It’s a warm evening in the small town of Bell River, Ontario. A group of kids are going out to the Mini-Mart for ice cream sandwiches or popsicles. They get there to find the parking lot covered in insects. Only one of them has the guts to walk across to get to the store. It’s going to be a chitinous massacre on the way in. What the kid sees when he gets there is going to be a lot worse in Fishflies #1. Writer/artist Jeff Lemire embarks on a six-issue small-town horror story with a big double-sized issue that takes its time in setting a very immersive atmosphere.

There’s a man dying in Franny’s barn. (Well...it’s Franky’s dad’s barn. Franny’s just a kid in school.) Anyway...looks like he’s bleeding in the stomach. Franny asks the guy if it was his fault. Maybe he did something wrong. The bleeding man says that it wasn’t his fault. The kid says that he can help the guy out. Maybe they have something in the house. He’s got to agree to leave the barn, though. If Franny’s dad finds him there, he’ll be mad. Franny says she’ll take the guy to her secret spot, but he’s got to promise not to tell anyone about it. He agrees to her terms. He hasn’t exactly got a choice. He is dying, after all.

The story introduces the small fictional town of Bell River. (There’s a Belle River in Ontario this side of the comics page, but that’s a different place altogether.) Lemire takes it slow with the story. There’s one major event in the whole first issue before the big reveal at the end. Judging from the way things play out, that one event is going to overshadow the entire series. (The bleeding guy...he didn’t mean to do it. Really. He’s a monster, but Lemire cleverly engenders sympathy for him. He IS dying, after all. Then there’s that twist ) 

Lemire is allowed a great deal of space in the first issue with it being double-length. He makes clever use of the double-size length to let the story play out in huge, open swaths of darkness that add a haunting feeling to the pacing of the events. There’s clever symbolism in Lemire’s sketchy darkness. There are whole pages of darkness. The ominous sound of the crunch that’s repeated a few times. And the look and feel of a hollow cylinder echoing a single gunshot.

Fishflies inhabits a chillingly poetic narrative space. Psychological horror twists into something far more supernatural and deeply unsettling as the story progresses. Above it all, Lemire does a strikingly good job of bringing across the uniquely strange relationship between Franny and the dying man. Their interaction exists mostly in silences and unspoken words. And there is SUCH a profound sense of stillness about the horror right up until that final page. Lemire takes such a hard turn in that final panel of the first issue...it will be interesting to see where he takes it in the final five issues. 

Grade: A+