A review by spenkevich
The Night Eaters, Book 1: She Eats the Night by Marjorie Liu

4.0

Don’t mess with Mom

Relationships with your parents are always a perilous path of love shadowed by past hurts, expectations and generation conflict, but for Chinese American twins Milly and Billy their mother’s sense of tough love might be even more complication. The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night, which is a rather redundant subtitle, is the first volume in what will be a continuing horror graphic series from Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda (the pair also worked together on Monstress). And this is a sufficiently scary start. The art is rather striking, and the pacing is good, weaving past and present, though the need to hold off on some of the big reveals frustrates some of the storytelling. Mixing the haunted house narrative full of demons and dread with themes on immigrant family relations and the difficulties of COVID times, The Night Eaters is visually stunning and a fun, wild ride.

While this is just the first piece in a longer series to come, it stands alone pretty effectively. I really love Takeda’s artwork, which is rather dynamic in setting an eerie, moody tone that can abruptly dip into great monster scenes as well as being able to keep a good comical vibe with the ways shouted dialogue is presented in a near-anime style. It does, at times, feel like there was uncertainty how to fold the reveal into the story beyond the shock scene and could probably have benefitted with a bit more foreshadowing. Though that said the pace in this is quite nice and I enjoyed the way the demon story is so wrapped up in Liu’s commentary on immigrant mothers and Chinese culture. Ipo is a tough mom and I appreciated how there are moments when you question if she is good or evil--especially after digging up the skeleton of a giant demon.


There are some classic horror tropes here—such as digging into the history of a house and visiting an old person in a hospital to investigate further—that feel a bit cliched with the way they rush through it a bit. However, I did quite enjoy the way the story takes its time in the beginning, comfortably moving around COVID times with issues of masking and the uncertainty of restaurants being able to stay open or not. Ipo refusing to wear a mask (which will later make sense because…no disease is going to hurt Ipo) and people leaving bad YELP reviews all works as some comic relief but in a way that makes you go “oh yeah all that was very real.” It’s weird to see it already embodied like a period piece but it works.

So if you want some good demon ass-kicking, The Night Eaters is for you. And next time your parents ask you to do a task for them, you’ll be glad these aren’t your parents. Or jealous that they aren’t. I really loved the dad, honestly. And I can’t wait for volume 2.

3.5/5