Felicitations! The hour is upon us. The review. The review! We must bear witness, by the rock, to The Last Delivery and the boy which leads it. What trip he makes. What task he endures. What life he spends.
Oh, how he spends! Life. Life! Spend by the drop, by the cup, by the bottle. Spent on the Last House and the descent within. Descend with me. Reap what is sown.

In Brandon Cronenberg’s 2023 film Infinity Pool, we watch a man set fire to his life as he fully unleashes his worst aspects to impress a group of people who, frankly, don’t give two shits about him. For all the awful, despicable things he is pushed to do – often with little to no cajoling necessary – he is never one of them. He is, and will always be, a plaything; a toy; defined by nothing more than his job and station in life.
It is a hard movie to watch, leaving you feeling implicated in its nauseating hyperreality. Yet, as unsettling and grotesque as Infinity Pool gets, it never gets as viscerally horrifying or spiritually soul-rending as Evan Dahm’s The Last Delivery, a comic I have not stopped thinking about since I first read it months ago. The Last Delivery is satire with the sharpest of teeth and a willingness to sink them deep into you.
The story is fairly simple. An anonymous delivery boy – hereafter the Deliverer – has to deliver a package and, crucially, have someone sign for it. He arrives at the manor, which we later learn is called the Last House, rings the bell, and, when no one answers, crosses the threshold in search of a signatory – an error all gothic protagonists make.
No one will sign. It is not their job. The Deliverer moves on, deeper into the party, into the bowels of the manor, encountering guest after guest, a cavalcade of endless partying that grows increasingly depraved and deranged and difficult to traverse in one piece. Berated, choked, beaten, bit, pushed, stabbed, the Deliverer endures, unable to stop, worse off with each encounter until…

The Last Delivery is not particularly violent nor filled with imagery that shocks. No goo or an excess of fluids. No fantastical, supernatural, monsters. And yet, it is a book filled with monstrosity; an oppressive work that confronts you with mundane cruelty in a phantasmic setting, cataloging a world of ills and its participants.
It’s hard not to flinch while reading The Last Delivery. Page after page of selfish, nameless characters abusing others, abusing substances, abusing themselves, dragging the Deliverer further into a party (the ultimate bread and circuses, courtesy of the Resident) they see as a dream but is, in reality, a nightmare.
The cruelty on display is hollowing. The callousness digs a pit in my gut that grows ever deeper with each step the Deliverer takes, threatening to swallow me whole. It is heavy metal poisoning, aggregated and concentrated through the Last House’s toxic environment.
Dahm isn’t deploying cruelty for cruelty’s sake, however. He does not revel in its myriad brutalities, and he remains remarkably restrained throughout. Always do these scenes serve a point, though often it is simply to shake us from our stupor. They are meant to be difficult because what The Last Delivery is preoccupied with is holding itself up as a funhouse mirror and then pointing out that the only difference between the reflection and reality is that the reflection has a funny little mustache drawn on it.
In it, we see a world rendered numb to the suffering of others, numbed by a system that traps all who enter it and which only benefits those with means, even as everyone else clamors to be a part of the party. It shows a world of empty purpose, hollowed by capital’s relentless pursuit of itself, making a mockery of the earnest, and devouring the dedicated.
It is a world where the people who actually make everything work are rendered invisible – faceless, nameless, disposable – and unacknowledged. They move the clocks. They fill the drink bowls. They turn the gears. Yet the loudmouth with the egg hat gets the credit; demands the respect; commands the hours.
It, too, shows what a world, taken to its extreme, looks like when our jobs define all we are.
Consider Spaulette, arguably the only character who helps the Deliverer (save for one of the masked servants who kinda, sorta drags him into the walls and the gaggle of mysterious figures near the end, making what appears to be a valiant effort to free him from his quest and the house). She doesn’t help him out of a shared sense of humanity, of responsibility, of anything. She takes pity on him as he bleeds out on the floor of the doctor’s hovel and thinks: why not?
It is telling that she initially sees the Deliverer bleeding out on the ground and does little but acknowledge him. Her next action is selfish, jumping into the Doctor’s lap to wheedle a cigarette out of him. She only seems to remember the Deliverer is even there when he drags himself further into the office and groans. That she tosses him the twine and needle to sew himself back up rather than helping him herself or appealing to the Doctor further solidifies the whim of the action and the lack of meaning behind it.
Why does the Doctor not help? Is that not his job? “On break.” Why does he not sign and help the Deliverer leave? “Not my job.” The same for the partier at the start. The same for Spaulette. The same for the masked servants. The same, by the end, as the Deliverer. All they are, are their jobs. It is all they can see, ground to dust by the machines and the Resident’s callous, absent, uncaring wealth, isolated and bitter and being driven to their deaths, literally paying for drink and passage with their blood.
We lose ourselves and our humanity this way. We lose our ability to empathize with others and prefer disaffected cruelty to any sense of solidarity or real, true empathy. We lose.
What keeps The Last Delivery compelling, then? A comic that is all misery, all the time, does not make for light or enjoyable reading, not that this is “light.”
For one, the book is gorgeous to behold, soaked in harsh pastels and drawn, it seems, only with pencil, giving it a foreboding, dreamlike quality that softens, in some respects, the harshness of the content, even as it reinforces the underlying dread. For another, Dahm is simply a storyteller par excellence. It’s hard to put the comic down once you start.

His dialog is snappy and witty, more play-like and formal than natural, a cadence aided by how he letters. Sentences break between balloons to emphasize natural and unnatural pauses and the balloons push and pull us through the pages, their placements as physical as the art itself. An early example of this is when the Deliverer is talking to the nameless hungover person, the Virgil to the Deliverer’s Dante, in the foyer. The Deliverer’s balloons are large, taking up a good half to three-quarters of the top of the panels while the other person cradles their head beneath them, the words almost literally pressing them down until in the final panel they let out a weary and defeated “by fuck.”
This environmental storytelling is not limited to the lettering, of course. Half the story, most of the characterization, and the vast majority of the theming is told through those cues. We see the journey of the book told entirely through the Deliverer’s eyes, transforming throughout the book from bright and large and shimmering orbs to strained and contracted and dull ovals.
We see the end of the Deliverer’s freedom in the lack of fully open splash pages or spreads. Always is there a claustrophobic close-up or partially obscured set-pieces, hemming him, and us, in. Only at the start are there two open pages, showing the desolation of the world in one and the malevolent grandiosity of the Last House in the other.
The Last Delivery is also nearly entirely devoid of exposition. While this is a fantasy world, Dahm knows we don’t need details to understand and, in fact, the lack of concrete information keeps us unbalanced throughout. The one time this becomes a hindrance is near the end when the Deliverer is in the basement with the coffin. The confusion caused me to have to pause more than I would have liked. That is a minor speed bump, in part, because the specifics of the moment matter little. Much of the specifics matter little.
Do not come to The Last Delivery for answers. It is uninterested in giving you them. Instead, it only has horrors to show you. Why not have a drink to forget them?
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