Warning! Spoilers for The Nice House on the Lake #1 ahead!
Being based around a group of friends joining together for a vacation getaway in a remote location, one might expect The Nice House on the Lake to follow every tired trope from the horror genre. Instead, the first issue of this new comic by James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno subverts those clichés to craft an elegant modern thriller born of the collective fears of Western civilization in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It manages this despite also not really being about an untreatable plague or a more traditional post-apocalyptic work, although its opening monologue is delivered by a survivor who would not look out of place among the cast of The Walking Dead.
Most of The Nice House on the Lake #1 is devoted to introducing us to the protagonists. All of them are educated professionals and most of them work in a creative capacity. Their host, a man named Walter, mysteriously vanished from all their lives at some point in the past few years, before suddenly inviting them to join him at the titular abode. Adding to the mystery, Walter assigns each of the friends a codename and a symbol based on their occupation, such as The Writer, The Accountant and The Consultant. This prompts one of the friends to make a joking reference to the X-Men, mocking the "mutant names" that they'll use "while protecting a society that hates and fears you." In a lesser work of horror, this would be the setup to some psycho killer or magic monster attacking the houseguests, but this is not that kind of story.
The first twist is delivered after Walter arrives and people start to relax, having every luxury to enjoy in the nice house on the lake, apart from reliable Wi-Fi. Only Ryan Cane, The Artist, seems able to get a signal on her smart phone. This leads her to make a horrifying discovery, which she relays to the rest of Walter's guests: something is happening in the outside world and it looks like the end of the world. The assembled guests witness the collapse of society through a series of Tweets and Twitch streams, with the setting being established as somewhere in the DC Comics multiverse as one person insists Superman will fix everything and the people crying about exploding eyeballs and skin melting off their bones are just alarmists panicking over nothing.
The parallels between the unknown apocalypse and the reactions of many people to the real-world COVID-19 crisis are plainly clear. The horror of the situation echoes the reality of many people who felt disconnected from the rest of humanity during the pandemic and like they were watching the world end on social media from within the safety of their own homes. It is a brilliant conceit on the part of James Tynion IV that he keeps the exact details of the disaster vague. The reader does not need to be told the details. Whatever they can imagine is far worse and will hit them much harder than anything a comic book creative team can depict. That being said, Alvaro Martinez Bueno (backed by the colors of Jordie Bellaire and the letters of AndWorld Designs) presents some truly disturbing imagery amid some well-crafted mock-ups of various e-mail apps and social media platforms.
This attention to detail, paired with its tapping the zeitgeist of post-pandemic society, marks The Nice House on the Lake #1 as something unique among the vast variety of horror comics. Genre enthusiasts will love it for how it twists the standard tropes to offer something new, while simultaneously building off of real-world anxieties to present a story that will be immediately relatable and enjoyable to comic readers who aren't big horror fans. This book is a high-water mark for DC Comics' Black Label line and a must-read experience.