Deep Sleeper is Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston's follow-up to The Coffin, an excellent book which I strongly recommend you track down in trade paperback.

This isn't a sequel, but another horror story.  Whereas The Coffin kept to a somewhat creepy spin on a superhero story (a corpse trapped in a suit of armour which prevented the soul from departing), Deep Sleeper goes for a much weirder angle.  Cole is a struggling writer plagued by nightmares, whose life gets much weirder when he comes across a supposed self-help guru who appears to have jumped the line from one of his own stories.

Floating around multiple layers of reality - the real world, Cole's dreams, and what's supposed to be his fiction - the story doesn't make a tremendous amount of linear sense.  But in this case, that's not a problem.  Cole's reactions keep the story anchored, and build the story around the idea that something inexplicably horrible is going on in his mind, even if he can't quite place how or why.  It plays on our lack of control of our minds, and turns deliberate vagueness to its advantage very effectively.

Huddleston's art shifts with ease from the relatively normal visuals of the real world into the utterly surreal images from Cole's dreams - the double page spread at the beginning of the issue is inexplicable, but fantastic.  There's also a nice touch in changing the style of greytones for the fictional sections, which at first seems to clearly mark them out before the levels of reality start to collapse.

It's an enigmatic book, but it leaves you with the unavoidable impression that something very horrible is lurking in here, if only you understood what it was.  Very promising.

Rating: A

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