Danger Milk

Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman Volume 1: written and illustrated by David Boswell (Collected 2011): London, Ontario's native son David Boswell made quite a splash in Indy comics in the 1980's with Reid Fleming and Heartbreak Comics -- the late, great Harvey Pekar was a fan, for one.

This first IDW volume collects the first few issues of Fleming and the stand-alone (though connected) story of Heartbreak Comics in a nice, over-sized format. Fleming's artwork can be fine-lined and immensely detailed at points; the larger reprint size helps a lot with keeping things crisp and clear.

Surreal and comic, Boswell's work occupies some droll territory that borders Eraserhead, Krazy Kat, and E.C. Segar's Popeye strips of the 1920's and 1930's. This isn't a superhero comic or a funny animal comic or even a humour strip, not exactly. It's a richly detailed and supremely odd world; its own thing, which is a rare instance in comics (or films, or books).

The plot, complex as it can sometime seems, is built upon a simple premise: Reid Fleming delivers milk. He's a guy who takes no crap, so he gets in fights with people. Milk trucks get demolished. Reid gets in trouble with his supervisor. Reid gets out of trouble. Odd things happen. It's all weird and charming and internally consistent -- Boswell has created his own world, with its own strange rules. And then there's that soap opera starring the walking skeleton... Highly recommended.

Republican Vampires On Parade

Night Life by Ray Garton (2005): In 1987's Live Girls, nebbish Davey Owen ended up battling vampires in New York -- and becoming one. In this sequel, the story picks up 18 years later, with Owen and fellow vampire (and lady love) Casey Thorne living in Los Angeles, making a nice living as screenwriters of romantic comedies, and staying on the straight-and-narrow as 'good' vampires who neither kill nor exploit humans.

But the bad vampires of Live Girls -- 'brutals' -- still have it in for Davey and Casey. When a millionaire horror novelist enlists private investigators Gavin Keoph and Karen Moffett to find out if vampires are real, the trail leads to Davey and Casey and fellow (though non-vampiric) Live Girls survivor Walter Benedek. Thus, a dirty little war breaks out.

Garton's vampires aren't supernatural. Though they can shapeshift, they're not affected by religious icons. They're hard to kill, but sub-machine-gun fire will do the trick, as will anything that destroys the head, or separates it from the body.

The rhythms of this novel resemble those of a thriller or a hard-boiled detective novel. The stakes are relatively intimate, the battles relatively small in scale. The thematic concerns here lie both with the cost of taking a stand, and the larger societal cost of NOT taking a stand: the brutals operate mostly with impunity while the good vampires try to stay out of their way unless directly attacked by them. It's a situation that's morally unsustainable for the good vampires; pragmatically speaking, the status quo can't be maintained forever anyway. The brutals are rapacious and invasive: they want theirs, and they also want yours. Really, they're almost perfect capitalists.

Night Life deftly and concisely sketches out the parameters of this vampiric sub-society, connecting it to more 'normal' human vices while making the brutals live up their nickname: they are indeed brutal, creatures indulging in their desires without worrying about the consequences for others. They're like neo-conservative hyper-capitalists, though at least the brutals were infected by something real, and not simply an idea -- and they're not hypocritical about their sub-Darwinian struggle to devour everything. Highly recommended.

Hollywood Undead

They Thirst by Robert McCammon (1981; this edition 1988): McCammon may have been the most Kingian (Kingesque?) horror novelist of the late 1970's and early 1980's, probably because of sensibilities shared with Stephen King and not out of simple imitation. He was good at creating sympathetic characters and then running them through the grinder, and most of his 1970's and 1980's output seems to echo one Stephen King novel or another, and sometimes two or three at the same time. They Thirst seems to have been bounced off both Salem's Lot and The Stand as well as Dracula. Certainly the Vampire King -- Conrad Vulkan, a Hungarian prince who 'died' in the 14th century -- recalls Bram Stoker's Dracula more than he does any of King's vampires. But this vampire has specific, on-stage help from Satan, or at least an adequate stand-in, as a powerful supernatural being referred to as the Headmaster (a name that doesn't really work in the 'Inspires Dread' category) is backing the Vampire King's play for earthly dominion with some heavy magical mojo.

McCammon's cleverest idea here lies in his choice of location for the Vampire King's D-Day: Los Angeles. McCammon's vampires can't tolerate sunlight, but Los Angeles appeals to the Vampire King because he/it, having been 'turned' at the age of 17, is forever obsessed with youthfulness. Los Angeles, home to both gleaming, artificial youth and a sordid, violent underbelly, is a perfect match for this vampire. No old people need apply for admission to this army of vampires. I'd guess no fat chicks either.

The vampires herein exist within a supernatural framework: they are most definitely not viral in origin. Set against the vampires are a ragtag but plucky mismatched group of heroes (is there any other kind of group in popular culture?) who must work together to save the planet from becoming a scrumptious, bloodsoaked buffet: a terminally ill Roman Catholic priest; an 11-year-old boy who loves monster movies; a successful but troubled young comedian; a middle-aged cop who escaped from vampires in his childhood home in Hungary; a mystical young woman; and a handful of other supporting characters. The last third of the book sails straight into the epic, recalling King's The Stand in its elevation of the stakes of the battle. The climax is apocalyptic: McCammon doesn't back down.

I can see why McCammon withdrew this, his fourth novel, from publication for nearly 20 years, citing the idea that his early novels, while good, marked a writer who was still learning. There's much that's derivative in They Thirst, and a bit that's silly, but McCammon's strength at propulsive plotting and at sympathetically drawn characters makes this well worth seeking out. Recommended.

1979

Shadows 2: edited by Charles L. Grant (1979; this edition 1984) containing the following stories:

　

Saturday's Shadow by William F. Nolan
Night Visions by Jack Dann
The Spring by Manly Wade Wellman
Valentine by Janet Fox
Mackintosh Willy by Ramsey Campbell
Dragon Sunday by Ruth Berman
The White King's Dream by Elizabeth A. Lynn
The Chair by Alan Dean Foster and Jane Cozart
Clocks by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
Holly, Don't Tell by Juleen Brantingham
The Old Man's Will by Lee Wells
The Closing Off of Old Doors by Peter D. Pautz
Dead End by Richard Christian Matheson
Seasons of Belief by Michael Bishop
Petey by T. E. D. Klein

The late Charles L. Grant was both a talented writer and one of the four or five finest anthologists the horror genre has had. His original anthology series -- Shadows -- was a high point for horror short fiction in the late 1970's and early 1980's, sometimes reading more like a 'Best of' than anything else. Most stories in Shadows are contemporary in setting, as the mandate seemed to focus thereon, but beyond that, anything seemed to go.

There isn't a clunker in the bunch in Shadows 2. Moreover, there are at least two all-timers that appeared here for the first time: Ramsey Campbell's unnerving tale of childhood horror, "Mackintosh Willy", and T.E.D. Klein's "Petey," a novella about a house-warming party that plays enjoyably as both social satire and a Lovecraft-infused horror of suggestion and accumulation of detail. Entries by Michael Bishop and William F. Nolan are also excellent, and the whole anthology is well worth the read. Highly recommended.

Haunted

Dark Delicacies III: Haunted: edited by Jeff Gelb and Del Howison (2009) containing the following stories:

"Though Thy Lips Are Pale" by Maria Alexander
A Haunting by John Connolly
A Nasty Way to Go by Ardath Mayhar
And So with Cries by Clive Barker
Children of the Vortex by Simon Clark
Church Services by Kevin J. Anderson
Do Sunflowers Have a Fragrance? by Del James
Fetch by Chuck Palahniuk
Food of the Gods by Simon R. Green
How to Edit by Richard Christian Matheson
In the Mix by Eric Red
Man with a Canvas Bag by Gary A. Braunbeck
Mist on the Bayou by Heather Graham
One Last Bother by Del Howison
Resurrection Man by Axelle Carolyn
Starlets & Spaceboys by Joseph V. Hartlaub
The Architecture of Snow by David Morrell
The Flinch by Michael Boatman
The Slow Haunting by John R. Little
The Wandering Unholy by Victor Salva
Tyler's Third Act by Mick Garris

　

Fairly solid original anthology from editors Gelb and Howison, with a number of stories by writers and directors better known for their Hollywood work.

Mick Garris, who's directed about half of all Stephen King adaptations (with King's blessing -- Garris seems to be King's director and occasional screenwriter of choice), offers a caustic piece about the new realities of television and the Internet as seen by a screenwriter who's rapidly circling the drain; Eric Red, another prolific screenwriter, takes on the music industry instead.

The prolific Canadian-born and bred novelist David Morrell (forever to be blurbed as "the creator of Rambo") gives the reader the most original riff on the Haunted theme in a story that touches on the new realities of publishing and a celebrated, reclusive writer who resembles J.D. Salinger.

More traditional supernatural horrors are nicely rendered in "The Wandering Unholy" (Nazis vs. Something Awful). "Starlets & Spaceboys" is a lovely little zinger, as are the bioengineered terrors of Simon Clark's "Children of the Vortex." And Richard Christian Matheson, who's successfully straddled the worlds of print and screen horror for decades (much like his father, Richard Matheson), presents a horror-story about obsessive editing. Recommended.

The World Eaters

The Forge of God by Greg Bear (1987): Bear's apocalyptic alien-invasion novel stands in the first rank of novels in that sub-genre. It's a page-turner, light on its feet for a nearly 500-page novel without sacrificing characterization or an exploration of society and individuals under pressure.

And the science is plausible for its time (and pretty much still ours). One of the pleasures of 'hard' science fiction lies in the attention to scientific detail. Bear augments this with an attention to sociological detail: the alien invaders have been watching humanity for awhile, and they enjoy playing mind games with humanity while the doomsday clock counts down.

Bear's narrative hits the ground running, as one of the protagonists (an American scientist) learns that one of Jupiter's moons has vanished. This causes something of a mainstream buzz for a short time, but Bear's near-future world (our past, now -- 1996-1998) has become as inattentive to astronomy as our world. The buzz dies. And then, in a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey, strange, seemingly alien artifacts are found in Australia, Death Valley, and Mongolia.

And then things start to get worse.

As in H.G. Wells's seminal War of the Worlds, humanity here faces aliens who are far more technologically sophisticated. Wells's aliens, though, had a pragmatic reason for their invasion: they were hungry. Bear's aliens don't have that motive. What is their motive? Why do they do the things they do? Read the novel to find out.

Bear gives us a sublime sense of scale that often isn't there in apocalyptic novels, rendered with technical skill and not a little poetry: the science goes down smoothly and the enormity of the horrors visited upon the planet -- and upon the deftly drawn characters of this novel -- lingers in the memory. Highly recommended.

Southwestern; South Western

Essex County: The Collected Edition (containing Tales from the Farm, Ghost Stories, The Country Nurse, and additional material): written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire (2008-2009): This mutiple-award-winning graphic novel both in Canada and the U.S. (or perhaps more accurately, a graphic short-story cycle in the tradition of Alice Munro and Stephen Leacock) really is a lovely piece of work in terms of writing and cartooning.

Lemire's moved on to more mainstream, big-company books (he currently writes for DC and DC/Vertigo), but I hope he returns to his more personal, independent roots at some point. I like his work on DC's Animal Man and Frankenstein, but his work here really sings.

Essex County, set in Southwestern Ontario's Essex County (on the Ontario/Michigan border near Detroit, if you're wondering) tells the story of four generations of interlocking lives and families over about a century in a partially non-linear fashion -- the earliest chronological flashback here is the last extended flashback in the book.

There's a lot of grief, family discord, and hockey. There's an eleven-year-old orphan who wears a superhero cape and mask all the time while he grieves for his mother and tries to acclimate to living with his bachelor uncle. There's a gas-station owner with a secret who played one game (and scored one goal) in the National Hockey League. There's the nurse who checks up on the isolated, elderly members of this diffuse community. And there's a crow who seems to watch everything.

Lemire manages the difficult feat of juggling humour and pathos without slipping into sentimentality and bathos. His writing is spare and realistic, and he lets his cartooning carry a lot of the narrative and thematic weight -- there are as many full-page spreads here as in a Jack Kirby superhero comic, and lots of big panels with a lot of space for sky and field. Lemire's not a slick cartoonist, which fits the material. He's rough in a suitable, evocative way; his faces, especially, are his strength.

The art reminds me favourably of William Messner-Loeb's art on Journey. Messner-Loebs is on the American side of that Ontario/Michigan border: is there an Ontario/Michigan Border Cartooning Style? Probably not, but they're both fine writers and cartoonists. While there are elements of setting, plot, and location that recall Ontario small-town chroniclers Alice Munro and Stephen Leacock, the closest Canadian analogy to Lemire I can think of in the non-graphic-novel arena is Paul Quarrington, whose novels including King Leary and Whale Music have a similar mix of family drama, humour, tragedy, and hockey. Highly recommended.

Cowboys and Aliens: created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg written by Fred Van Lente; illustrated by Dennis Calero and others (2006): I'm pretty sure Scott Rosenberg came up with the concept of Cowboys and Aliens and then farmed out the writing and drawing to others with an eye to selling the concept to Hollywood. Certainly I've never seen the first installment of a comic book in which the creator doesn't write or draw anything.

The ploy worked. A movie was made, and that movie contains almost no plot points or characters or even character names in common with this short graphic novel. But it does have the same title! The comic is marginally better than the movie, bland but not as dumb as Hollywood's take on the material. And at least some of the advanced aliens here wear clothing. Not recommended.