Everything That Rises Must Converge

The Dark Knight Rises: written by Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, and David S. Goyer; directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Tom Hardy (Bane), Michael Caine (Alfred), Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon), Anne Hathaway (Selina Kyle/The Cat), Marion Cotillard (Miranda), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (John Blake), and Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) (2012): Given the dire history of the third installments of superhero movies (Superman III, Blade III: Trinity, Spider-man 3, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, to name four stinkers), Christopher Nolan has done a remarkable thing in making a third Batman film that's actually a worthy finale to his vision of the Dark Knight.

The Dark Knight Rises is a bit draggy at the start, and its main villain, Tom Hardy's Bane, occasionally lapses into incoherence when speaking words of more than two syllables. But we also get a third movie that actually builds upon what the first two films created both in terms of story and in terms of characterization. And while it lacks the extreme highs of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises nonetheless satisfies while giving its audience something more to think about than simply, 'Wow, the Hulk is actually funny!'

Some credit must go to what the Brothers Nolan and David S. Goyer pull from the comic books. This is easily the most intertextual of all Batman movies. Lines of dialogue from great comics that include Kingdom Come (created by Mark Waid and Alex Ross) pop up in the right places. Epochal Batman storylines that include The Dark Knight Returns, Knightfall, Batman: Year One, Batman RIP, and No Man's Land are used in ways both justifiable and, sometimes, offer an improvement on the original (Gotham's sudden geographic isolation makes much more sense here than in the near-endless, deeply stupid No Man's Land storyline, for instance).

The story itself also holds up. It chugs along like a well-oiled action machine, as much James Bond as it is Batman (though Bondaphiles Nolan et al. also take inspiration from the most James Bond-y incarnation of Batman, the globe-trotting Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams version). Some cuts would have been fortuitous, especially if accompanied by expansions in other areas -- the subplot involving fallen cop/administrator Matthew Modine goes nowhere and elicits nothing, while somewhat short shrift is given to both Michael Caine's Alfred and Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox.

Nonetheless, this is a surprisingly generous and character-minded superhero film, with fine performances throughout from both the established principals -- Christian Bale is terrific, though his Bat-voice still grates -- and the newcomers -- Joseph Gordon-Levitt does nice work as a Gotham beat-cop, and Ann Hathaway shines as the movie's lightest character, the skin-tight-suited Cat (woman).

Several action sequences astound, though I wish they hadn't teased the football scene in the trailers. While there's nothing quite as thrilling as the lengthy chase in The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises does do a better job with understandable action choreography. I didn't get lost in some sequences the way I did in the previous film. The movie may be nearly three hours long, but it earns its length as a satisfying end to a trilogy. Highly recommended.

One-Way Ticket to Hell (and Back)

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1931): When Frankenstein's Creature went bounding off into the Arctic wastes at the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the early 1800's, ostensibly to commit suicide, he helped start a small but rewarding sub-genre of horror: the Sublime voyage into the Arctic (or Antarctic) wastes. Shelley's unnatural Creature was repeatedly associated in Shelley's novel with the great Romantic obsession, the Sublime in nature: he inexorably leads his creator on a chase after him into the Arctic, and he's repeatedly seen against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps, nimble as a goat but much, much, much larger.

One of the uses of the Sublime in literature and art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was as a statement on the ephemerality of humanity's constructions. This use explains why there are so many paintings from that period featuring a ruined building of some sort with a mountain looming in the background. Seriously. You can look it up. And the first age of Arctic exploration was underway as the 19th century began, leading to an entire landscape of the Sublime, rather than just one looming mountain.

That a lot of these real expeditions suffered grievous losses while looking for things like the Northwest Passage just increased their literary appeal -- as did the gradual exploration of the Antarctic coast during the middle part of the century. Those first tentative forays into Antarctic exploration led to Edgar Allan Poe's Antarctic nightmare The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Further Antarctic exploration would be one of the exploratory high points of the early 20th century, as would the seemingly Sisyphean race to climb Mount Everest. From these two contemporary Sublime enterprises -- and literary forebears that included Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe -- H.P. Lovecraft would forge his extraordinarily influential short novel, At the Mountains of Madness. The DNA of Lovecraft's creation would have many ancestors -- including the indifferent science fictional universe of H.G. Wells, in which humanity just isn't all that important -- but the final product would be something new and enduring.

Much of the pleasure of the novel lies in its gradual, vise-tightening approach to revelations both visceral and existential, accompanied by, and accomplished by, the accumulation of telling detail. Its bare bones would be in use soon after its mid-1930's magazine publication, in John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", which would be adapted three times and counting into movies, always as The Thing. There, as in At the Mountains of Madness, an Antarctic expedition encounters something alien. Bad things happen. Very bad things.

Lovecraft deploys his signature documentary meticulousness here, as his narrator grinds through detailed descriptions of the foreboding landscape in order to build to the introduction of the fantastic. The details seem plausible even now, even the biological ones -- more plausible than, say, the similarly themed Prometheus. This is quite a feat for Lovecraft, as neither DNA nor the true timescale of the universe were known when he was writing. His narrative even goes all-in on plate tectonics, which in the 1930's was a theory held in contempt by mainstream geologists. So, like, score one for HPL's prescience.

At the Mountains of Madness really is a joy to read, perhaps Lovecraft's most sustained and modulated piece of horror writing. The final revelation may fall a bit flat, but I'm not sure it can do anything else, given the revelations already in play. Lovecraft's intrepid explorers find themselves not only dwarfed by a Sublime landscape -- they find themselves poised over a cyclopean Time Abyss which becomes more unsettling and unnerving the farther they physically travel into the unknown. In the end, only one revelation is comforting. And it's not that comforting.

Given how much of the novel is given over to description and exposition and people walking through tunnels looking at stuff, I'm not sure how Guillermo del Toro intended to adapt it as a movie. Like Moby Dick, which I'm pretty sure also brought some influence to bear on Lovecraft, this is an adventure novel of ideas and philosophical speculation. But what awaits at the literal and figurative bottom of the world is ultimately one step beyond rational explanation. Highly recommended.

The Worms Crawl In

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): Laird Barron has fairly quickly made a name for himself in horror fiction with a unique blend of cosmic horror, graphic depictions of horrific violence, and a constant concern with masculinity and its discontents, satisfactions, and challenges when faced by maggot-like, child-eating horrors from beyond the rim of conventional space-time. Some of Barron's male protagonists (sort of) break even in their confrontations with gibbering, capering, nigh-omnipotent horrors, though generally only through escape or death. Most of them are either destroyed or subverted.

Many of Barron's stories share the same mythology, in which a race of cosmic horrors collectively known as the Children of Old Leech lurk in the lost places of the Earth, spiritually and physically feasting on humans while occasionally offering a small handful of people the "honour" of joining them. Technically speaking, the Leech are both endo- and exocolonists: they conquer from without and within, all in preparation for the day Old Leech itself wakes up hungry and devours the populations of whole planets. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs, among other lost Earth populations.

Yes, he's the feel-good writer of 2012!

The Croning is Barron's first novel, and it's a doozy. For the most part, the narrative follows hapless geologist Don Miller who, in the present day, is in his 80's and plagued by gaps in his memory that, when encountered, his mind scrambles to either explain or forget that such a discovery ever happened (he's even forgotten that he ever knew Spanish well enough to translate Spanish documents).

Don's uncannily young-looking wife of more than 50 years, Michelle Mock, has always pursued the anthropology and archaeology of "lost" tribes, periodically leaving Don for weeks or even months at a time. And as the narrative swings back and forth in time and space, we begin to see why Don's mind is so screwed up -- and why, despite his great love for Michelle, he also occasionally fears her.

The horrors here are indeed horrible, the worst coming from the failures of human morality when confronted by terrible tests. Barron weaves history and mythology and legend (including a crackerjack origin for the story of Rumplestiltskin) into this backwards-and-forwards-looking opus, presents the horrors of the flesh and the soul, and gives us scant light in the face of world-annihilating darkness. It's a brilliant debut, but not for the physically or philosophically squeamish. Highly recommended.

Hero of the Beach!

Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Frank Quitely (1996; collected 2012): Near the beginning of Grant Morrison's comic-writing career at DC, he created a character named Flex Mentallo in Doom Patrol. Mentallo's origin was basically a parody of the old Charles Atlas body-building print ad. A scrawny kid gets bullied and works out; eventually he becomes Hero of the Beach.

Flex turned out to be the comic-book creation of a kid named Wally Sage. He'd escaped into the real world. His powers stemmed from his total control of his muscles: flexing them could alter reality! And above Flex Mentallo's head would appear his Hero Halo, the giant glowing words 'Hero of the Beach!'

A few years later, Morrison and soon-to-be-superhot artist Frank Quitely did a Flex Mentallo miniseries set on another Earth. Then the lawyers for Charles Atlas threw a fit, and DC agreed not to reprint the miniseries for some undetermined length of time that, finally, has ended. Flex Mentallo is back! Just in time! The Dark Age is over!

This oversized hardback reprint collection has one major flaw: it doesn't reprint the two or three Flex Mentallo issues of Doom Patrol. I have a feeling another edition of Flex Mentallo will rectify this in a few years. DC is really good at endlessly repackaging material, as anyone who's tracked their shuffling and reshuffling of Alan Moore's DC Universe work well knows.

But other than that omission, this is an awesome piece of metafictional, optimistic, hopeful superhero work. Quitely's art is gorgeous -- the depraved and the heroic and the mundane are all beautifully, sharply rendered; the layout is innovative and non-traditional when it suits the story and straightforward when it suits the story.

And confined to about 100 pages, Morrison distills many of his obsessions in relation to superhero comic books down to an almost pure form. He'd explored these obsessions earlier in his career in Animal Man and Doom Patrol. He'd explore them later in everything from The Filth to Sea Guy to JLA. But here and now, we get the pure dope -- hope that you can cope.

On an Earth without superheroes, a musician in his early 20's talks on the phone to a suicide hotline. He's taken an overdose and he's waiting to die. While he waits to die, he wants to talk about comic books and superheroes.

On an Earth with one superhero -- Flex Mentallo, escaped from fictionality! -- doomsday looms for everything and everyone. Can the Man of Muscle Mystery follow the clues, unravel the mystery, find the other superheroes, and save the world?

How do these stories relate? Read the comic book. Order the workout package. Learn the secrets of muscle mystery! Because sometimes a guy just has to get out of his room and meet some girls! Highly recommended.

Ice, Guns, and Beer

Hitman Volume 5: Tommy's Heroes: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by John McCrea and Gary Leach (1998-99; collected 2012): Yay! DC Comics finally gets off its ass and finishes reprinting the brilliant Hitman series only...12 years after it finished. Volumes 6 and 7, both roughly phonebook-sized, will finish things off. First, though, there's Tommy's Heroes.

This trade reprints the so-so Hitman/SAS storyline that was previously published in a much shorter reprint volume several years ago (the last Hitman reprint volume, I believe). Super-powered (well, marginally super-powered -- X-Ray vision and limited telepathy) hitman Tommy Monaghan, to clean the stink of the SAS fiasco off himself, leaves Gotham with his best bud and fellow hitman to fight as a mercenary in a small African nation trying to stave off a revolutionary funded by drug money.

As the title of this story arc (and this volume) references acidhead WWII movie Kelly's Heroes, you can rest assured that things get weird and that the boys find a tank. And that things aren't quite what they seem.

Then it's back to Gotham for the award-winning standalone story "Of Thee I Sing," in which Tommy and Superman talk on a rooftop for most of 23 pages. Then a bizarre, company-mandated crossover with the DC One Million event. Then more harrowing stuff awaits as Tommy finds out more than he ever wanted to know about what really happened the night he was placed as a baby on the doorstep of a Catholic orphanage. Good times, good times.

Well, violent times anyway. I like John McCrea's gritty art anyway, but Gary Leach's inks polish it to a sinister, occasionally bleakly comic high sheen. All this and Superman remains noble because he's apparently the only superhero Garth Ennis actually likes. Highly recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.

Best Spoken Underwater

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird: edited by Paula Guran (2012) containing the following stories:

"The Crevasse", Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud; "Old Virginia", Laird Barron; "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear; "Mongoose", Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette; "The Oram County Whoosit", Steve Duffy; "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman; "Grinding Rock", Cody Goodfellow; "Pickman’s Other Model (1929)", Caitlin Kiernan; "The Disciple", David Barr Kirtley; "The Vicar of R'lyeh", Marc Laidlaw; "Mr. Gaunt", John Langan; "Take Me to the River", Paul McAuley; "The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft", Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt; "Details", China Mieville; "Bringing Helena Back", Sarah Monette; "Another Fish Story", Kim Newman; "Lesser Demons", Norm Partridge; "Cold Water Survival", Holly Phillips; "Head Music", Lon Prater; "Bad Sushi", Cherie Priest; "The Fungal Stain", W.H. Pugmire; "Tsathoggua", Michael Shea; "Buried in the Sky", John Shirley; "Fair Exchange", Michael Marshall Smith; "The Essayist in the Wilderness", William Browning Spencer; "A Colder War", Charles Stross; "The Great White Bed", Don Webb.

Editor Paula Guran's mandate here is focused -- the best Lovecraftian stories of the first 11 years or so of the new millennium. If there's a disappointment here, it lies in something that's only going to be immediately apparent to a reader who buys a lot of Lovecraft-influenced anthologies and collections.

However, as I imagine a high percentage of people who read this sort of thing do just that, I'll note the disappointment: too many stories taken from the same original anthologies (eight of the stories herein appear in just three other original anthologies) and a fairly significant overlap (four stories) with the 2011 anthology The Book of Cthulhu, the mandate of which was to collect Lovecraft-influenced stories from the last thirty years or so.

In a pinch, I'd suggest going with The Book of Cthulhu. Its overall quality is higher, though that's obviously a factor of a longer span of time to choose from. Furthermore, choosing a lot of stories from other anthologies strikes me as somewhat problematic -- I've got several of these stories in three anthologies already, a pretty heavy load for a story published in, say, 2008 to be carrying. This may indicate taste rather than laziness, but it feels like laziness. And a couple of the multiple stories from other anthologies really sort of stink. Others are a stretch for the anthology, especially for one with a big picture of Cthulhu on the cover.

Nonetheless, there are some corkers here, both too often repeated ("The Oram County Whoosit" is a terrific tale -- so terrific I've now seen it in three different anthologies) and relatively new to this anthology (the offerings from old pros Michael Shea and John Shirley are especially gratifying). Shirley's almost reads like a Cthulhu Mythos story semi-sarcastically supercollided with a Young Adult novel. Shea's story about Clark Ashton Smith's blobby toad-god addition to the Lovecraft pantheon (subsequently described by HPL in At the Mountains of Madness) is squishy and, thankfully, not the over-anthologized, excellent "Fat Face".

Neil Gaiman impresses with a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos crossover, but not only was it in a fairly high print-run anthology, the story also appeared on Gaiman's website free of charge for several years. China Mieville's terrific "Details" also appeared in an anthology that, ten years later, remains in print.

There's a problem of overfishing the same ponds over and over again. Ponds filled with the Deep Ones. What is it with all the stories about people who identify with Lovecraft's Deep Ones? Yeuch. Alan Moore was on to something with Neonomicon. Lightly recommended.