My heart can't handle how awesome "Heart of Hush" is. DETECTIVE COMICS issue #848, available at your local comic shop now now now, is yet another twisted, mysterious, relentlessly exciting chapter in the yarn being spun with staggering formidability by writer Paul Dini and artist Dustin Nguyen.

Neither the original Hush tale by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee nor its limp follow-up (HUSH RETURNS) by A.J. Lieberman painted Dr. Thomas "Hush" Elliot as creepily, as capably, as sadistically -- and therefore, as dangerously -- as Dini continues to do in these pages.

At the end of last issue, Hush was spouting some disgusting dish about how vile he sees the women in Bruce Wayne's life to be, while his former mentor but current lackey, Dr. Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane, terrorized a young boy who's somehow "part of the plan."

Both storylines come to a head quickly in #848, with results you have to read to believe.

First of all, Hush spouts his despicable attitudes about the girls in Bruce's life directly to Selina Kyle's face while only proving himself to be a sick, leering hypocrite. Read the dialogue. It perfectly captures the spirits of Hush's insanity and Selina's relationship with Bruce. And how it ends will leave you begging for more.

And you get it on the following page, but from a different part of the storyline. While Selina's in the worst jeopardy of her life, Batman's off to rescue little Colin Wilkes from his. Crane's trap draws Batman into a cave filled with bats, and Nguyen's depictions of the Scarecrow's shadows along the cave's walls are the stuff nightmares are made of. Dini, ever the master of character reinforcement and development through dialogue, does particularly effective work with the words he gives Crane to use against Batman.

Crane: "It's children that are your weakness. The little ones, lost and scared. I have often suspected that your origins are similar to theirs. I posed the question to my colleague, brilliant lad, but true to his code name, he always remains mum about certain secrets of yours."

Batman: "Hush."

(Nice play on the word "mum," since Crane knows how Tommy Elliot's relationship with his own mother shaped his own insane cruelties.)

Batman gets a big surprise when he tries to help little Colin; Batman knows it's a trap, but he also knows that sometimes the only way to discover a trap is to spring it.

And while the Dark Knight has his hands full with the fruits of Jonathan Crane's experimentations, Tommy Elliot has his hands full with ...

No. I don't have the heart to tell you. And neither will someone else.

Just pick up the book and read it.

As we delve deeper into the book, we get another of this run's trademark flashbacks that features a cameo from a character created by Dini for one of his earlier storylines that I was massively fond of. I'll be curious to see how this person's inclusion in the tale plays out. Without giving it away, I'll still say that it always makes me happy when Dini shoots for the bigger picture and gives us little gifts like these.

Another element of the flashback that makes the book even creepier is the evolution through the years of the relationship between Tommy and his mother. Whereas we've previously seen her as overprotective to a disturbing fault, the manipulative, guilt-tripping behaviors against Tommy in her later years come into troubling focus here. It's great stuff.

And just when you think you've had enough, Dini comes up with one of THE most awesome Batman escape plans I have EVER seen in the pages of a Batman book. Though its execution is on a smaller scale, it rivals the awesomeness of the truck flip in THE DARK KNIGHT (and even has a visual tie-in with something the Scarecrow dabbled with in BATMAN BEGINS).

See it for yourself. Believe it.

What you won't believe, however, is the book's ending.

And, like me, I expect that you won't be able to stand the wait it's going to take to find out what happens next.

I can't speak highly enough of what Dini and Nguyen are doing in DETECTIVE. Each new issue is better than the last, and the stakes just keep getting higher. The ending here is outrageous and horrifying, and I have a feeling things are only going to get worse for Batman.

As long as it's written and drawn as well as "Heart of Hush" has been conducted so far, I'm on board for whatever.

(A couple of other things worthy of note: the mystery of Hush's self-inflicted plastic surgery deepens, and Dini incorporates the events of a story I didn't like -- HUSH RETURNS -- in a way that I do.)

Please give this a shot. It won't let you down.

And….

Is it next month already? - John Bierly