Blood-starved Beast
As the Ashen Blood disease spreads across Yharnam, the city slides from Gothic majesty into a paranoid charnel house as the dead start to outnumber the living and armed hunters patrol the streets, slaying the misshapen beasts that have appeared. Alfredius, a rationalist and physician in a city dominated by a religious organization with a monopoly on healing, undertakes a surreptitious investigation into the causes of the spreading illness. Clement, a priest of The Healing Church finds his faith in the organization waning as it seems helpless to provide any effective succor to the suffering. Both men encounter each other and become allies and friends while searching for the truth. As the plague grips Yharnam tighter, the men will have to question what they hold dear and what they are willing to risk if they want to save that which is important to them.
Church of the Good Chalice
The Healing Thirst is an intimate story about the questioning, dedication, sacrifice, and moral dilemmas of two men in plague conditions. It focuses on the parallel and eventually entwining narratives of its pair of protagonists and the comradery, trust, and heartbreak that develops between them as they seek for answers to the Ashen Blood’s cause and how it might be cured. There is little action or violent confrontations in large part because Clement and Alfredius are not adventurers or partaking in the Night of the Hunt as readers might initially suspect. Instead, these men are individuals caught in extraordinary circumstances that test their beliefs and emotional endurance as they struggle against a problem that baffles even the self-appointed guardians of society. They are then caught in a fraught quandary when they realize the Church may not just be impotent against the Ashen Blood but complicit in its spread. How they wrestle with this knowledge both as individuals with different outlooks and a pair of men that do value the truth and believe that the people deserve it forms the emotional and thematic core of the story. Clement trusts in the teachings of the Church but finds its structure and his superiors seem unmoved by the increasing suffering and carnage among the people to whom they are dedicated to heal and guide. Alfredius puts his conviction in experimentation and empiricism even while aware that many of his actions have non-rational motivations such as friendship with Clement or his romantic longing for and desire to rescue his neighbor, Mathilde. The graphic novel provides no easy answers and has a devastating and tragic conclusion.
Blood Moon
While using language, lore, and imagery from the source game, some readers will find these inclusions a veneer on The Healing Thirst. With a few minor changes, this story could easily take place in 1347 Paris during the Black Death or even the Great Plague of London 1665. This graphic novel does not feel out of place next to Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman or the plague chapters of Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse. The main thrust of The Healing Thirst is much more about its two central characters’ sense of increasing desperation as the world they know is dragged into disease, madness, and slaughter.
Bonfire of the Beasts
As with Bloodborne: The Death of Sleep, Kowalski’s art gets the job done. He captures the sense of danger and the grotesque that reinforces the tone of the story and the overall mood of Bloodborne. Kowalski is also generally capable of translating locations from the game into hand drawn representations, making the graphic novel at least look like it belongs to the FromSoftware property.
Night of the Hunt
How much a reader will enjoy this graphic novel will depend on how closely he or she wants it to follow the story of the Bloodborne game. Anyone looking for a recreation of those story beats will be disappointed, but an audience in the mood for a dark tale of personal and social horror set in a collapsing society that no longer has answers for the sickness and bloodshed around them will enjoy the tale.
Source
Bloodborne: The Healing Thirst. By Aleš Kot, artwork by Piotr Kowalski, colors by Brad Simpson, et al., letters by Aditya Bindikar, Titan Comics, 2019.
© 2024 Seth Tomko