They say you can never go home again. Then again, they also say that home is the one place where, if you go there, they have to let you in. What is interesting to me about Silent Hill is that it is somehow the opposite of both of these things at once. Silent Hill is a place where, if you go there, it slithers inside of you and you can never really leave again. Which is why I find the games compelling enough that even though I only ever beat the first one, and with the worst possible ending, I still want to go back and play through the whole series. Which would I suppose be easier if I owned any of them.

This makes it all the more disappointing just how non-good the (apparently first in a series) graphic novelization is. Dying Inside follows a film student, a lauded psychologist, and a punk chick as they interact with the disturbingly empty (although, often it is even more disturbingly not-empty) town of Silent Hill, where a person’s bad thoughts have a way of doing more than haunting them, and really of haunting more than just them. It’s like a horrifying state of mind given flesh, and sidewalks, and hospitals and elementary schools. The story is sufficiently creepy, and has the seed of a really great concept, about a girl’s guilt over losing her little sister at the mall in pretty much the most horrible way imaginable. But the execution is almost total failure, with direction changes that come out of nowhere and plot elements that barely make any sense, even when taken as a whole after the fact. Or it’s possible that it would have been fine if I had not been so distracted by the art, which bleeds all over the page, one panel indistinguishable from the next. And that style could have been very effective as a means of demonstrating the breakdown in reality between Silent Hill and the outside world, except that it was used indiscriminately from the first page to the last. So it could be that it was the art I couldn’t follow and the plot was just fine, instead? I don’t know or really care, because I have forgotten to even write this review for the past two or three days. Not dreaded it or wondered what to say, but consistently forgotten I had even read the book.

That probably makes my point better than any of the rest. Still, it was in some way effective, because damn if I don’t wanna play me some Silent Hill! (Did I ever mention it was originally a video game? Oops.)