Sometimes horror isn’t mushroom spores sprouting from every inch of a human body. Sometimes horror is seven issues of dread, the slow disclosure of a betrayal, a secret threatening to be revealed and the consequences growing worse each time it isn’t.

Poison Ivy Vol. 6: A Death in Marshview is a fall nonpareil, a seven-issue unraveling where a variety of good decisions are one-by-one replaced with bad. Ivy issues are unnamed, and “Death in Marshview” is in some respects a poor choice for this volume’s title, as it seems to emphasize the swift conclusion of one of this book’s mysteries in the early pages over everything that comes next.

At the same time, maybe one raging monster isn’t the only thing that dies in Marshview this time around. And maybe all the build up for Ivy’s confrontation with an ecological monster that she takes down with relative ease is to put focus on something more metaphorical, a natural cycle of monsters where each reigns supreme until it’s subjected to a horror even greater.

[Review contains spoilers]

One volume ago, at Poison Ivy’s 25th issue, Ivy had defeated the mentor who’d abused her, and she stood ready with a dedicated group of friends to rebuild a smaller, more peaceful life. But forces quite outside Ivy’s control have conspired against her — Ivy’s frenemy Bella “The Gardner” Garten and her Order of the Green Knight; the perpetually warring Green and the Grey.

Ivy’s constant taking for granted her sidekick Janet-from-HR has led to Janet doing anything for agency. Janet causes the Green to bring the militant GCPD to Marshview, and when Ivy’s outgunned, she engages a ready group of soldiers, the Green Knights, to combat them. With Bella unwilling to share the Green Knights, Ivy sees no choice but to eliminate her friend in torturous fashion; still trying to solve the betrayal, Ivy turns paranoid and alienates the Green Knights.

And so, a dozen issues from Ivy’s plan for peaceful “rewilding,” her life’s been upturned again, and Ivy takes the attack of the GCPD and the worship of the Green Knights as an excuse to once again go supervillain. It isn’t necessary — nothing’s happened here that couldn’t be explained to Batman and mitigated by finding a new place to hide — but the combination of persecution and veneration is Ivy’s own toxic brew. As the character Undine foreshadows, “If [Ivy] ever had real power … lawful power, given to her by a willing populace … the Pamela we love might completely disappear.”

Again, Marshview’s been a specter in the book since the beginning of Poison Ivy Vol. 5: Human Botany, a submerged town raised from the muck, rife with ominous spray-painted warnings and the shuffling sounds of a creature. In Marshview’s first two issues, Ivy employs Undine to help her learn the town’s history, and it’s for the most part what the audience would have expected — a town, built on the marsh, which slowly sunk while the people were exposed to toxic swamp gas.

We meet the town’s sole surviving resident, Ed Cooper, now monstrous, though where Ed was while the town was sunk, and who was responsible for all the graffiti, we don’t know. Unequivocally, Wilson’s earlier depiction of the haunted Marshview was much scarier than what was finally revealed, and guest artist Brian Level’s Cooper is too familiar in the style of Kelley Jones' Anton Arcane.

We started with a ghost story, but ended with a run-of-the-mill monster story, and that’s not Marshview’s strongest except in the sense of how Ivy can’t see herself becoming the same kind of monster as Cooper. This was true of Ivy’s climactic fight against Woodrue in Poison Ivy Vol. 4: Origin of the Species, too, that Wilson’s book tends to be better in the spooky than when we finally get down to base superheroics.

Credit as always to series artist Marcio Takara, whose wide, often pretty figures are a fine counterpoint to the book’s horror. But Takara, artist Atagun Ilhan, and colorist Arif Prianto also do especially well showing Janet’s deterioration over the course of the book, particularly the subtle — and then not so subtle — reddening around her eyes.

Killer Croc has been the man-beast conscience of this series (see Poison Ivy Vol. 3: Mourning Sickness), but this time his part is small, and he’s taken out partway through (possibly to Batman Vol. 1: Daylight, unless there’s another stop along the way). The flower-headed Peter Undine fills the role here, now more heroic than villainous, and it’s an unexpected moment of grace when the monstrous Undine, who can’t touch anyone but Ivy without killing them, prevails on Ivy for a cuddle (narrates Ivy, “Even horrors need the occasional hug”).

I did note then later on, after Undine has spent more time with Janet, how his words toward Ivy become sharper; he tells her straightaway, “You chose Janet’s fate when you decided to hold an inquisition instead of taking her to the hospital. She’s not the first victim of your crusade.” From enemies to friends and now possibly less so, I’m curious to see how this evolves and what role Undine continues to play in the series. It is Undine’s recognition of how Ivy treats Janet that has turned him; I wonder, might Wilson make the same apparent to Harley Quinn, too?

Poison Ivy Vol. 6: A Death in Marshview ends at perhaps the height of Ivy’s misguided evil (or will it get worse), with her discovering Janet’s duplicity and dragging the half-dead Janet behind her out into the swamp. G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy tends to learn — I rather doubt Ivy will kill Janet for her betrayal rather than recognizing Ivy’s own part in it and coming to some kind of detente — though for the horror of it all, Ivy doing something she regrets might be fun, too. And a crossover on the horizon! I continue to be thrilled with how this unlikely series is progressing.

[Includes original and variant covers, cover sketches]