By M. Alice LeGrow
Tokyopop, 192 pp.
Rating: Teen

Dinah, a schizophrenic girl in a lonely town, discovered a mausoleum and wound up completing a binding contract with her soul on the line. When asked to pick between eternal damnation for breaking the contract or freeing spirits from the mausoleum, she made the obvious choice. Now on a quest to free spirits and send them to the afterlife, Dinah is not alone in her endeavors. For every ten spirits appeased, she is granted an assistant. She has, so far, earned two assistants: brothers Edaniel and Edrear. The duo looks out for her as she wanders the mausoleum’s vaults to help the trapped spirits. Along the way, she loses a close friend, has to fight through the depression, and gains the romantic interest of Edrear.

Volume six of Bizenghast is a mixed bag. It ditches the vault explorations entirely, focusing more on Dinah’s daytime life and then dealing with a surprisingly grisly murder and theft from within the mausoleum. With the mausoleum under lockdown, the brothers leave to seek out help from their otherworldly kin.

Narration and dialogue run the gamut from beautiful (“There’s no telling when you might have a significant dream. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you’ll have strange, yet purposeless ones. But then, there will be that thousandth dream. The one that will stay with you for days.”) to atrocious (“They’ll be choco-printing my face on collectible pancakes. And the syrup will be mint in box.”). Most of the really terrible lines are given to Edaniel, who wins my vote for most annoying manga sidekick. He’s often drawn in a style that makes him look like a paper-cutout cat with a super-wide grin full of pointy teeth. LeGrow stuffs him full of gag lines that fall down flat. Maybe somewhere, someone finds them funny. (The pancake example above oozed out from his mouth.) Edrear’s stilted, snooty method of speech isn’t any better, either. He also looks like someone took a Jonas brother and gave him snake eyes. Poor guy…

There is an especially stunning chapter in which Dinah walks through her own dreamscape, wearing a gorgeously detailed steam-punk dress. The borders of every page are all black and Dinah wanders through a surreal landscape filled with stars, gates, and non sequitur movement that captures the feel of a real dream. She walks through a mansion, falls through a crumbling floor and down into the sky, only to wind up back in the mansion, staring at two portraits with scratched-out eyes and holding a jewelry box that drips with blood. It is an arresting sequence that begs to be read over and over again.

LeGrow also does a great job when it comes to creating horror. At one point, Dinah discovers a hidden doorway in her house that leads to the charred remains of a room beneath hers. The panels contain an overwhelming amount of suffocating darkness and silence and it all adds up to create a very powerful sense of fear and the unknown. What Dinah finds down there isn’t exactly comforting, either.

While, from chapter to chapter and scene to scene, the quality is erratic, Bizenghast has a unique, compelling feel to it.

Volume six of Bizenghast is available now.