Pig Wife by Abbey Lee

Wife never leave.

A man and a wife are bound by god himself. They are together forever, till death do them part.

If one of them leaves, it’s a crime against scripture.

Someone who’d turn their back on a friend like that is a goddamn pig…

Who deserves to burn in hell for all eternity.

Pig Wife by Abbey Luck is a bit different from the books I’ve reviewed so far, being a graphic novel. I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this at first as a good chunk of the book relies on visual representation to get some of the more meta elements of the story across. Maybe this is giving the book too much credit though, because at its heart it’s a pretty straightforward horror story.

Pig Wife follows Mary, a teenager who was reluctantly brought to the house of a recently deceased aunt by her mum and stepdad, who is intent on finding financial deeds to the land hoping it will get him out of financial trouble. As well as deeds to the property, which sits on top of an abandoned gold mine, the house holds dark secrets about Mary’s Aunt Pearl. After an argument with her parents, Mary runs away before accidentally falling down the abandoned mine. Lost and disorientated, Mary soon becomes the captive of two pale, dishevelled occupants of a secret underground bunker, Tommy and Ed. Tommy is a hulking, unhinged simpleton who seemingly has no frontal lobe, while Ed is quiet and more reserved, though both men still believe that Mary has been brought to them by their mother and she either needs to become one of their wives, or otherwise is a pig to be slaughtered. The majority of the 540 pages follows Mary in her various attempts to outwit and escape Tommy and Ed, finding out the dark, shameful history of the town and her Aunt Pearl in the process.

The story of Pig Wife is relatively standard, it reminded me a lot of 10 Cloverfield Lane and Split. The central themes of Pig Wife are mental illness and generational trauma, so its by no means light reading. Though tense at times with some adult themes, the book is relatively light on horror. The intention of the graphic novel seems to be to portray all of the characters as products of their upbringing, illustrating how the generational nature of trauma can make real physical monsters of anyone. While this is fine in principle, everything in Pig Wife feels quite surface level and superficial, and the characters (including Mary) are fairly bland. The author seems to assume that giving someone a back story makes them complex, though all of the histories and resultant effects are pretty much tropes at this point. We can see precisely the kinds of messages Luck is trying to get across, we’ve just seen other people make the same points with more nuance and complexity.

The story and character development are not helped by the art style which look amateur and cartoonish. This feels especially jarring when juxtaposed with themes of misogyny, child abuse and christian fundamentalism. I imagine illustrating 540 pages of comic would have been an exhaustive process, particularly because the whole job appears to have been completed by one artist (Ruka Bravo) and the fatigue of drawing the same three characters in a cave really shows at times. There are occasional double-page spreads and what I assume to be chapter illustration which are more on the surreal side, much more abstract, and appear to have taken 10 times as long to render. It doesn’t even stylistically really capture that lo-fi aesthetic that you might find in self-published comics and zines. I wonder if this may have worked better as a black and white graphic novel. The larger illustrations show that the creators clearly have vivid and expressive art styles, but 95% of the book just looks like an Art GCSE project.

If the story was particularly compelling or ambitious then the above wouldn’t have mattered as much. Just look at half of Fantagraphics output, for example. In this case however a fairly mid story combined with low-quality art reduces the impact of both. I was surprised to see Abbey Luck is a writer, director and animator for Disney, FX, Comedy Central and MTV Films as this was clearly a label of love for her (being her first graphic novel) but I doubt Pig Wife would have met any of their editorial standards.

I know I’m not speaking for everyone, as the majority of the reviews seem to be quite positive. This just wasn’t really for me. I considered giving up within a few pages, but despite the 500+ pages it was very quick to read. I wondered if this was pitched more towards a teenage reader, but couldn’t see any evidence of this in supplementary material.

Pig Wife is available to pre-order from bookshop.org. UK Bookshop donate 30% of the cover price to an independent bookshop of your choice, or 10% to an earnings pool that is distributed across participating bookshops each month. This was a free review copy of Pig Wife. Thanks to Top Shelf Productions via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication in January 2026.