They say that after the storm the calm returns… but in the new album by Samuel Stern “The Palace of Memory” with drawings by Antonio Mlinaric, story by Massimiliano Filodoro and cover by Emiliano Tanzillo, Maurizio Di Vincenzo, Valerio Piccioni, published by Bugs Comics, it seems that this has not happened.
After the events of the Apocalypse in the previous issue, the entire world has fallen into the shadows, which have come out into the open, spilling out from humans, exposing their true identity.
In a context of desolation and abandonment with dark and dramatic atmospheres, where the certainties of normal life have been swallowed up by the unknown and fear, while the streets of the city are walked by strange individuals and historic buildings have vanished from their functionality to leave space for emptiness, we find Samuel who continues with his exorcisms….
A very particular story, because after everything that happened in the previous issues, paradoxically we find the Red calmer, less taken by worries and feelings of guilt, determined in what he has to do and less taken by remorse and psychological torments, almost as if he wanted to explore the true human identities of the protagonist, questioning the boundaries that separate the human from the non-human.
This new reality, which in some ways recalls the surreal atmospheres of the film “Constantine” and those of “1997: Escape from New York”, transports the reader into a very particular narrative context, a sort of dreamlike gothic, all excellently crafted with a strong but clean line and a script that creates situations that escape the control of the reader who wonders: is this the end of everything or a new beginning?