In The Red Mother (2020), Danger Lurks in Plain Sight
Original Cover for The Red Mother, Issue #1
Effective horror feeds a person’s existential fears and leaves them looking over their shoulder when they’re alone. The Red Mother: Volume One, is this kind of horror. The 2020 graphic novel, written by Jeremy Haun and illustrated by Danny Luckert, sinks into the blood and elicits uncomfortable questions. Are evil unseen things lurking in the shadows? Is that mysterious presence looming in the corner imagined... or something else?
A major theme in The Red Mother is the concept of vision. That humans can “see” things at all is weird at best, and unsettling when more consideration is given to the actual scientific process of sight. Eyes serve as a filter for the world rather than a direct reflection, sending abstract signals for the brain to interpret in ways that may or may not be reliable. Putting it in this context, it’s easier to understand why a person who experiences hallucinations would struggle to differentiate between what is “real” and what is a projection from the mind.
In The Red Mother, this question takes on a more sinister meaning. Daisy McDonough, a young puzzle maker who likes traveling and naps, has been adrift after the sale of her company. She finds fulfillment in her happy relationship with an artist named Luke, and the story starts with the walk home after their date at a local pizza joint.
Or rather, that’s when the narrative starts. The comic book begins with four panels colored crimson, depicting a woman’s desiccated corpse, floating at the center of a crumbling archway. Both eyes are missing, but her right eye socket appears to be disintegrating. A creepy beginning to a story that quickly switches to a mundane night out between lovers.
While returning from the pizza place, Luke is suddenly distracted by an open wrought iron gate leading to a shadowed apartment building. It’s the city, so approaching any shadowy threshold is never a good idea, but Luke walks toward the gate as if called by an unseen person on the other side. He mutters something about “mother”, and then he’s gone.
Daisy awakes in a hospital bed after the violent aftermath of Luke’s disappearance. In addition to losing her boyfriend, she’s lost her right eye. Over the course of the first chapter, Daisy grapples with grief and confusion. She’s frustrated by the detectives’ lack of answers and unspoken suspicion that Luke was mugged or simply left her—unlikely, since he had asked her to move in with him mere minutes before the event.
As Daisy struggles with the absence of her eye, her true love, and her inspiration, she seeks guidance from a counselor and solace with her best friend and co-worker, Pari. Interesting visual cues begin showing up at this point, including a stone slab on the therapist’s bookshelf that depicts a Celtic triskele symbol, which holds significance both to the story itself, and to myths the comic seems to reference.
Mythology is filled with eye imagery. Crows and ravens pecked at the eyes of fallen soldiers to transport their souls to the afterlife. Odin sacrificed his eye to gain magical wisdom, and the dreadful Balor of Ireland had an eye that could strike men down in battle. In more recent history, a 2008 film called The Eye has a few parallels to The Red Mother—namely, the protagonist receives an eye transplant and begins seeing visions of terrifying entities.
While Daisy doesn’t receive a transplant of an actual human eye, she does have a more common procedure that includes a ball implant to fill out the missing space, and a painted glass eye that can move in sync with the existing eye but—importantly—not see.
And yet, despite her missing vision, Daisy begins to see things that aren’t there. At first, it’s only the color red, falling over her sight like a color lens on a projector; easily explained as a symptom of Charles Bonnet syndrome, which afflicts many people with vision loss. But after a positive meeting with her counselor that gives her renewed hope, Daisy is struck with red in the middle of a crowded city sidewalk and sees something truly horrifying: an immensely tall shadowy figure with broad, cheshire-cat grin coming straight toward her.
The rest of volume one follows Daisy’s attempts to logically explain her panic and public outburst inducing visions. She asks doctors and Pari, web searches Charles Bonnet syndrome, and for a while settles on the theory that her hallucinations are brought on by moments where she’s experiencing intense emotions or life changes. In some horror stories this might be the real answer, but in The Red Mother, it’s anything but.
Each of the four chapters begins the same way, with the Mother herself, floating in that ancient tower archway. There’s no explicit clarification that this is Mother and that Mother wants Daisy, and there’s no need for one. Between the archway that resembles the one Luke passed through, the disintegrating right eye, and the title of the comic, the answer is indisputable. During Daisy’s rapid descent into terror, she repeatedly hears people mention “Mother”, which leads her to the awful conclusion that she is not, in fact, having hallucinations, and the monster is maybe, probably real.
The overall story, art, and writing of this comic have been highly praised. Detailed without being overbearing, a near perfect use of strategic color and symbolism, characters that are imperfect and believable in their attractiveness, a diverse cast, and nice balance of realistic and stylized, which is sometimes difficult to achieve in comics.
The Red Mother takes a normal girl with simple desires and transforms her life into a living nightmare. Horrible things can happen to anyone here, from the loss of a loved one, to the loss of a body part, and the subsequent introduction to a world where ghouls exist.
