Som Som is the story’s gnostic frame narrator - our Marlow - and the heart of darkness that troubles her is the tragic affair between her mysteriously charismatic friend Rawra Chin and Foral Yatt, an intense and darkly attractive male actor. The particulars of the mutilation are best left to the reader to discover, but they keep Som Som imprisoned in Silence, unable to move or communicate easily. Among its “employees” are Loba Pak, who could “adjust her features into the semblance of almost any woman” Mopetel the corpse mimic (what a concept) and Jazu, who “had fine black hair growing all over his body and would walk upon all fours.” Som Som has been cruelly mutilated so that she might better service a very select clientele: wizards. The first, “Hypothetical Lizard,” is a coldblooded chiller set in an otherworldly brothel called the House Without Clocks. It opens with a troika of tales that give you a sense of Moore’s prodigiousness. An assemblage of eerie sublimities with more pyrotechnics than Guy Fawkes Day - and just as many shadows - the book showcases all of Moore’s strengths as a fantasist. “Illuminations,” Moore’s first collection of short fiction, finds the writer working on a smaller scale but still swinging for the firmament. It has longueurs and overreaches aplenty but is a bona fide masterwork, a vastation of a novel built for the type of contemplation that smartphones were designed to destroy, and it casts a spell not only on the reader but also against the society that has made being a reader so challenging. Delany’s “Dhalgren” or Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Almanac of the Dead” and wondered what could possibly come next, “Jerusalem” is the answer. If you’ve ever read prophetic phantasmagorical novels like Samuel R. This is a novel in whose multitudes can be found Lucia Joyce (daughter of James), Oliver Cromwell, Asmodeus, angels and a game of trilliards played not with ivory balls but with human souls. (Northampton is to Moore what Indiana is to Michael Martone.) “Jerusalem” might be longer than the Bible and nigh as vexing but it also happens to be Moore at his mad best.
Illuminations time Patch#
Next up was “ Jerusalem,” a 1,200-page secret history of a patch of Northampton called the Borough. The opening chapter should be required reading for anyone interested in dialect it’s “Riddley Walker” with a heart. His first novel, “Voice of the Fire,” was a millennium-spanning myth cycle centered on his hometown, Northampton, England. He is now an estimable writer of fiction with three books, including his latest, the story collection “Illuminations,” and while none of these volumes have the gamma-ray punch of his comics, all of them burn with Moore’s soaring intelligence and riotous humanity. Even his loopiest work - the last few volumes of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” for example - had something searing to say about matters mundane and sacred, and his feverish creativity was worth every bizarre digression and self-indulgent turn.įortunately, Moore hasn’t retired from storytelling. Moore retired from comics a few years back, a huge loss to his admirers and the profession. His genre-shattering work is part of the reason that superheroes have saturated our cultural landscape - ironic, considering that Moore has been one of the most unsparing critics of superhero narratives and the often septic politics that undergird them.
With the help of a few contemporaries (Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Michael Zulli), Moore helped elevate comics from the depths of the sub-zeitgeist to the stratosphere of literature. Moore has written everything from “E.T.” knockoffs to weird “Star Wars” shorts, but his legendary status rests on comics that he created in his 1980s and ’90s prime - “V for Vendetta,” “Miracleman,” “Watchmen,” “From Hell,” a run on “Swamp Thing” that is too wild to paraphrase - all of which transformed mainstream comics forever.įew comic-book writers past or present could match Moore’s subversive mythmaking (and unmaking) or the piercing psychological plangency he brought to a field that was widely derided as disposable nonsense. There are many comics cognoscenti who consider the British writer Alan Moore the Greatest of All Time.
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