X-Men: Golgotha by Peter Milligan, Salvador Larocca, Danny Miki and Allen Martinez

The X-Men respond to a report of violence at a mutant commune at the South Pole and find just about everyone dead, and their only clue to what happened is the word "Golgotha" written in blood on the wall. Trying to figure out what it means, Rogue picks up on the Christian Eschatology of the word while Emma Frost discovers that the words were also found beneath a site in the holy land where death occurred, and at the site of gang violence in L.A.

While they don't know what the sites have in common, they discover that each has something of a same iconography, a slug-like creature, either depicted or modelled at each site. And even worse, they discover two of those creatures at the sites of the violence, seemingly dead. Emma wants to study them, so she asks the team to bring her the corpses.

Locked into the Cerebra room with the two alien creatures, Emma finds herself attacked by them, and not exactly by the creatures, but by parasites on their bodies, who saturate her nervous system and make her see enemies where none exist and promote paranoia. It is these that killed all the people at the sites of the violence, and now they have infected all the X-men who encountered them, making it absolutely imperative that the X-men stay away from others they could infect until the infection runs its course and the organisms die from lack of contact with new victims. But can they survive the paranoia of the infection and the desire to use their own powers against the others?

Worse, just when they think it is over, they find that these creatures were just the foretaste of an invasion from outer space, and so many more of them are coming that the earth is doomed unless the X-men destroy the creatures in space, before they can land on the planet. But can they convince the military to let them take care of it, or will the military's insistence on grabbing the glory for themselves doom the earth to infection and paranoia?

Whoo. This was such an interesting graphic novel to read, being all sort of horrific and gothic- not gothic in a visual way, but in a atmospheric way, especially the part where they must hole up in the mansion and seek to keep from going crazy and killing each other. And let me tell you, it's not easy when the thing you are fighting can twist your own mind.

The sight of the things definitely brings up Hieronymous Bosch, the Dutch painter of grotesques and visions of hell, so it's fitting that he's brought up in the story, and that, fairly often. But has the earth really dodged the bullet of the invasion by the Golgotha lifeform? At the end, we are left with questions, since Lorna Dane appears to have been affected by it during the battle. Is the earth really safe?

This graphic novel has a dark, almost claustrophobic story that makes me think of cockroaches scuttling in a dark room, hiding from the light. Yeah, it's an icky image, but this one made me want to get in a tub and scrub myself hard. Only if I could do that with my brain... Highly recommended, but not for those who easily get nightmares.