We're just about a month into the Knight Terrors event, and it's already starting to feel drawn-out. The main plot, by necessity, needs to last the entire two months, but maybe filling that time with four main series issues plus a prologue and epilogue was too ambitious. Like I said in Knight Terrors: First Blood, the story is utilitarian. It just needs to exist as a framework and justification for everyone else to have their nightmare adventures. The narrative to accommodate that premise is fine: Insomnia the nightmare villain puts everyone to sleep so he can find a magic stone, and Deadman has to stop him. It's simple but sufficient. However, it becomes a problem when you try to make that story last six issues without much else to go off of.

Not much of anything really happens in this issue. Some characters talk to each other and there are a couple of expository scenes, but everything is kept so vague as to not say anything that will accomplish too much. The mystery needs to keep going for at least two more issues, so the only revelation of consequence is that there were some cultists 100 years ago that tried to summon the nightmare stone. The rest of the pages are devoted to a couple dream sequences that serve to be mildly creepy more than anything else. Ultimately what this results in is a meandering plot that feels like it's treading water to kill time.

Despite not having much meat on its bones, the story is more than eager to jump straight into exposition. The big twist at the end of last issue was that Wesley Dodds' Sandman (not the Gaiman character) was resurrected by the Lazarus Planet event. Instead of exploring that or using it as an opportunity for character development, everyone decides to just move past it. "Multiverse" is all Dodds needs to say and the story can jump straight from being brought back from the dead into an extended flashback.

In addition to the exposition hurriedly told to us by the resurrected Sandman, we get more cutaway sequences in the form of dreams. The first of these is a brief Nightmare on Elm Street pastiche where Insomnia kills a trust fund baby in his dreams using money, and the second is a flashback to Insomnia in an insane asylum. As a means to keep the creepiness of the story up, these do a decent job, though they both just happen unannounced and feel disconnected from the rest of the story. The earlier exposition regarding the cult was the same way, so a lot of the narrative doesn't mesh together organically or feel like the detective story that was hinted at earlier.

The art for these sequences are drawn in a distinct art style of their own, which helps set them apart. They're far more brightly colored and stylized than the main plot's pages, which make them pleasant to look at even if they're not particularly scary. Outside of the dreams, the art continues to look like the kind of professional house style one would expect from a high profile comic. It's well done, looks good, but there isn't much to say about it. The one exception to this is at the very end when a double splash page gives Camuncoli a chance to play with color and shadows in a very impressive way.

What these dream sequences do more than anything else is really emphasize that the story is about "nightmares".  If there's one thing that the comic doesn't let you forget, it's that. At one point in a single statement we're told that Insomnia has "nightmare energy" from the "nightmare realm" that he wants to use to find the "nightmare stone". It's very cheesy, but if you just sort of accept that you're not meant to take any of this too seriously, it's easy to just sit back and enjoy it for the goofy shlock it is. After all, this is the same comic that just finished copying the master of cheesy horror, Freddy Krueger. The fact that the main bad guy's minions are called the "sleepless knights" is so dumb that you can't help but like it.

Recommended if…

• You like dream sequences and flashbacks
• Horror should be goofy
• You're excited to continue the story of Deadman and Insomnia

Overall

Knight Terrors #2 is a story that's stretched out in order to take a simple premise and have it last as long as necessary. It jumps from flashback to dream sequence to flashback with not much narrative momentum or consequence. The overall tone wavers between goofy and spooky, resulting in a cheesy horror story that might appeal to fans of camp.

Score: 5.5/10

DISCLAIMER: DC Comics provided Batman News with a copy of this comic for the purposes of this review.