Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s “The Night Eaters” trilogy continues with its second book, ‘Her Little Reapers.’ After the first book ended with the Ting twins discovering that they aren’t human, that they have supernatural powers, you might think that the horror element of the series would be somewhat dampened. You’d be wrong. Spoiler warning: this review discusses major themes and plot points.
Written by Marjorie Liu
Illustrated by Sana Takeda
Lettered by Chris Dickey
Book design by Andrea MillerIt’s been four months since the night of gore, chaos, and the failed demonic summoning that revealed the Ting twins’ unusual family background. Since then, Milly and Billy have tried to explore their new powers but their parents, Ipo and Keon, haven’t been much help. Despite the lack of explanations, one thing is abundantly clear: the Ting family is part of a much larger supernatural world and something in that world is very, very wrong.
As Ipo and Keon are reluctantly drawn back into the treacherous high society of supernatural elites, their children find that dealings with the spirit world comes at a steep price—when the dead have unfinished business with the living, only blood can balance the scales. To save humanity and themselves, the Tings will have to embrace their inner demons.
Eisner Award–winning and bestselling author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda have done it again, spinning an epic tale of gods and monsters in Her Little Reapers that will leave readers hungry for more.
I thoroughly enjoyed “The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night”—it was among my favorite comics of 2022—but ‘Her Little Reapers’ takes what that book established and pushed it so much further. It’s a darker, much more tense book. Yes, it still retains the humor that I loved from the first, but it pivots from those moments back into horror much more quickly. Despite being sixty pages longer than its predecessor, it feels faster. The world building has grown exponentially bigger, yet with surprisingly little said about it—no one ever says what the Scales are, what the Wings are, or what the Circles are. Instead, we understand them by their dynamics with each other and the rest we get from visual cues in the art. There’s a level of trust in Marjorie Liu’s writing in how she makes Sana Takeda’s art carry major plot points, and I believe it’s a crucial part of the tone of the book. Horror can lose its potency when too much is explained, and with the story being told this way, it is felt more that it is directly known.
That focus on tone is apparent immediately. Normally, when you pick up an issue of a comic, you’ll see the cover first, then you open it up and you’ll usually see a credits page and then you dive straight into the comic. With a graphic novel there’s more of a “settling in” period before you get to the comic, and “The Night Eaters: Her Little Reapers,” uses the presentational element of its book design to carefully shape the reader’s expectations. When you open the book, you’ll see the endpapers first, decorated with cobwebs with birds stuck in them like flies; before seeing a single panel, the book has already seeded the idea of unnatural spiders in the reader’s mind. That idea sticks as the reader is introduced to Adria in the prologue, and it seeps into every interaction. You can’t help but search for the predator… and it creates an extra level of tension. By the time Adria is meeting smiling church members that are promising to help her family, all I could see on the page was her certain doom. This scene totally works without the endpapers, but this presentational aspect definitely heightens it.
This aspect is in Liu’s writing too. The first words in the first panel are “Eat bitter,” and it hangs over everything that follows, especially with Milly and Billy grappling with who and what they are now. When Billy talks about them being superheroes, it doesn’t ring true with eat bitter. Eat bitter is about survival.
But there is definitely still a conversation with the superhero-like elements of the story. Billy even uses that famous phrase “With great power comes great responsibility,” but as Milly points out, she was in medical school and dropped out because she couldn’t handle that level of responsibility. And yet, when Adria’s ghost comes to her for help, Milly can’t ignore her—it doesn’t even cross her mind. There’s something her mother Ipo told her in book one, “It’s dangerous not to care for the small things that need you,” words that Milly had taken to heart by the end of that book.
Continued belowMeanwhile, though Billy says things like Uncle Ben’s famous maxim, he doesn’t take it to heart. He wants to be a Tik Tok star or a podcaster or Wolverine, but whenever he’s faced with the realities of his powers and what he is, he immediately changes his mind. It’s not just that he doesn’t like the consequences, it’s that he doesn’t even think about them until he’s experiencing them.
But ‘Her Little Reapers’ isn’t about the twins learning to shoulder responsibility. It’s about survival. It’s about learning to eat bitter. Their powers make them targets for people that fear them and people that want to use them.
It’s interesting to look at how the twins react to everything immediately, whereas Ipo is slow to react and does so in a very measured way. In book one, it took her three years before she dealt with the aftermath of the incident in Mr. Anderson and Mrs. Lee’s home. And in this book, she is given a gift for her children, luck, but she doesn’t pass it on. “Gifts cannot always be trusted. It is important to know more. Luck can harm, too.” Ipo does not act without first understanding. That and, true to her dragon nature, she is an isolationist, which served her well in the thousand years when she lived alone, but it has caused problems now that she has a family that can make their own messy choices. For Milly and Billy, choices are complicated since they were kept ignorant about the themselves and the world around them. Ipo does what she does to kept her family safe, but she never explains anything to anyone, even her husband Keon. Paradoxically, she expects her children to be like her, a woman who is fiercely independent, but she has created a situation where their safety is dependent on her.
In the first book, Ipo mentioned how she feared that anything that came from her would be bad, so she wanted to give her children the chance to be just human. But I think in this second book, we also see how she’s afraid of her family making the wrong choices, so she makes their choices for them. But this is a self-fulfilling fear. If she doesn’t teach them how to make the right choices themselves, inevitably they will make ignorant and wrong choices.
There’s a scene early in the book that captures this dynamic, where a teenaged Milly is playing Dungeons & Dragons and the game is not going well. But then she starts unconsciously using her powers, and every time she rolls her die, she rolls a 20. When Ipo notices, she influences the die roll so the next time Milly rolls a 1. This scene is not only showing Milly’s latent abilities subconsciously manifesting, it’s also showing her lack of agency—she doesn’t have the choice to cheat or not; she doesn’t even know about the choices that are being taken away from her. For Ipo, this is a moment that reinforces her fears, because from her point of view it seemingly confirms that if Milly could knowingly use her powers, she would use them to cheat.
But Milly, like her mother, is a naturally independent person. This is a detail that’s been driven home since the early pages of book one. Time and time again, parallels are drawn between Ipo and Milly. As one character observes, “You’re so lucky your parents take care of you and your brother. You guys don’t have to worry about anything right now,” and Milly can barely contain her frustration.
In this book, the doll possessed by Mrs. Lee tries to get Milly involved with tracking down Adria’s killers, but Ipo steps in and burns the doll. She doesn’t explain this choice, only expressing that it was the right one. And it really was the right one, Mrs. Lee is seriously bad news, but Milly won’t understand that till much later. Fearing Milly will make the wrong choice, Ipo chooses for her.
As for Keon, he sees problems brewing, but he doesn’t deal with them. He likes this peaceful, and he’ll ignore things to maintain that peace. He knows his children don’t know about the world and he knows they are too soft to deal with the dangers out there, but rather than pushing Ipo to confront this, he lets her come to this conclusion herself much, much later. Just as Milly is a lot like Ipo, Billy is a lot like Keon, but where the two stand apart is in their relationship to knowledge. Keon is a warlock who survived because of his knowledge; Billy thinks he can learn about demons from an exorcist (and as Keon notes, “Exorcists are comedy”). He literally can’t tell the difference between real demon information and farce. Hell, Billy doesn’t even know any of the proper terms for demons and he is one.
Another problem Keon doesn’t deal with is the shadowy figure from his past, a problem that Billy inherits when the shadowy figure decides if he can’t get at Keon directly, he’ll get at him through his son. This figure tried to cut a deal with Keon, one that Keon absolutely refused. When the figure offers a deal to Billy, he accepts without even hearing his terms. This shadowy figure problem is clearly made massively worse by Keon’s refusal to deal with him in the first place, by Keon and Ipo keeping Billy ignorant, and by Billy’s own failure to ever consider consequences until he’s experiencing them.
On paper, “The Night Eaters” could’ve been told as a superhero story. The newfound powers could’ve been taken in a power fantasy direction, character flaws could’ve been obstacles to overcome to beat the bad guy. Instead, powers are a vehicle for horror, and character flaws are explored through the lens of the damage they do, and the question at the heart of it is what will the Tings have to lose in order to survive? How will they eat bitter?
