Garth Ennis does socially aware horror after the Me Too era, primarily highlighting men's mistreatment of women but also addressing racial prejudice and "defund the police". Ultimately, everything bad in this story is either an abuse of power or a reaction to that. Men are physically stronger and might be capable of anything. Cops can shoot you and get away with it. Unless they meet the Ribbon Queen, of course, who'll shred them as if their flesh had turned into lots of tapeworms. Something I've noticed about Garth Ennis's horror stories is that they'll often have a visual hook. Crossed had the "crossed" crucifix on its anti-zombies' faces. Here, we have a gross killing method that's perfect for comics.

Is this book entertaining? Nope. It's dour as hell, without the slightest trace of Ennis's trademark humour. It's also slow, drab and not afraid to be boring. Its characters don't seem to enjoy life. It won't make you smile and you probably won't enjoy your reading experience... but, personally, I respected it. I don't imagine it sold well, but it's serious, it has things to say and it's doing unusual things with its genre. Horror's usually survivalist and its heroes are usually trying not to get killed, but here the not-scary-but-definitely-disturbing thing is that the Ribbon Queen and our heroine might discover mutual attraction and decide to make sweet music together. This would mean lots of gruesome death... but hey, only of other people who deserved it, right?

Detective Amy Sun works for the NYPD. Is she a dirty cop? Well, sort of, technically, and she's dodged the consequences for killing someone. Now, though, she's investigating a case that scares her boss and attracts unwanted attention from her colleagues.

The tone is realistic and dull enough that the story's supernatural elements don't take you into magic bullshit land. The writing and art are accurate and subdued. This is throughout a grim detective story, albeit one where corpses do inexplicable things and someone's committing impossible murders. Detective Sun gets on well with hardly anyone who's still breathing. She doesn't trust her boss or her colleagues, while her relatives might spout anti-cop slogans at her. There's a forensic pathologist she's friendly with, but that relationship's going nowhere. She's stubborn enough to plug away at this dangerous case even when it would be safer to keep her head down, but she doesn't have enough allies in the department to handle trouble. Also, being ethnically Chinese has made things that little bit harder throughout her career.

Anyone who thinks comics should be fun will hate this book... but horror fans might complain that it isn't scary, except in a detached, intellectual way. That's true. It's an unusual choice in horror. That said, though, we're getting lots to think about. BLM protests, "defund the police", the "blue wall of silence" (an unwritten rule among American police officers), workplace intimidation and women being bullied, exploited, enslaved, raped, tortured and murdered for pretty much as long as humans have walked upon the Earth. Does Garth Ennis have any answers for these questions? Of course not. No one expects a comic book to solve deep-rooted social issues like that. The solutions presented within these pages are worse than what they're fixing... but the question being asked is whether to press ahead anyway and damn the body count. That's this book's challenge for its readers. A lot of us might say yes, but you'd be embracing a horror movie abomination that you'd normally want to run away from for the rest of your life.

This book is the horror counterpart of Garth Ennis's Punisher. Their title characters have comparable goals, methods and motivations. Both invite the reader to consider the fantasy of being able to kill anyone you dislike. The only difference is that this book turns that into horror and you'll never see members of the American police and military turning the Ribbon Queen into an alt-right poster boy and decorating their gear with her emblem.