, however I was a little let down with the ending. Overall I did really enjoy this though! Definitely want to let the read marinate for a little bit and it could be a five star, I am going to grab a physical copy for sure!

I love Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. The story and the artwork together with the colours chosen was able to portray the creepy feeling the graphic novel wanted to. I loved that the story was way more than what we see. There were a few twists that I didn't see coming and can't wait until the second volume.

Cults, satanic panic and betrayal...

An enjoyable read throughout. I really liked the way they used the flashbacks to piece the story together the further you progress through the novel. The only bummer was the open ending - it left me feeling a bit empty, as the ending was totally inconclusive.

Overall, I really liked this one. The artwork was pretty and the story was gripping. The only reason for the 3 stars instead of 4 is down to the open ending as I find these quite frustrating!

Thanks to Image Comics for letting me read this one in exchange for an honest review.

My first graphic novel. A true horror and loved every second of it. Took me on a wild ride and cant wait to read more!

This was very mid for me. There was nothing new in this story if you are at all familiar with the Satanic Panic as a historical event or if you are familiar with any kind of satanic/cult trope plot line in horror. It could have taken this story to such different places but this felt very safe and very over done.

The team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are often called the "dynamic duo" or the "dream team" in a lot of the comic book community circles I participate in. I continue to NOT understand why. Houses of the Unholy was interesting to me at first but I just felt the writing got lazy and the character development was weak. Phillips gratuitous depiction of women is tiresome.

Natalie is one of the "Satanic Six," a group of children who told tales of being taken by trusted adults to be tortured by demons and satan himself. As an adult, she's had that history as a shroud from which she cannot escape. As her fellow Satanic Six find themselves in trouble, Natalie is next on the list.
A short, fast read. I would have loved to see this fleshed out into a longer story - there's so many fun points; with an FBI agent, car chase, stalkers, conspiracy theorists, and more. It was beautifully illustrated, I loved the use of colors. So much of the book is in a sort of sunset tone (reds, oranges, pinks) which fits perfectly with the end-of-days themes.

A beautifully illustrated comic about the darkness of the Satanic Panic and a fictional account of its ripples through the years.
Well written story with characters that were horribly flawed and a twist I didn't see coming.
The ending felt...unfinished though. I wasn't left with any sense of finality or effect. All I had was the bleakness of the story and even that felt short lived.
I would love to see more from these creators especially a darker horror story. The art and dialogue were excellent.

I’ve been on a comic book kick recently and was really happy to be selected to read this on Netgalley, however, this just left me a little cold. I love the art style - it felt almost noir in its penmanship and really brought the characters to life. The story though, that’s what fell a little flat for me. Gripping for the first two thirds and then kinda’ just stopped - where did the horror go! Anyways, despite my middling review I would still recommend this.

Houses of the Unholy had me very interested the entire time. A group of six children making up horrible demonic stories about the adults around them abusing them had longstanding consequences. Years later these children are being murdered one by one and an FBI agent and one of the original six go on an investigation to figure out what's going on. I'm typically a Brubaker Phillips fan and will continue to read their work but the ending of this one had me raging. I will still be telling my audience about it and look forward to different viewpoints.

I mostly enjoyed this, but possibly because I live in the UK not the US, wasn’t alive in the 1980s, and have never understood religion let alone religious fanaticism, I don’t think I was the intended audience.

It was interesting and dark with a lot of plot twists, but it felt like the overarching plot fell flat, especially given the open ending- I need answers please!?

Read through Netgalley.

Low key this was better than I thought it was going to be. I'm not the biggest fan of the font on the cover. But the book was good and I enjoyed it.

I adored the artwork of this book, but I was not overly attached to the storyline. I couldn't stand the main characters, the spiciness seemed thrown in just for the sake of it and came out of nowhere, and just overall it didn't do it for me.

Satanic panic gripped America in the 1980s, like a modern-day Salem witch hunt, and suddenly the Devil was everywhere - especially in Natalie Burns’ town where she and a few other kids, later dubbed the “Satanic Six”, accused teachers of heinous acts, claiming Satan was involved, leading to horrible consequences for all concerned.

Decades later and someone is murdering the members of the Satanic Six and Natalie’s gotta go on the run. Teaming up with a disgraced FBI agent, they have to try and save the remaining others and figure out who’s killing them all. It couldn’t be Satan… could it?

Like their last book, Where the Body Was, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ latest collab, Houses of the Unholy, is another standalone book. It’s a twisty little number riffing on real life hysteria (Satanic panic was - arguably still is - a thing) and isn’t a bad comic but it’s not up there with their best either.

The story jumps between the present and the past throughout but the present storyline is much more compelling than the flashbacks, which become tedious and slow the narrative down. They provide some necessary backstory on the characters but often repeats itself - yeah yeah, we get it, Satan, blah blah - and feels like these are included to pad the book out to an acceptable length.

The present-day storyline though is unpredictable and often interesting. Natalie’s a professional kidnapper, tracking down kids who’ve joined cults and bringing them back to their concerned parents - that whole opening scene is pretty damn good. Brubaker includes more intriguing figures like Agent West and Natalie’s conspiracy nut brother Brendan and this narrative moves at a decent clip.

That said, the story never totally made sense to me - Agent West’s presence, the point of the murders - so I wasn’t surprised with the twist as I was waiting for something like that to happen given the half-(Bru)baked plot. The final act is a bit weak too. It’s a fault of this kind of story - anything Devil-worshipper-related tends to end in few limited ways, which skews towards the melodramatic and silly rather than coming off as exciting or scary - so I’m a little disappointed to see Brubaker fall back on convention like this rather than attempt something different to the well-worn formula. A certain character’s turncoat motivations too were especially unconvincing when stated out loud.

I found Houses of the Unholy to be by turns entertaining and boring. The narrative as a whole is pretty good until the final act where it all falls apart in an anticlimactic mess. The present day scenes are a lot of fun though there are too many flashbacks so that the narrative never gets to build substantial momentum. Sean Phillips’ art is what it always is: dependable and competent, if unexciting and occasionally bland.

Definitely not their best book, nor among their worst, Houses of the Unholy is a middling addition to the ever-growing Brubaker/Phillips library.

This is a 3.5 star review rounded up to 4 stars.

Houses of the Unholy is the story of Natalie Burns, a woman who was part of a satanic panic situation when she was a kid and who is now a private investigator who sometimes rescues kids from cults.

The story follows Natalie as she is involved in an investigation of the murders of people who were involved in the satanic panic scare she was part of in her childhood. As this investigation rolls on, the reader also learns about what happened when Natalie was a child.

This is a book by two creators who have worked together for decades. Brubaker and Phillips work very well together, and that is what makes this book work. The story and character work are good and the art is wonderful. The only flaw I found in the book was the ending.

There were a few too many twists at the end and I felt that, while I couldn't see how else it could end satisfactorily, I still wasn't satisfied. But, all in all, I found it an enjoyable reading experience.