Courtesy of Jim Ousley
Local comic book author Jim Ousley has had a lifelong love affair with the horror genre—and the city of St. Louis. This month, readers can experience both for themselves with the launch of his new series with Red 5 Comics, The Atonement Bell. The ghost story finds a St. Louis family spending their holiday grappling with secret histories, a strange cult, and their own relationships.
Ahead of the release of Book 1 of the series on November 9, we caught up with Ousley to talk about comics, his love of scary stories, and what it was like bringing horror to his hometown.
How did you get into comics to begin with?
Well, a friend of mine, Oscar Madrid, and I wrote a screenplay called Hooch & Daddy-O that was produced here locally. And from that time on, I started working with PLAYBACK:stl and The Arts STL, just writing reviews and interviewing folks and everything else. I was invited by a fellow writer, Jason Green, to attend an Ink and Drink meeting. Ink and Drink Comics is a local artist and writer collective, and they publish two anthologies a year. Each one has a specific theme. As far as comics are concerned, that was really a major education for me, and I learned so much from it. Inspiration is a really euphoric thing, but if you're having to wait for it, having a deadline and needing to write to a set of assigned parameters helps too. So that got me started. And then I started crowdfunding my own projects. One of them was called The Dead Palace. That was a horror anthology. I'm a huge horror fan, so that was something that was always kind of on my bucket list. It was sent to Red 5 Comics, and they loved the anthology. They loved the stories and everything else. So they asked us to pitch them a story, and me and my artist, Benjamin Sawyer, we pitched them Butcher Queen, and they published the series. That was a huge deal for us, because it was the first time that my stories were available to people anywhere outside of St. Louis. From there, we published a sequel series called Butcher Queen, Planet of the Dead, and now I have The Atonement Bell, which I co-created with my artist, Tyler B. Ruff.
What draws you to the horror genre specifically?
I think horror, to me, is much like comedy in the sense that it's very, very subjective. And so for me, it's just a fun challenge to tell a story truthfully within that genre. With horror specifically, it really lends itself to commenting on social issues. Certainly with George Romero's work with Night of The Living Dead and Dawn of The Dead, he was sort of the king of that. But, you know, that's gone as far back as The Twilight Zone. It’s really something that’s always been there. So whenever I have something that I see that bothers me or impacts me, especially concerning civil rights or equality, that really kind of fires up my imagination to write a story. And that's kind of what happened with The Atonement Bell.
Tell me about that process and what inspired this story.
With The Atonement Bell, initially it was based on the screenplay that I wrote called The Angels of Warwick, and it was kind of a personal screenplay. It was more like a tone poem than it was a clear narrative So while I liked it, I knew it couldn't translate or communicate it to anyone really outside of myself. I took a hard look at it, and around that time, we kind of started to see the rise of the Evangelical Right, a lot of folks using religion in ways that, to me, it shouldn't be used for.
I really started to think about that, and I immediately thought of the characters that I began writing for The Angels of Warwick, which became The Atonement Bell. Uh, I would see friends I went to school with on social media and see some of the things they were saying. And it dawned on me that so many people were using this thing that should be used to express gratitude and love and using it as a backing for their own sense of entitlement, and sometimes even a racist perspective. And The Atonement Bell deals with that. That's kind of the heartbeat of the story. Having said that, I always like the comic stories—and even the books and movies—that don't wear [their goals] on their sleeve. It's done in a more subversive way. It's possible to read The Atonement Bell and enjoy it on a couple levels. You can enjoy it as a fun horror story, or, if you look a little deeper, you can find all these things that we're talking about. It was really important for me to be able to satisfy both of those things.
Courtesy of Jim Ousley
What has it been like crafting this story? Has anything changed while writing it?
When I first started working on the outline for it, I had just had COVID—this was before the vaccines were available—and I was really, really out of it. I suffered from brain fog. So it was just a bit of a bear to get through at first, but then, the more I worked on it, the more I felt like I was working on something special. When you're writing characters that you love and you're inspired by, they kind of become your friends in a strange way. And when I finished writing it, I began to miss my friends. It was a strange thing.
It was really my intention with this series—and this is my third published series that I've done—to take it up a few notches as far as making a really great story and communicating what I want to communicate in a better way than I ever had before. I feel really satisfied about that. Part of that is working with Tyler B Ruff. He has such a great eye for the beautiful aesthetics of St. Louis that his work really ties together the entire project in such a fascinating way.
Tell me more about capturing St. Louis in this work and evoking the city within this horror story.
This is the first time I've ever had a story take place in St. Louis. I love my city, and I always feel like St. Louis gets a bad rap in narrative media, in stories and movies. A classic example is National Lampoon’s Vacation. I feel like a lot of people that don't live in St. Louis don't get a real sense of St. Louis, especially beautiful it is and how culturally diverse we are…St. Louis does have a history that isn’t always great, and I think you'd be foolish to ignore those things altogether when doing a story like this, but what we're doing with The Atonement Bell is framing everything in a proper context.
What do you most want people to know about this series?
The important part of the story for me is the importance of family and what you would do and what you would not do—where you would draw the line in defending your family or how far you would go. I think sometimes family can be blood, other times it could be a close friend. But as we get older, we have to define what that is. And certainly the protagonists in this story, they find that out and they find what really holds them together and what family really means.
What a nice bridge for folks from the season of spookiness and horror into the holidays and getting together with family.
The story itself takes place the week of Christmas. I've always really enjoyed horror stories that take place during Christmas. One of my favorite movies is Black Christmas actually. I think Christmas, for a lot of people, is a time of, like you said, togetherness and joy and celebration. It seems like a lot of people make more of a concerted effort to be good to one another. I also think that a lot of people are very lonely and very vulnerable, and I think they tend to be forgotten at that time of year. So that dichotomy, I think, has always been really fascinating. It really makes a great backdrop for this kind of story.
Is there anything else that you really want folks to know about The Atonement Bell?
The Atonement Bell captures so much of what I love about the genre. It’s got spirits, it's got witches, it's got a family struggling to keep it together, and an undercurrent of fun. These characters are fun. They're just a delightful bunch of protagonists that I really think readers will enjoy and find relatable.
