‘Nocterra #4’ (review)

Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Tony S. Daniel, Tomeu Morey
Published by Image Comics

Nocterra #4 features some of the tightest storytelling of the series so far.

While every issue has used one of Val’s memories as a framing device, this time we get a combination of Val’s emotional connection to her foster brother Emory as well as an illustration of how sometimes hope is rewarded.

It’s still in the first week after the world went into permanent midnight, and Val and Emory are holed up in the house.

Their parents are still locked and barricaded in the basement, turning into the shades.

Val is ready to leave before the shades break through the cellar door.

Em, however, wants to sit tight and wait for the military transport that the news broadcasts said was coming to take them to a well-lit stronghold. Not that TV is still airing anymore; that went down on the fourth day.

And so they wait, between two doors of possibility.

The front door, where salvation is hoped for. And the cellar door, where certain death awaits them. The good door and the bad door.

Val and Bailey are caught outside another bad door. Em’s shade infection is progressing. Unless they can find a solar lamp at a fellow ferryman’s camp, he won’t make it to the fabled sanctuary that Gus, Bailey’s grandfather who was killed by Black Top Bill the previous issue, was paying Val to drive toward.

The place that supposedly has the solution to restoring the sunlight. The place Val has zero hope of existing.

Black Top Bill is still on their tail, too. Whom does he work for? That’s still a mystery, as much as he is.

But Val tells us the rest of that memory, waiting between the good door and bad door, at the same time that she arrives at the sanctuary’s coordinates, her truck nearly out of power.

In this moment, as shades descend around her and Bailey, Val tells us she closes her eyes and prays.

These moments are odd to read given how hard boiled she was just two issues ago.

Yet desperation and furious love will bring even the non-believer back to stretching their arms at the unknown and hoping something benevolent will take their hand.

I hope this theme plays out fully in future issues.