One Bad Rabbit, Furnished in Relatively Early Gaiman

Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade: written by Neil Gaiman, Toby Litt, Jamie Delano, Alisa Kwitney, and Rachel Pollack; illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Peter Snejberg, Peter Gross, Mike Barreiro, Al Davison, and others (1993-94/2015/Collected 2015): DC's adult-oriented fantasy comics line Vertigo tried its first line-wide crossover in the early 1990's. As Neil Gaiman notes in his introduction to this volume, no one really knew how to do such a thing. The result was a special event with a beginning and an end but a confusing and disjointed middle.

In this volume, Gaiman and company work to give Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade a workable middle and a partially rewritten end so that everything holds together. I think they succeed, thus giving a 'lost' Gaiman comics story a new life in a collected edition.

The original structure of Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade saw beginning and ending chapters published in two extra-length Free Country comic books, while the middle of the story appeared in several of Vertigo's ongoing comics that included Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Black Orchid. Gaiman's Dead Boy Detectives (boy ghosts who elected not to go to the afterlife), who first appeared in Gaiman's A Season of Mists story arc in The Sandman, drive the plot as they accept a job to find a young girl's missing brother. He went missing along with everyone else in his English village. Why? Well, therein lies the story.

And really, what an enjoyably dense and epic story it is. Writers Neil Gaiman, Toby Litt, Jamie Delano, Alisa Kwitney, and Rachel Pollack mesh together quite wonderfully -- their individual voices remain distinctive without being jarringly discordant. 

The art duties are primarily handled by pencillers Chris Bachalo, Peter Snejberg, and Peter Gross. They work well together, as all are able cartoonists who can lightly depict the realistic while also doing fine work with the more fantastical artistic elements. And all of them do one sinister talking rabbit!

The story weaves together the history of the real Children's Crusade with mythology, folklore, and the particular fictional mythologies of the various comics involved in the crossover. The Dead Boy Detectives, on what I believe is their first real case, are a humourous, sympathetic pair. The looming menace to all the Earth's children gives a horrific tone to some of the comic, as does the truly disturbing section devoted to that real Children's Crusade. It's a fine thing that Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade has been restored and refurbished for contemporary consumption. Highly recommended.

Reconstruction of the Fables

Justice Inc. (2014-2015/ Collected 2015): based on characters created by Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Paul Ernst, and others; written by Michael Uslan; illustrated by Giovanni Timpano and others: I mean, if you're going to resurrect the three most popular heroes of America's pulp era of the 1930's and 1940's, you might as well get a writer who knows the characters and is willing to have fun with them. Michael Uslan (sometime comic-book writer and listed as one of the producers of every Batman movie since 1989) knows Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Avenger.

Maybe a bit too well: a recurring meta-joke about the young Doc Savage's haircut looking like Clark Gable's hair recurs a couple of times too often, as does a bit in which various people react to Doc's 'skull-cap' haircut. Both jokes stem from things exterior to actual Doc Savage stories: the illustrators of Doc's pulp magazine novels in the 1930's were told to make Doc look like Clark Gable; the tremendous, iconic Jim Bama cover illustrations for the Doc Savage reprints from Bantam books in the 1960's gave Doc a skull cap/widow's peak hairstyle based on a misreading of the novels (Doc had a close-fitting helmet that looked like this, but it wasn't actually his hair). See what I mean about knowing too much?

But anyway, Justice Inc. is actually fun. Its revisionism makes sense within the bounds of the story. And the revisionism doesn't fundamentally alter the characters of these three heroes. Doc and the Avenger still believe in the rule of law; the Shadow still has a tendency to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Together, they're a fun, occasionally bitchy team.

And they face villains familiar to fans of Doc Savage and the Shadow, slightly revised in what's really a very Marvelesque attempt to create links among characters who were never linked in the pulps. Both the Doc Savage and Shadow villains behind the potentially world-shattering conspiracy that drives the plot now share part of an origin with the Shadow, at least when it comes to the Shadow's somewhat murky and plot-convenient mental powers. 

Originally published as a six-issue miniseries from Dynamite, purveyors of ancient copyrighted characters for ancient fans, Justice Inc. isn't a mind-blowing super-epic. It is very entertaining however, which is more than I can say for a number of recent efforts to breathe new life into Doc, the Shadow, and the Avenger (DC's depressing Firstwave, I'm looking at you!). 

Giovanni Timpano's art has just a touch of the illustrative retro feel that such a project requires. His renditions of the various iconic characters are mostly swell. Somewhere in the Uslan/Timpano collaboration is an occasional difficulty with smooth panel-to-panel and page-to-page progression. It's not jarringly off-putting, though it occasionally causes one to struggle making sense of what has just happened.

My only other real complaint isn't actually a complaint: Uslan understandably limits the roles of the various sidekicks and helpers of the three great pulp heroes. Many of them make cameos (Monk Mayfair, Margo Lane, and Pat Savage most prominently), but there clearly wasn't room for both the crossover and an encyclopedic use of all the major characters from three different pulp-hero rosters. Especially when Albert Einstein, Howard Hughes, and H.G. Wells make relatively major appearances. So it goes. 

If this is the last time we see a new Doc Savage comic-book adventure, he goes out on something of a high. And I'd imagine the Shadow and the Avenger aren't far behind him. Well, probably. All three characters have been remarkably stubborn about shuffling off the pop-culture coil to this point. Recommended.

The Past Isn't Even Past

Poppet (2013) by Mo Hayder: Mo Hayder's troubled, brilliant DCI Jack Caffery continues his Major Crimes work in Bristol in this satisfying horror-procedural. Caffery again and again finds himself investigating cases that seem to be just this side of the supernatural, and Poppet keeps that going. Caffery also has a couple of problems to deal with from previous novels, but these are explained well enough that one doesn't need to have read a previous Caffery novel to understand everything that goes on.

Hayder gives us multiple third-person limited narrative focuses for Poppet. The narrative is handled deftly (though Boy, are some of the chapters short!), with Caffery and mental-institution worker AJ being the main protagonists. AJ calls Caffery in when events at his privately funded institution seem to get dangerously weird. And they are dangerously weird, and have been intermittently for years.

Poppet does a number of things tremendously well. Foremost is its sensitive treatment of catastrophic mental-health issues both through the sympathetic, haunted AJ's interactions with his patients, and partially through Poppet's plot, which does not go where it seems to be going. Hayder should get some sort of prize for not giving us the same old mentally ill boogeymen and women, or for not simply dressing up yet another impossible Joker and unleashing him on her novel.

Terrible things do happen, and marvelous things, some of the latter verging on the supernatural without necessarily getting there. Throughout it all, Caffery -- isolated, alcoholic, workaholic -- holds himself together as he also strives to follow the labyrinthine thread to the truth. Highly recommended.

Hey Nostradamus! (2004) by Douglas Coupland:  So we have four narrators for the four sections of Hey Nostradamus!: Cheryl, Jason, Heather, and Reg.  They narrate their parts of the story in 1988, 1999, 2003, and 2004 respectively. Cheryl and Jason were high-school lovers in 1988. Heather is Jason's girlfriend in 2003. Reg is Jason's religious fanatic father. A horrific 1988 Vancouver high-school shooting which vaguely anticipates Columbine sets the narratives in motion.

Coupland's characterization of the four narrators is deft and sympathetic, or at least empathetic. The 1988 school shooting is portrayed with a mixture of horror, black comedy, and crazed heroism on the parts of some individuals, including Jason. The media frenzy afterwards, the desire to canonize some individuals, the problems of recovering from such things -- these are all marvelously conveyed.

Douglas Coupland doesn't always get his due as a major novelist because, like Kurt Vonnegut, his novels are so easy and natural to read that the whole thing can seem effortless. Perhaps even too entertaining. Perhaps, given the often bleak but also often laugh-out-loud comic touch Vonnegut and Coupland share, the novels can seem glib.

Hey Nostradamus! isn't glib. But it goes down so smoothly that one can perhaps be forgiven for finding it too entertaining to be taken as a serious novel. But it is serious. If there's closure, it's faint and conditional and human and humane. The plot takes turns at several points that are genuinely shocking in their unexpectedness, though they always remain this side of plausible. 

Morally, the novel suggests that moral or religious certainty, the certainty of absolutism, can be horrifyingly toxic. It also suggests that people can change, but not always, and not always in time for that change to be meaningful to those for whom one changed. All this comes in that compulsively readable Coupland manner, funny and witty and floating on a vast ocean of sadness. Highly recommended.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Mad Max: Fury Road: written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris; directed by George Miller; starring Tom Hardy (Max Rockatansky), Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa), Nicholas Hoult (Nux), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Immortan Joe), Zoe Kravitz (Toast the Knowing), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (The Splendid Angharad), Riley Keough (Capable), Abbey Lee (The Dag), and Courtney Eaton (Cheedo the Fragile) (2015):  Still tons of fun the second time around, on a small screen. The benefit of watching Fury Road on a TV rather than a movie screen? More time to notice all the little world-building details George Miller and company put in the movie. A grand, taut adventure movie. Highly recommended.

Jacob's Ladder: written by Bruce Joel Rubin; directed by Adrian Lyne; starring Tim Robbins (Jacob Singer), Elizabeth Pena (Jezzie), and Danny Aiello (Louis) (1990): Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost, which came out the same year as this, 1990) seems to have gotten indigestion from a combination of Roman Catholicism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Viet Nam-era conspiracy theories. Director Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks) is not the first person I'd choose to direct an occult thriller. Though he does give us a lot of naked Elizabeth Pena, and Tim Robbins seems to be shirtless for two-thirds of the movie.

But Lyne does base the 'look' of some of the film's 'demons' on things like Francis Bacon paintings rather than traditional horns-and-tails depictions (though there are also horns and tails). These, including a recurring hooded, vibrating figure, work pretty well. Well, well until Lyne goes to the well once too often, in the process showing us so much of 'Shaky Man' that it ceases to be creepy and instead clearly becomes a mannequin attached to a paint mixing machine. 

Admittedly, if I came across a mannequin attached to a paint mixing machine during my travels, I'd probably be weirded out. Well, no. Now that I've seen Jacob's Ladder, I'd know that Adrian Lyne was around somewhere.

I think this movie probably works pretty well for a viewer who hasn't read or watched much horror. From my standpoint, the horror peaks early, in a genuinely terrific subway sequence featuring Robbins and one bad subway stop. Things gradually fall apart after that.

The main plot problem is that the Viet Nam conspiracy stuff and the occult stuff ultimately have no real connection to one another by the very rules set up by the movie. Rubin clearly intended the Viet Nam stuff to be important -- there's even a portentous title card about secret Viet Nam drug trials as the film concludes. But the occult stuff seems meant to be a separate, universal phenomenon that stitches together Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. 

The performances are all fine, especially that of the perennially under-appreciated Elizabeth Pena, who's much better and more interesting than her character has been written. Tim Robbins is good, as pretty much always. Lyne makes one terrible, terrible choice in sound effects, however. During the opening scene set in Viet Nam, one of the recurring sound effects for an explosion is a long-standing sound effect that I remember from 1970's TV shows that include Battlestar: Galactica and Buck Rogers. This completely destroyed my suspension of disbelief for the Viet Nam stuff. I kept expecting Twiki to show up. Lightly recommended.

Best New Horror Volume 3 (1991): 2015 Revised PS Publishing Edition

Best New Horror Volume 3 (1991): 2015 Revised PS Publishing Edition: edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

• True Love  by K. W. Jeter: Really disturbing character study.
• The Same in Any Language  by Ramsey Campbell: A visit to the Greek islands turns out badly for a boy and worse for his annoying father.
• Impermanent Mercies  by Kathe Koja: Totally weird and strangely disturbing.
• Ma Qui  by Alan Brennert: Marvelous piece of posthumous narration set during the Viet Nam War.
• The Miracle Mile  by Robert R. McCammon: Pretty slight entry from a zombie anthology.
• Taking Down the Tree  by Steve Rasnic Tem: A weird, poetic piece from the prolific and valuable Mr. Tem.
• Where Flies Are Born  by Douglas Clegg: OK bit of body-horror.
• Love, Death and the Maiden  by Roger Johnson: Moody horror-quest sort of fizzles out in murkiness.
• Chui Chai  by S. P. Somtow: Another unimpressive piece of horror from someone who was a really impressive science-fiction writer in the 1970's and early 1980's.
• The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu  by Kim Newman: Fun metafictional oddity for Citizen Kane fans.
• Colder Than Hell  by Edward Bryant: Chilly psychological horror story recalls Sinclair Ross' classic "The Painted Door."
• Raymond  by Nancy A. Collins: Collins creates a sad werewolf.
• One Life, in an Hourglass  by Charles L. Grant: Riff on Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is low-key but mostly satisfying.
• The Braille Encyclopedia  by Grant Morrison: Creepy horror piece suggests that mostly-comic-book-writing Morrison is riffing hard on Clive Barker.
• The Bacchae  by Elizabeth Hand: Brilliant piece of feminist, mythological horror set in a rapidly disintegrating near-future.
• Busted in Buttown  by David J. Schow: Interesting, but it really feels like Schow is riffing on Dennis Etchison here.
• Subway Story  by Russell Flinn: Flinn abandoned writing soon after this was published, which is a shame -- he was like a somewhat more surreal but quite horrifying version of Ramsey Campbell in terms of his subject matter and descriptive focus.
• The Medusa  by Thomas Ligotti: One of Ligotti's relatively early, much-anthologized, weird pieces.
• Power Cut  by Joel Lane: Sharp, satiric horror about homophobia.
• Moving Out  by Nicholas Royle: Excellent, unusual, disturbing ghost story.
• Guignoir  by Norman Partridge: Fun, pulpy piece of American ultraviolence, complete with carnival.
• Blood Sky  by William F. Nolan: Unusual, affecting character study of a serial killer.
• Ready  by David Starkey: Interesting.
• The Slug  by Karl Edward Wagner: Writer's block horror from the late, great writer and anthologist who faced these demons and others at the time of publication.
• The Dark Land  by Michael Marshall Smith: Excellent early bit of horrifying, somewhat surreal journey into... something.
• When They Gave Us Memory  by Dennis Etchison: A typical Etchison oddity, which is to say unusual in subject matter, elusive in meaning, keenly observed in physical detail.
• Taking Care of Michael  by J. L. Comeau: Sort of yuck.
• The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank  by Thomas Tessier: Tessier works some very modern, gender-bending, boundary-pushing changes on the basic set-up for such horror classics as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite."
• Zits  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman: Bleak, disturbing vignette.

Overall: Many of these stories have become repeatedly republished classics, and others merit rediscovery. There are very, very few misses. Fine editorial work from the team of Jones and Campbell. This new edition updates the biographies for the writers, so there is new material if one already owns the original edition. Highly recommended.

Best New Horror Volume 2 (1990): 2015 Revised PS Publishing Edition

Best New Horror Volume 2 (1990): 2015 Revised PS Publishing Edition: edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

• Apostate in Denim* by Roberta Lannes: Removed from the original edition by the publisher due to concerns over its violence. It's well-written and very unpleasant.
• The First Time  by K. W. Jeter: Brutal road trip/coming of age story becomes graphic and surreal towards its end.
• A Short Guide to the City  by Peter Straub: Straub's most Borgesian work, complete with a shout-out to a famous Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story.
• Stephen  by Elizabeth Massie: Award-winning and right on the cusp of unintentional hilarity, especially if you remember In Living Color's Head Detective.
• The Dead Love You  by Jonathan Carroll: Bonkers, surreal, disturbing, weird.
• Jane Doe #112  by Harlan Ellison: Another Ellison story that starts off as horror and ends as a shrill condemnation of anyone who doesn't lead what Ellison considers an exciting, meaningful life -- which is to say, anyone who isn't either famous or well-regarded in a creative field. Thanks for the lecture, Mr. E!
• Shock Radio  by Ray Garton: Enjoyable revenge piece involving, well, a shock-radio jock.
• The Man Who Drew Cats  by Michael Marshall Smith: Moody, very Bradburyesque piece was one of the soon-to-be-prolific Mr. Smith's first published stories.
• The Co-Op  by Melanie Tem: Augh! Very disturbing, feminist take on body horror. 
• Negatives  by Nicholas Royle: Brilliant short piece in which the horror arises from distorted perception.
• The Last Feast of Harlequin by Thomas Ligotti: Probably still the estimable Mr. Ligotti's most anthologized story, a creepy, oddball reimagining of concepts from H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival."
• 1/72nd Scale  by Ian R. MacLeod: Mournful tale of a boy, his dead brother, and his grieving family builds both sorrow and horror with careful, slow precision, and then moves in an unpredictable and cathartic direction in the last few pages. Quite brilliant, I think.
• Cedar Lane  by Karl Edward Wagner: Minor, late-career Wagner with a nifty twist and a story that overall riffs on a famous Bradbury story from the 1950's.
• At a Window Facing West  by Kim Antieau: Interesting but weirdly unfinished.
• Inside the Walled City  by Garry Kilworth: Disturbing, claustrophobic horror in Hong Kong.
• On the Wing  by Jean-Daniel Breque: Pretty minor.
• Firebird  by J. L. Comeau: Witchcraft and embattled cops in decaying Detroit.
• Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills  by David J. Schow: Much more Hollywood humour than horror.
• His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite: A career-defining early work from Brite riffs on Lovecraft's tale "The Hound" in disturbing, erotic, and decadent ways. 
• The Original Dr Shade  by Kim Newman: Brilliant, horrifying, metafictional riff on British pulp heroes, racism, and Thatcherism.
• Madge  by D. F. Lewis: Pretty minor.
• Alive in Venice  by Cherry Wilder: Nice 19th-century period piece.
• Divertimento  by Gregory Frost: Science fiction horror.
• Pelts by F. Paul Wilson: Don't catch, kill, and skin raccoons from a haunted forest. Just don't.
• Those of Rhenea  by David Sutton: Interesting but not entirely successful piece set on a haunted Greek island.
• Lord of the Land by Gene Wolfe: Great, mysterious nod to Lovecraft from the great and giant Mr. Wolfe.
• Aquarium  by Steve Rasnic Tem: Weird near-horror from the finely tuned, poetic Mr. Tem.
• Mister Ice Cold  by Gahan Wilson: Oh no, another unstoppable serial killer. Yuck.
• On the Town Route  by Elizabeth Hand: Weird, atmospheric jaunt through extremely rural America.

Overall: Many of these stories have become repeatedly republished classics, and others merit rediscovery. There are very, very few misses. Fine editorial work from the team of Jones and Campbell. This new edition updates the biographies for the writers, so there is new material if one already owns the original edition. As well, a story meant to appear has been added back in (See * above for details). Highly recommended.

Dismember the Titans

Attack on Titan: [tankobon] Volume 1-3: written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama and others (2009): Violent, lightning-paced, and deeply weird. Attack on Titan, the Japanese manga smash that became internationally successful as well, is great and weird post-apocalyptic horror-action. One sort of blisters through it, wondering what the Hell is going on at points while one waits for the history of this strange, distorted Earth (well, I'm pretty sure it's Earth) to be unpacked by writer/creator Hajime Isayama and his crew.

In order to spoil as little as possible, I'll note that Attack on Titan takes a very common trope (humanity huddled together in its last refuge, beset by some terrible force) and refreshes it by making our collective nemesis... person-eating giants. Lots of them. Ranging from 12 feet to 50 feet in height. They can be hurt, but they regenerate faster than Wolverine: the only reliable kill-shot comes by targeting a small spot at the back of the neck. 

The art depicts the giants as fantastic grotesques with idiotic expressions on their faces (mostly) and figures somewhat distorted from the human norm, enough so and varied enough that different monsters always seem to bring with them a horrific shock of the new. They're truly disturbing visual creations -- they create that frisson of un-ease that one seeks in horror but rarely finds. That they're beautifully integrated into vertiginous, sweeping battle sequences is also a triumph, a thrilling combination of horror and action.

Where did they come from? What are they? Why do they eat only humans? Why, having eaten pretty much everyone on the planet a century earlier, are they still alive and apparently non-starved? Where on Earth is the Last Redoubt of humanity (thanks, William Hope Hodgson!)? What secrets does one of our young protagonists have because of his vanished father's scientific enquiries into the origins of the Titans, secrets somehow hidden in his memory but unavailable to him?

Well, read the series. It's a blast. There are many adult characters, but the main protagonists are all in their late teens, new to the job of giant-killing. The writing is sharp, the characterization somewhat stereotypical. But when it comes to the giants and the battle sequences, Attack on Titan is terrific, horrific fun. And as it will clock in at about 4000 pages whenever it finishes, there's a lot more where these volumes came from. Highly recommended.