Let Your Ezrulies Hang Out
Written By: Nalo Hopkinson and Dan Watters
Illustrated By: Dominike “DOMO” Stanton
Colors By: John Rauch
Letters By: AndWorld Design
Cover By: Sean Andrew Murray
Edited By: Molly Mahan
Associate Editor: Amedeo Turturro
Assistant Editor: Maggie Howell
Executive Editor: Mark Doyle
Cover Price: $3.99
On Sale Date: February 13, 2019
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**
I ga-ron-tee you’re gonna love my review of House of Whispers# 6! Alright…I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry, okay? I don’t mean to disrespect Cajun folks or genteel Southern men. I apologize. I hope we can move past this.
Explain It!
Madame Ezrulie Red-Eye is having an awful time sleeping. For one thing, there’s a lot on her mind, what with her nephew Shakpana traipsing madly in the waking world, spreading a horrible plague. For another thing, Ezrulie is a god and doesn’t need sleep. She’s so fitful, that her attendant alligator guards don’t bother rousing her, when they see her Napoleon-hatted husband Agwe plummet into the purple waters. Meanwhile, Uncle Monday gets busted pilfering the Dreaming’s library, so he grabs two books and scrams out the window. On the way back to the houseboat, he goes through a valley that makes him remember his origin story.
In New Orleans, Madame Ezrulie’s adherents are having a funeral parade, and Habibi and Lumi’s dad is there since he was saved from a tsunami by one of them last issue. It turns out that, in between issues, Ms. Turtle sent Maggie, Latoya and the girls back to New Orleans to find someone that could translate the pages pilfered from Shakpana—and then decided to stay in the archipelago that received her last issue. Well, the person that knows about these pages is none other than Alter Boi! He recognizes them as Shakpana’s, and summons him for some answers. Shakpana manifests in the body of an attendant, even though I could swear that the last issue ended with him tumbling into the Dreaming.
Also at the party are the spirits of Madame Ezrulie’s two other husbands, the two-headed snake Damballa and the hammer-wielding titan Ogun. They tangle with Shakpana’s spirit form, so he calls upon the ghosts that have been added to the Dreaming for support? He can do that? The spirits grab energy from Madame Ezrulie, who dived into the water to save her rapidly dissipating husband Agwe. Uncle Monday shows up and causes the spirits to scatter, but Ezrulie’s husband is still shapeless…so they bind him with the houseboat, which they then sail off to…somewhere. I think.
I glossed over quite a bit there at the end because, quite frankly, I have no idea what’s going on. Instead of pulling back and explaining what’s come before, this issue when balls to the wall and threw at the reader some of the weirdest and most esoteric principles established thus far. Shakpana controls the ghosts? And then at one point, he plunges his hands into the young girls’ bodies, and Ezrulie can communicate with the waking world all of a sudden. What? What part of the game is that? The effect is that, not knowing the lore and stories surrounding these Cajun gods, it reads like utter nonsense. There are definitely intriguing bits in here, but after being assaulted with so much high weirdness and no explanations to support it, I’ve begun to feel inundated.
Bits and Pieces:
Some more stuff happens, but it's making less and less sense as we go. I can't even rightly say that the initial story src is concluded with this issue. So much ethereal posturing has become tedious.
5.5/10
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