“Illuminations is a wonderful collection, brilliant and moving. A few are stories I've loved for years (in one case, for decades), some were new to me, often managing to be both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality, written in language that coruscates, concatenates and glitters. But the short stories in this book also turn out to be a sort of camouflage, or a frame, for 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' a short novel that's a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious, unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four colour funnies. It's Alan Moore's Guernica, a time-hopping ontological Imaginary Story that refuses to leave your head after you've read it.
” —Neil Gaiman, author of AMERICAN GODS and NORSE MYTHOLOGY
“One of the most significant fiction writers in English . . . Moore's influence can be felt everywhere-in our literature, on our screens, in our politics.” —Guardian
“His bighearted passion for his people . . . and the whole monstrous endeavor of the human condition is infectious. I'm not sure there's a God, but I thank Her for Alan Moore.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal never-ending.” —Financial Times
“One of the great fiction minds of his generation.” —Rolling Stone
“Moore's prose is rich and complicated . . . Once you slip into the rhythm of it, it is also poetic, insightful, and beautiful.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The question of whether he's a fountain of imagination or just bats has never arisen: He's both, and his ability to see familiar ideas from an alien perspective is one of his best tricks.” —Slate
05/01/2022
For the first time in his four-decade career, the Hugo Award-winning Moore (Watchmen) publishes a short story collection. The characters range from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to theoretical Boltzmann brains dreaming up the universe at the big bang, and a big novella covers the twisty history of the comics industry. With a 150,000-copy first printing.
2022-08-17
The first short story collection from the author of several iconic graphic novels and comic-book series.
When a comic-book writer switches to prose only, they might have trouble conjuring the fleshed-out descriptions usually provided by pictures. But Moore, creator of such legendary graphic works as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has never had this problem. His works typically include several picture-light text extracts, and if Moore’s debut novel—the sprawling Jerusalem (2016)—is anything to go by, the difficulty is getting him to stop his flow of words. One might hope, then, that the restrictive length of a short story would provide some necessary structure. This collection definitely includes some tight, clever, and vivid entries, including “Not Even Legend,” about a cabal of mythological creatures prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that ordinary humans never get a hint of their existence; “Hypothetical Lizard,” which chronicles a brothel worker’s nasty revenge on his former lover; “Location, Location, Location,” concerning a real estate agent officially signing over a house to Jesus after the Rapture; and “And, at the Last, Just To Be Done With Silence,” a creepy tale of madness-inducing penance in the late 12th century. The title story, in which a man longs to recapture his youth, and “Cold Reading,” which features a successful fake medium who learns the perils of disbelief, have an entertaining if slightly derivative Twilight Zone vibe. But Moore goes off the rails with “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” the book's longest work, taking up fully half the pages. It’s a self-indulgently savage lampoon of the comic-book industry, wandering over several decades, taking the occasional clever potshot, very occasionally affirming the way that comic books and comic-book conventions can bring lonely nerds together, and frequently veering into the grotesque, petty, and bizarre. The story never has any clear destination other than to suggest that the industry is a cesspool that’s impossible to escape in any clean way. The well-informed reader will infer that Moore is still extremely angry at DC for a number of intellectual property issues, remains upset with the way Warner Brothers adapted his works for film, and isn’t exactly happy with Marvel, either.
A mixed bag with a misshapen boulder in it.