Stories about quiet seaside towns with something dark to hide feel almost like a sub-genre of British horror in themselves. Dix’s The Idris File follows the 1970s exploits of teenage boy Idris who moves to the Welsh coast with his mother. Idris’s mother has taken up a position as housekeeper to the mysterious Mr. Miller, and the pair take up residence in the confines of his empty house. Miller is an abrupt and oddball character whose social circle does little to alleviate suspicion.
Idris, meanwhile, becomes slowly acquainted with the town’s strange cast of characters. The local eccentric Squid who is convinced of a monster lurking in the sea nearby; the weird grocer Mr. Eynon who worships his unfaithful wife; and Gwen, the local priest’s daughter who seems to hang out in the church graveyard all day long. Sinister forces are stirring in this grim locale, though, as ghostly presences and long-buried Nazi conspiracies converge to ensure Idris’s stay here will not be an uneventful one…
Dix’s story is a curious mix of tense, claustrophobic build-up and bleak, almost farcical, humour. The two main plot strands initially seem unrelated but slowly their connections are revealed as events move on. The overarching structure of the story is founded on Nazi rebirth and conquest, with the antagonists proving to be a bizarre mix of the clinically efficient and the laughably incompetent. But it’s the more personal relationships and subplots that pull the reader into events, particularly the poignancy around Idris’s friendships with Gwen and Squid.
Dix’s art has a malleable quality, giving his characters a kind of pliable grotesqueness. This works in echoing both the odd, almost slapstick nature of the story’s villains and their machinations but also emphasises the otherworldly sadness that permeates everything. Idris’s loneliness and solitude, established so firmly at the book’s beginning, proving to be something of an inescapable prison. Use of muted, dank colour is key throughout in giving the town its atmosphere of dread and decay, with the rundown and closed local amusement park being especially memorable.
Not every story element and revelation feels fully spelled out by the story’s denouement but that only serves to give The Idris File an even creepier sense of the intangible and the unknown. An unsettling cross-genre drama soaked in a cloying sense of the nihilistic that feels peculiarly British in delivery.
Dix • Fantagraphics Books, $24.99
Review by Andy Oliver
