TRAVELERS

Defeating a blood-sucking monster from another dimension turns out to be only the warm-up for a team of superpowered teens.

Their efforts to expand their newly acquired powers while keeping them secret and playing surveillance games with a hostile unit of government men enter a more active phase for the six self-dubbed Freaks with the sudden appearance of scores of eerily alert rabbits in their small Arkansas town. At the same time, the arrival of a new classmate, nonbinary Latinx Bec Villalobos, roils the hormonal waters for both White lesbian Christian and African American brainiac Jamie. Angry, traumatized Micah, who is White, falls under the sway of his sinister great-uncle Baltar—a stranger with a weirdly compelling voice and a murky but plainly evil agenda. All three developments prove hard challenges to the team’s already fragile cohesiveness. But a series of increasingly violent encounters (interspersed with Micah’s flashbacks to his mother’s dismemberment by a monster in the previous volume) culminate in a face-off with an ancient, powerful shape-shifting trickster out to wreak vengeance for the persecution of local Indigenous nations. Along with brutal scenes of torture and bloodshed (not to mention references to at least eight more lurking supernatural foes to feed future episodes), Riley weaves explorations of anger issues and budding romance as well as forthrightly confronted themes of racial, religious, and class conflict.

Adolescent issues compete for attention with monsters, not all nonhuman, in this grimdark sequel.