The Nice House on the Lake: the Deluxe Edition

Product Information

Batman Gambit: It's revealed in the final issue of Cycle One that the plan to make the housemates ultimately accept their situation in the house isn't Walter's at all; it's Norah's, and she devised it based on her ability to predict how the group would react to the situation, and what scenarios would lead them to a path of ultimate acceptance. Walter is initially hesitant to use her plan, but after his own attempts to get them on board utterly fail (which Norah also predicted), he agrees to try it her way. And it works. So you DO find out what's going on in a small way. NOT what is happening in the outside world as far as the alien invasion thing, but what might be happening and definitely what some of the other inmates of the house were aware of (unaware of?).

Bait-and-Switch: The Ryan from the present day is wearing bandages on her face and holding a spear, indicating something bad has happened. She also puts on a N95 respirator, indicating that perhaps there is something toxic in the air...until we get to the beginning of the story and see that she already had the respirator due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. And, the very last line of the book? Yeah, to me, it felt cheap. It's the whole, "stay tuned, there's more to come" when we should have just been left with a "holy shit, what are they gonna do now?" ending. Driven to Suicide: The guests can request items from Walter by writing on a notepad. Molly requests a gun, a rope and then a straight razor when her requests for her husband and parents alive and well aren't granted. Walter repeatedly refuses these requests, until David gets the razor for her by asking for it on his own notepad. Although it turns out they can't actually die, so it doesn't matter whether she gets the razor or not. A mutual friend, Walter, invites ten people to stay in a fancy lakeside house in the country for a weekend getaway. A nice house, far enough away from the hectic pace of modern life to make you think you were the last people on Earth - and then it turns out that you are! Because “Walter” is an alien who has saved his nearest and dearest from the end of the world. What next - imprisonment in some hellish mystery box? Oh…

Become a Member

There’s a lot more to the mystery but I won’t give anything away here - suffice it to say, they deepen it and were about the only parts of the book I found compelling, sprinkled in amidst the bland group’s past and present witterings-on. The book is good once Tynion gets on with it - it’s just a shame that most of the time he doesn’t and seems satisfied simply relaying dreary conversations between the characters who are just sitting around, like a third-rate Bendis impersonator. And that is only a basic outline of the otherwise character-driven series. What makes Nice House such an essential story is not its science-fiction-tinged horror plot—Martinez Bueno's body horror is strangely gorgeous and unparalleled—but rather its unflinching look at complicated human relationships. As the characters' relationships to each other and to their old friend Walter unfurl over the course of the series, readers come to understand that the horror doesn't arise from the aliens and the apocalypse. The horror is Walter's betrayal of their trust—and so their betrayal of Walter in return. The explanation for what is happening is.. unexciting..? I believe the ending of this volume is supposed to be a kind of twist, and it's more of a sigh, really. Baggy storytelling.. feels like the same story could've been told a lot more tightly. At least two issues/chapters felt like wheelspinning. The Nice House on the Lake is a short horror graphic novel series about this group of "friends" who are brought together to live in this nice house on a lake by a mutual friend they all share. After getting there he tells them the rest of the world is gone and some weird things start happening .

I was so excited that the second volume was available because the opening volume was spectacular. It took a few seconds to realize that Walter had played with everyone’s memories again, which is when I settled in and followed along. This time around, we watch as Walter tries to manipulate everyone into settling down in their new reality now that they think they’re just trapped at the lake house. The only problem is that no one wants to settle in long-term because they think there’s a world that still exists outside of the lake house. However, it is going much smoother since they’re no longer angry and upset knowing what happened to everyone they’ve ever known. Not to mirror the issue of ecosystem/balance/longevity too closely from the comic’s own plot but I think the whole model would need to change to keep things running.Tynion is just not quite clever enough to pull any more twists out, or at least at this frequency, as the few here feel a bit thin or frayed compared to the earlier ones (maybe it’s just the downside of reading a collected volume as opposed to the floppies). Big Fancy House: The book is, after all, called The Nice House on the Lake. It's really nice and includes pretty much everything the characters could want, including a movie theatre. Of course, Walter did this because he knew that they could never leave. With Something Is Killing the Children and The Department of Truth, James Tynion IV has changed the face of horror in modern comics—now get ready for his most ambitious story yet, alongside his Detective Comics partner Álvaro Martínez Bueno! As everyone prepares to leave the house, however, Ryan realizes this is why Walter brought them there. Walter tells them they can't leave — he loves them, so he has made sure to spare them from the genocide his people are doing. They will survive the apocalypse...but they can't leave the house on the lake. Ever.Coming out in 2021, it was interesting to see the pandemic briefly alluded to, though reading it in 2023 it was difficult to not compare the opening of the book to the film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery as both have an extremely similar, mysterious set-up (and oddly both have someone working on a Democratic Party campaign). There are A LOT of characters, but this guide came in handy: You’d need to get us better invested in the characters. Do cool time jumps, or leap to other cells of lab rats, introduce us to other Walters more/less sentimental than Walter-proper (and their little cells too). Let the walls of the other cells touch and clarify the scale, where we really are. Show us the world burning for real. I dunno. But the form and the delivery both need a refresh. Stars Volume 2 collects issues #7-12 of the comic. This was supposed to be a limited 12 issue series but the ending of this leaves so many questions unresolved that I have to assume there will be more issues. Will I read them though? Probably not. read this amazing essay "Fragmentation of the Self" that has nothing to do with a nice house on a lake, but I stole some phrases and ideas from it anyway: I kind of hoped this would be the end of it, but no, these volumes are only 'cycle one'. Means there must be a bicycle coming.

This is, admittedly, a fun story that has a lot of heart to it. Walter is an interesting character and we really feel his struggle, though still empathize more with the others who we unfortunately only really know in their context to Walter and never quite get to know as themselves much. I do enjoy how much this series is sort of a critique on millennial friend groups and culture, with some wry and subtle digs that amuse me, and the group dynamic really works though sometimes it’s tough to know who is who. Overall I wanted to like this more than I did and despite some pretty mind blowing ideas and explanations, I think this is where I’ll drop out of the series while still very eager to read his other works, particularly continuing Something is Killing the Children. Not a bad series, but the cumbersome and clunky aspects can drag the otherwise imaginative and creepy fun. Shout-Out: In Issue 4, David is wearing Ferris Bueller's Iconic Outfit, having apparently requested it from Walter via the notepad. the camera movements of the mind take it in but not all at once, a shot here, a shot there, swing left swing right, zoom in zoom out, cut. edit. try to put it all together as a narrative, as something that makes sense, some kind of sense, any kind of sense but nonsense; but there is no sense, all of the senses may be working overtime, one two three four five, but nothing is making sense, sense has stopped making sense. in this nice house on the lake. all abstractions, all generalizations, treat words and images and people and thoughts as units existing in some matrix of comparison. the doctor, the pianist, the politico, the artist(s), etc. et al, all the participants in this study taking place in a nice house on the lake... all treat the story as substance. all treat their own selves as having some substance, a genuine identity, rather than a label or title to be fulfilled. all attempt to communicate. all fail. their last communication, for now, for when, is a bullet. it fails. but that was the plan all along, to fail. to fail is to keep living? This reads like it's supposed to be a character piece, but we only get to see the characters in reference to Walter. I know almost nothing about the characters.But I did enjoy the various aspects of the story like the weird sculptures scattered around the compound, and the questions arising from the reveals: why is there a symbol for each person, why can no-one remember travelling to the house, how is the world ending and why, and, of course, Walter himself. I wonder if the name is derived from Walter Tevis, the author of, among others, The Man Who Fell to Earth? Walter gives off a vibe similar to Newton from that novel.