Carnage #8

[Cable]

Prepare yourself, things are going to get weird

Full Spoilers:

Spoiler: show

Hela takes Malekith to return him to his punishment. Jonathan Shayde is left to fend for himself. Carnage and Neely turn to leave through a portal but before they do Carnage shows the codex and explains how a symbiote leaves a permanent imprint on the host, just as the inner world of the host leaves an imprint on the symbiote. We then cut to St Estes Orphanage, long ago destroyed by a fire and abandoned. Scott Rawson is a young man with an internet channel where he explores spooky places. As he shoots a livestream outside the orphanage, he finds the place very unimpressive. That is until he enters a door and finds a room that doesn't look old. And has no windows inside despite him having seen windows outside. Words in red appear on the wall and say "Time to put some skin in the game"; a bloody scalpel lies on the floor. He cuts his hand with the scalpel and the inner door opens. He sees a dining room where what looks like a skinless corpse of a man is eating something with his hands. And it is wearing a robe Rawson's father used to wear...Scott gets closer and finds the man is eating a human face and upon the wall it says "Feed the man some face to eat." The man reaches out a scalpel and Rawson takes it. A scream echoes and Scott stumbles out of the room with blood streaming from wounds on his face. His phone stops working and now he is face-to-face with Cletus Kasady. Cletus says most would have turned away by now but he knows Scott needed to know about that robe; Kasady tastes the blood running down Scott's face. Kasady when questioned reveals he was an orphan at this place and he was so bored here that he made up terrible devils in his mind. Now he has been elsewhere and seem many worlds but always finds himself back here; it is his first symbiosis. When Rawson gave blood in the first room the house tasted it and told Kasady everything about Scott. He knows Rawson tries so hard to be interesting and charming on the channel where Scott opens doors to find what is behind them. Does he want to open the next door? Rawson says yes and they enter a physics-defying area of staircases and rooms of Scott's past. Like the room where a young Rawson could hear his adulterer father with different women each night, or the room at school where Scott helped beat down other kids so he could be one of the cool ones. The more flesh Rawson gives, the more the house reveals. Scott is in disbelief, still thinking this must be some viral marketing gimmick. Kasady becomes angry and tells Rawson that if he wants to leave back to the reality of that small unimportant life then he can walk out the front-door. Cletus hands Scott his phone back but Rawson tosses it away and chooses to stay inside. He questions how Kasady himself could have gone out into other worlds and never found anything to keep him from coming back here. Kasady does say he once found someone with whom he was inseparable and he was almost like a god. But they went away to see how far they could go and left him behind. But he knows they will find that out there those shining lights are just dead stars and nothing is more beautiful than the world inside himself. Here in this house he makes his own reality. "I can choose to be God" says Kasady as Rawson's bloody body lies on the floor among several other corpses.

As I said, it's an odd issue. This comic was already a bit weird but it still very much followed a 'comic booky' plot of Carnage fighting villains like Hydro-Man and the Spot and then travelling to locations like Niffleheim. But with little warning this issue veers sharply into a barely related full-blown horror story about Cletus Kasady. To this point Kasady has only been present as a voice in another character's head. Now he is in his body? Or is this in the past? And he is in symbiosis with a building? Or is this all metaphorical? It really isn't clear what exactly is going on here and whether its relationship to the main story is direct or indirect. What it is though is an extremely creepy issue by Ram V and Antonio so if that niche is your sort of thing then be sure to check this out!