John Constantine Hellblazer Volume 5: Dangerous Habits: written by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis; illustrated by Will Simpson, Steve Pugh, Sean Phillips, Dave McKean, and others (1991; collected 2013): Brit Jamie Delano was the first full-time writer for occult detective/punk mage John Constantine, a character created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch over in the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing in the mid-1980's. Constantine got his own adult-oriented book in the late 1980's, with Delano tapped to write it.
Delano wrote 40 issues and a few annuals and miniseries entries before passing the baton to the up-and-coming Irish comics writer Garth Ennis. This volume collects Delano's last handful of regular Constantine issues and Ennis's first six-issue arc.
Constantine, hardest of the occult hardasses, is in something of a downward spiral in Delano's final issues. The psychic cost of fighting evil -- and inevitably getting one's friends and lovers killed during the battle -- has taken its toll. Delano probes Constantine's childhood in a striking horror tale, "Dead Boy's Heart," before turning to the incandescent wrap-up to 'his' Constantine.
What a wrap-up! Issue 40 of Hellblazer contained rare interior artwork by Dave McKean (probably still best-known today for his covers for Neil Gaiman's Sandman). I think it's one of the artistic highpoints for nominally mainstream comic books during the 1980's, dense and detailed to go along with a dense, detailed prose look at Constantine's life and works. This could have served as a fitting end to the series had it been cancelled, but Ennis came aboard with issue 41.
Under the circumstances, Ennis wisely went with the tactic of briefly mentioning the events of issue 40 and then never, ever mentioning them again. DC's decision to put Ennis on the book was something of a stroke of genius. He and Delano are both gifted horror writers, but of almost completely different stylistic modes. Where Delano is baroque and intellectual, Ennis is visceral and bleakly comic in a punk sort of way. To some extent, splatterpunk had come to Hellblazer.
Delano did benefit from some lovely, horrifying artwork at the end of his run, other than McKean. Steve Pugh's grotesques worked perfectly for the Grand Guignol two-parter he illustrated, while the cooler Sean Phillips meshed perfectly with Delano's writing on their issues together. Ennis wasn't quite so lucky early on -- Will Simpson, who pencils Ennis's first six issues, is not a gifted artist when it comes to horror, though he rises to the occasion at points.
Anyway, the first five volumes of the re-edited and re-compiled Hellblazer are marvelous, though why this series didn't get the hardcover treatment the second time around is a puzzle. Unless DC is about to scrap this reprint series and start another one in hardcover. Which, given the mercurial nature of DC's publishing habits these days, is entirely possible. Hidey ho! Highly recommended.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross and a host of others (2013): Brilliant companion piece to the equally brilliant, ongoing comic-book series The Unwritten delves deeper into the backstory of the series while also offering the reader a dead-on pastiche of Young Adult fantasy novels.
Indeed, the world Carey, Gross, and other artists conjure up for the first volume of the imaginary Tommy Taylor series is filled with more wonder and interest in 60 pages or so than the entire Harry Potter series. And it comments on the sinister implications of a separate race of magic users walking among the powerless mundane. A great work on its own, and a great and rich expansion of the series, which has about 12 issues left to run in its storyline. Highly recommended.
Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper (1992): Author Ben Hamper appears in Michael Moore's first documentary, Roger & Me, to discuss assembly-line work and mental breakdowns. Hamper wrote for Moore's Michigan left-wing newspaper for nearly a decade before the movie appeared in 1989, doing first record reviews before branching out to stories about his life on the assembly line at one of the GM plants in Flint, Michigan. Hamper would eventually become famous enough to write for Mother Jones and to get coverage in the Wall Street Journal and other national media outlets.
Hamper's fame was based on his hilarious, scabrous depictions of life on the assembly line, where doing a good job and being extremely drunk often went hand-in-hand. The mind-crushing reality of repetitive line-work Hamper describes caused most of the people on the line around Hamper to find a variety of coping strategies, from daydreams to bizarre games (Rivet Hockey, anyone?) to 'doubling up', in which line-mates immediately beside or opposite each other would learn each other's jobs so that one person could then do the work of two while the other person took some time off.
Hamper's personal odyssey was that of a generations-long line of GM line employees. But as the stretch at GM stretched into years, GM itself began to close its factories in Michigan and begin the long job of eliminating much of its American workforce. Hamper was in and out of work, but the stress of the line also began to take its toll.
Hamper combines sarcasm, cynicism, and a keen eye for description into an absolutely... rivetting... read. As the American Way of line-manufacturing disintegrates, Hamper offers a ground-level view of that disintegration. Should people be paid a (relatively) lot of money to do this stuff? Well, it's soul-crushing, mind-destroying work. So yes. But should we live in a world where people get their minds and souls crushed for our collective need for cheap automobiles and other products? Well, no. That seems pretty clear by the end of the book.
Hamper's depiction of the petty politics of the work-floor, the ridiculous PR schemes by the GM executives (a Quality Cat mascot being only the most absurd of many absurd things), the endless self-medication by the workers with booze and drugs, and most importantly the numbing nature of linework in all its physically taxing, mentally null glory...all these things combine to make Rivethead one of the great books about blue-collar work in the industrial age. Welcome to the late 20th century's version of Blake's dark, Satanic mills. Now get back to work. Highly recommended.
Domain by James Herbert (1985): Technically, this is the third novel in Herbert's Rat Trilogy, following The Rats and Lair. But you don't need to have read the previous novels to enjoy this one -- I haven't, and there's nothing difficult to follow here.
Herbert's really great at excruciating physical horror. Domain hits the reader with two horrors for the price of one: nuclear strikes on London, England, followed by the rise of giant mutant rats from London's sewer systems. Come for the nuclear apocalypse, stay for the rats!
And boy, these rats are bad news. After an intense and detailed description of the nuclear devastation of London, Herbert follows some of the survivors into the sewers as they head towards a governmental bomb shelter disguised as a subterranean telephone relay station. Will order be restored? Hey, where did all these giant, super-intelligent rats come from?
If you enjoy scenes of visceral horror, rats, and nuclear war, then this novel is for you. It's one of the two or three strongest Herbert novels I've read. The science gets wonky at times, but hey, giant rats! Recommended.
Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith (1977): This early Cruz novel, written before Gorky Park made him a break-out star, is a terse, thrilling account of the present-day descent of a colony of Mexican vampire bats onto the New Mexico region inhabited by the Hopi.
An Ahab-like bat researcher and a somewhat aimless, hopeless Hopi Deputy will ultimately be the only people who can save the area before, as the researcher notes, the United States is forced to remove New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona from the map.
The novel combines compelling exposition (yes, compelling exposition) on Hopi mythology, vampire bats, and Black Plague transmission with a tense, exciting disaster narrative. There's more than one ecological narrative at work here: the bats have been chased out of their natural habitat, and this makes them much, much more dangerous than they were before, while the quest to contain them, and the plague they carry, is fatally compromised by the attempts of a Navajo leader to sell oil rights to portions of Navajo and Hopi land.
Smith creates winning, sympathetic characters under pressure, and also manages the difficult feat of positing a rational, natural apocalypse which may or may not also have supernatural origins. The portrait of the Hopi people is fascinating throughout. So too the vampire bats, a predator with no fear of humanity, and with an awful lot of similarities to humanity: they come, and they strip an area bare of life both through their predation and through the diseases they carry, diseases that don't affect them because bats have the strangest mammalian immune systems on the planet.
Bats in their entirety are the most successful mammal on the planet besides humanity. Here, Smith turns them into a natural force worse than any hurricane or earthquake. They make for a terrifying antagonist, rendered in full horror but with full honors to their biological distinctiveness. When Charles Darwin first saw a vampire bat feed, he was left speechless. One feels that way for awhile after the explosive, somewhat hallucinatory finale of this novel. Highly recommended.
The Psychic Mafia by M. Lamar Keene and Allen Spraggett (1976): M. Lamar Keene was a psychic huckster in the 1960's and 1970's who developed a conscience and decided to reveal the tricks mediums and psychics use to bilk their customers. This book is the result, and it's a fascinating glimpse into a world which, if anything, has grown larger and more fradulent in the nearly 40 years since The Psychic Mafia came out.
Keene calls his former compatriots 'the Psychic Mafia' because there's widespread communication and sharing of information between them, whether they call themselves spiritualists, mediums, or psychics. A medium in Florida may be able to 'read' astonishingly detailed facts about someone 'new' because information has been sent in advance from the medium that person usually sees in Maine. And so on.
This was true long before the Internet. Imagine the ability to instantaneously share information about clients now!
Keene goes into other tricks of the trade, most of them fairly basic sleight-of-hand and mentalist stuff. Chiffon turns out to be the fabric of choice for ectoplasm in a darkened room, for instance, as it looks remarkably smoke-like when the right lighting is used. Other basic mentalist skills such as pick-pocketing, palming, cold reading, and ventriloquism also fill the medium's arsenal.
There's a real sadness to many of the stories Keene tells, as people are defrauded of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars by a spiritualist network from which Keene can glean no stories of 'real' psychics...or even people who believe they're real psychics. The entire enterprise seems corrupt, and seems to have been corrupt since the birth of modern spiritualism in America in the mid-19th century.
Along the way, Keene also coins a useful term -- 'true-believer syndrome.' He applies it to the customers (or dupes, or rubes) who continue to believe that they've experienced real spiritual phenomena even when, in some cases, the medium himself or herself comes clean and admits to that person that everything was a fraud. I think you can imagine how this phenomenon plays out again and again in areas other than spiritualism. A fascinating book about a fascinating (and disturbing) topic. Recommended.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (2013): King's 36-years-later sequel to The Shining finds psychically gifted Danny Torrance (call him 'Dan', now, please) all grown up and working at a seniors' hospice in New England. His mother Wendy Torrance died of lung cancer several years ago. And Dan has survived a decades-long battle with alcohol.
Nine years sober when the main narrative of the novel begins, he uses the psychic gifts of the Shining to help calm and comfort people who are about to die, all with the help of a cat, Azreel, who somehow knows when people are going to die. It sounds like the set-up for the weirdest children's book ever.
Meanwhile, roaming around the country in a malign fleet of RVs are the members of the True Knot. Long-lived psychic vampires, they feed on mass death and, when at all possible, the physic residue created when they torture and murder someone with the Shining.
As the power of the Shining tends to peak when a child is 10 or 11, they've spent millennia torturing and murdering children to increase their own lifespans. Their protective colouration (other than their own prodigious range of psychic powers) is that they look like a normal band of mobile-home enthusiasts of all ages. Truly of all ages, as that psychic residue -- which they've dubbed 'steam' -- can age them backwards when imbibed in enough quantity.
Now, through a series of truly unfortunate events, the True Knot has become aware of the most powerful psychic they've ever detected -- a pre-adolescent girl named Abra (no fooling) who lives a dozen miles or so from Dan Torrance. They're going to come and get her and eat her, and while she's more powerful than Dan ever was, she's going to need his help to survive, and to perhaps destroy the True Knot once and for all time.
Billed as King's return to horror, Doctor Sleep really isn't, at least entirely. Much of it is of a piece with his other 'Wild Talent' novels -- Carrie, Firestarter, and The Dead Zone --- which would have been classified as science fiction had they been released in the 1950's. The True Knot's members are horrifying, especially leader Rose the Hat, but King devotes a lot of space to making them understandable by depicting their group dynamic and their genuine concern for one another. They're monsters, but as a knowledgeable ghost tells Dan at one point, "they're sick, and they don't know it."
Moreover, the True Knot's travelling ways and their quasi-carnival slang (normal human beings are "rubes", for instance) put them firmly in the tradition of Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, a dark carnival King has riffed on a number of times in his work, most notably in It and Needful Things.
It's with Dan that the novel must succeed or fail. I think it succeeds. Torrance, plagued by memories of his alcoholic father and the demonic Overlook Hotel, certainly has his reasons to escape into the bottle. But he's also finally forced to find his reasons for getting out again -- and, with Abra, to play the role that the Overlook's benign cook with the Shining, Dick Hallorran, did for Danny. Because beyond the threat of the True Knot, there is the threat posed by Abra herself, poised closer to the edge of becoming Carrie than anyone initially realizes.
Doctor Sleep isn't one of King's scarier novels, though it has its moments. As a character study, though, of Dan Torrance and of the horrible, pitiful members of the True Knot, it succeeds. It's a novel about forgiveness more than anything else. Some ghosts must now go, quietly or not. Recommended.
Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 2: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby, Vince Colletta, Mike Royer, Al Plastino, and Neal Adams (1970-71; collected 2009): The second omnibus volume of Jack Kirby's early 1970's work for DC Comics sees Kirby rapidly fleshing out the war of the New Gods while also tap-dancing his way through Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen with some of the weirdest comic-book work of his life.
Vampires had been absent from all mainstream comic books approved by the industry watchdog Comics Code Authority since the mid-1950's. So of course, when DC decided to bring vampires back, they got Jack Kirby to do it, in what could only be described as the strangest vampire story ever told. I'm not sure I can do justice to it by describing it.
Suffice to say the vampires are teeny-tiny lab experiments living on a teeny-tiny globe. They face destruction, along with a variety of other micro-races that all look like various horror icons such as the Wolf Man and the Mummy, at the hands of their scientist-creator Dabney Donovan. And then comes...the musical Oklahoma!
Besides the weirdness, the volume also offers an expansion of the war of the New Gods, as Darkseid's forces continue to land on Earth, to be confronted by Orion, Superman, the Forever People, and Mister Miracle on different fronts.
What Kirby does here with a multiple-level conflict hadn't been done before in superhero comics, and really hasn't been done since: four partially integrated books focusing on different aspects and fronts of the same battle, all four of them written and illustrated by the same person. The breadth and depth of it make most superhero comic books before and since look imaginatively impoverished by comparison.
Amidst all this comes one of Kirby's greatest single issues, the New Gods story entitled "The Glory Boat." The second half of a story dealing with the underwater invasion of the Deep Six, super-powered terrorists from Darkseid's Apokolips who are destroying Earth's shipping lanes, "The Glory Boat" plays off a small-scale human conflict between a conscientious objector of a son and his hawkish, patriotic-gibberish-spouting father against the final battle between Orion, Lightray, and the Deep Six. A moment of hard-nosed poignance is achieved, magnified by the mercy and the vengeance of the New Gods against their enemies. Don't ask -- just buy it! Highly recommended.
The Height of the Scream by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories: The Scar; The Whining; The Dark Show; Missing; Reply Guaranteed; Jack's Little Friend; Beside the Seaside; The Cellars; The Height of the Scream; Litter; Cyril; Smoke Kiss; The Words That Count; Ash; The Telephones; In the Shadows; Second Chance; and Horror House of Blood (Collected 1976): British horror master Ramsey Campbell's third collection of short stories came out the year he turned 30, with a dozen years of published work under his belt. In his introduction, Campbell notes that he's become more self-aware when it comes to the psychosexual dimensions of his work.
This certainly shows in the stories, which are generally a lot more up-front about both sexuality and the horrific potentials of sexuality and gender unobscured by metaphoric horrors. "Cyril" and "The Telephones" are the most blatant of these sexualized horrors: the latter story is almost entirely concerned with anxieties about sexual preference.
There are more conventional horrors here as well, though everything appears as through a Campbellian glass darkly, rendered in his peculiar and disquietingly descriptive prose, in which everything we see seems subjectively distorted by metaphor and simile. Or objectively weird. Campbell's prose style is almost fully formed now. To see the world this way all the time would drive a person bonkers.
There are a couple of misfires, including the title story, which doesn't manage to wring much horror out of some form of telepathic ability. In the strongest stories, though, such as "The Scar," with its rundown, urban-decayed take on the idea of the Doppelganger, or "Horror House of Blood," which deconstructs the standard haunted-house story, Campbell's skills are fully evident and engaged with not only scaring the reader, but with destabilizing, if only for a brief time, the reader's construction of the world. Highly recommended.
John Constantine Hellblazer Volume 5: Dangerous Habits: written by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis; illustrated by Will Simpson, Steve Pugh, Sean Phillips, Dave McKean, and others (1991; collected 2013): Brit Jamie Delano was the first full-time writer for occult detective/punk mage John Constantine, a character created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch over in the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing in the mid-1980's. Constantine got his own adult-oriented book in the late 1980's, with Delano tapped to write it.
