From Inside

by John Bergin

Eastman shelf 10

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Horror

300 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1996

About the author

FROM Weird Business, 1995:

A former Harvey Award nominee, John Bergin is an illustrator, designer, and musician. He designed, wrote, and painted the 300 page graphic novel From Inside (Kitchen Sink); co-edited, designed, and contributed to the comics and illustrated fiction anthology Bone Saw (Tundra); wrote and drew Ashes (Caliber); and designed The Crow (Deluxe Edition) with a 70-minute CD "soundtrack" by Bergin's musical project Trust Obey.

Reviews

[Jan Philipzig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nightmarish, brooding, gorgeous, visionary psychological horror - an overlooked masterpiece.

[D.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Bergin is (or was) friends with The Crow creator James O'Barr, and it shows. Though lacking the adolescent revenge fantasy of O'Barr's chief work (he has chosen instead a pre-natal, post-apocalyptic nightmare), Bergin's still feels a bit like a comic adaptation of a very long industrial-music video. And that's not bad.
Bergin's art is not perfect, nor is the tale deep, but his writing is solid and simple and the imagery is haunting & memorable. There are bits of this book that have always stayed with me, and still draw me immediately in. His use of colour, too, is fairly remarkable, raising his basic art style another notch or two above itself.
Clearly, this is not a perfect book, but still a remarkable one. I've never seen its like.

[?0?0?0 · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a contained fever dream of the end of the world, John Bergin's "From Inside" is a kick to the stomach. Illustrated with a strict colour pallet of crimson, brown, beige, and tawny oranges and beautiful pallor tones for human skin, this is a work not of grand scope but of great vision, nonetheless. Page after page of bold ideas either in storytelling or illustration and just as you believe this book cannot deliver or up itself any better than it just did on the page you're on, you go ahead and read on and discover you were wrong, for this work unfolds with the type of brooding nightmarish qualities usually found in weird horror tales and not that often there. And it does not fall into the predictable traps of an apocalyptic tale: the character's are sparse and their inner worlds are as tormented as the mad world around them, complete with blood rivers filled with bodies and dolls. I don't really know what else to say about this collection other than just to ask why it took me thirty years to find (thanks sweet Emma) and when will this have another print run because it is really expensive.

[Julie Rylie · Rating 3 out of 5]

super dark nightmarish atmosphere of a dystopian universe where there is not many resources around, people have to recur to cannibalism and everybody seems to be infertile due to malnutrition.

[ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Publishers Weekly:
"In this strange, post-apocalyptic birth story, a pregnant woman sees her husband fry during the nuclear flash before she manages to escape on a train with other survivors. The group travels through the wreckage of a bleak world looking for food, shelter and a suitable place to stop the train. Along the way, the passengers overcome a host of chilling obstacles, the least of which is the woman's complicated childbirth. Understandably depressed, the woman is ambivalent about her baby, unable to reconcile the new life of her child with the fast approaching death of the world. Any symbolic connection between the train traveling through the refuse of a planet and a child leaving the womb is lost in too many scenes of fire, destruction and mounting series of wicked dreams. Bergin's dark artwork aptly illustrates the desperation at the end of the world, with appropriately apocalyptic red and brown overtones evoking blood and fire."

[Jason]

This is a novel length comic (I refuse to call them graphic novels, c'mon own up and admit you read comics). It's about a pregnant woman travelling across a post-apocalyptic america on a train. The train's relentless journey through all sorts of surreal horrors merely adds to the woman's fear as her due date draws close. This reminds me in some ways of Stephen King's Dark Tower, probably for the journey and the surreal western landscape. John Bergin is a master at making worlds that are haunted, nailed home by his full colour paintings, while the narration is mostly internal. While the psychodrama is not hard to figure out, and the ending is a little sloppy, it is still worth reading for its unforgettable and nightmarish imagination.

[A.A. Attanasio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant!