Be sure to treat your LCS like your favorite place to be this Wednesday, because it probably is. 

Unless you are like me, of course, reading on my iPad behind closed doors like some malnourished shut-in.

Previous winner of Top Cow’s Pilot Season 2011 is Jeremy Haun’s The Beauty. My prediction is that this will end up at the top of lots of people’s stacks this week.

The premise is simple and deadly. There is a disease, ‘The Beauty’ that makes you look amazing but has a major side effect, a chronic fever. 

At the opening of the book, it appears that the symptoms have grown more severe and these good-lookin’ folk will start dropping like flies.

Part X-Files, Part Chew, part The Killing, this self described sci-fi police procedural takes an alternate world view or problem (see Chew) and wraps it around gumshoe detective work and departments stepping on each other’s toes. 

Many contagions are not obvious to the beholder, but the attractiveness of a symmetrical human form is for all to see. What makes this STD especially deadly is that people want to get it, not matter what the long term effects can be.

Haun and Hurley are able to explore classism, narcissism and vain behavior through the lens of your buddy cop tropes and a uniquely terrifying prospect.

Beautiful people dying next to you on the subway? What can be scarier than that? I’d rather take my chances with Rick and the rest in that zombie book.

Cheers to Jeremy Haun (Batwoman) for making a huge leap from the drawing board to the typewriter and back to the art again. This is absolutely great storytelling on the page and from the minds of Haun and his co-writer Jason A. Hurley.

I may grab a couple copies of this one at the store.

[READ MORE AT FORCES OF GEEK]