I had planned to have my first review of 2023 posted earlier than now. But then I decided to read Illuminations, Alan Moore’s collection of stories from last year and, well, that took some time. I feel completely unqualified to review writing of this magnitude, but what the heck, let’s review it anyway.
Wordy is a woefully inaccurate term for Moore’s work. With a career in comics – both in and out of the mainstream – that spans over four decades, Moore doesn’t so much describe things, he paints glorious, mindblowing images, ones where a tiny segment of one part of a scene can have a description that goes on for pages. (Literally. The story “What Can We Know About Thunderman” has an entire chapter devoted to an in-depth portrayal of everything that takes place in the nine panels of one page of a comic book.) Moore’s lifetime experiences with counterculture, the occult, psychedelics, and every type of experimental storytelling style you can imagine (and some you probably can’t) means that once you start one of these stories you know you’re in for a ride, with no guarantee that you’re going to understand where you’ve been once it’s done.
“A Hypothetical Lizard” is an excellent introduction to Moore’s style. Written waaaaaay back in 1987 for an anthology series set in the fantastical city of Liavek, its convoluted prose is dripping with detail, with glorious, decadent magic, a setting with something for everyone, no matter how impossible your tastes are. Moore’s contribution takes place in the House Without Clocks, a brothel where every resident has been painstakingly altered to enhance their specialty. We see most of the action through the eye (singular) of Som-Som, who’s specialty is that her clients can confess their darkest secrets, knowing that she will never be able to tell anyone. Anything. Ever again.
Silence, massive and absolute, surrounded her and would not permit her to make the smallest sound. She was embedded in silence, a tiny bubble of consciousness within an infinity of solid rock, mute and grey and endless.
Contrasted with the fairy tale world it’s set in, the heart of the story is…well, elegantly mundane, a tale of a careless breakup, and a revenge that’s epic in its scope and its pettiness.
Several of these have a similarly simple plot that’s elevated by Moore’s prose. The title story “Illuminations” is about a man escaping his miserable present by trying to recapture a happy past with a vacation that’s never going to live up to his expectations. And “Cold Reading” is the interior monologue of a “psychic” who’s made a living off of telling grieving clients what they want to hear. You might be able to imagine where both of those stories will end up, but that doesn’t really capture the feel of them, the solitary figure all alone with their thoughts. You see inside the mind of the nameless narrator in a fever dream of happy memories clashing with the disappointing reality of a second-rate seaside carnival that’s showing its age. Or the kindly conman, spinning stories of heaven to his clients, while endlessly spinning stories to himself about how he’s actually a very nice person when he’s really not.
It’s not our fault if people were too lazy to make something of themselves and find a better place to live. Leave us alone.
You might also be able to figure out ahead of time (I couldn’t) the ending of “And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence”, but first you have to figure out who’s talking in a story that’s entirely the dialog between two scoundrels in the dying days of the twelfth century, who are trying to remember what their crime was, what their punishment is, and what the terrible, terrible aftereffects are.
‘…It was the going in the church that did for all of us. I can remember thinking, it shall do me not a bit of good to come in here’, but went and did it anyway…’
“The improbably Complex High-Energy State” takes place entirely in the thirty millionth of a second at the beginning of the universe. It’s told with the skill of a master storyteller who’s most likely taken a lot of LSD, showing us what life, sex, and academic rebellion looked like before thought, form, and chronological time were even a thing.
Through this inference of a sequential nature to events and its conjectures on the possibility of a location, the detached cerebrum, still in the traumatic processes of being born, constructed both time and space. It was, clearly, on something of a roll.
“Location Location Location” meanwhile starts at the very end. Armageddon. All the prophecies are fulfilled, humanity is no more, the great towering beasts loom at the four compass points, angelic battles occasionally fill the skies with a rain of blood and feathers. And one solicitor is left to meet her client and hand over the keys and the deed to his house. Because once death and taxes are no more, there’s still paperwork and legalese.
What this contract about, it’s all the fiddling details of the handover. Our legal people have been quibbling about the wording for, what, fifty years or more? “That needs a comma. That needs a huge wine press spurting blood. That needs a human-headed locust.”
If you can get past the impossible things in the sky and the terrifying concept of every other person in the world being gone, the apocalypse here is actually…kind of nice? It’s a pleasant dinner and good conversation (and a little more) in a house on a planet that’s quickly reverting to its untouched state, with no need to wear clothes ever again. And it seems rather fitting for the end to be sort of cozy, and maybe a bit ridiculous.
If I was worried about my ability to review the other stories in this collection then I’m entirely unqualified to really appreciate “American Light: An Appreciation”. It’s poetry, from the 1960’s, and also a very in-depth literary essay which takes place within the confines of eighty six footnotes. Alan Moore invented an acclaimed poet by the name of Harmon Belner and then wrote Belner’s masterwork, the 22-page (with 86-footnotes) poem that strolls through a day in the real-life 1960’s San Francisco. The poem is full of energy, indulgences, pain and beauty. The literary criticism explains point-by-point what every metaphor means, a work of love that picks apart the magic but also wryly points out some of the very problematic elements of the shining stars of the Beat Generation. This is a story that needs to be studied, and it also makes me want to ask my husband to recommend a good Jack Kerouac book to start with.
And of course we need to talk about the elephant in the room. Elephant-sized anyway; “What Can We Know About Thunderman” is a 240-page novel in the middle of a short-story collection. It starts with four members of the comic-book publishing world sitting in a diner. Out of nowhere we have gushing blood and death and a waitress punching someone in the face, and things only get weirder from there. This is a story that every chapter made me ask “What the hell did I just read?”
And the answer is: a relentless skewering of the comics industry. Alan Moore has been reading, drawing, and writing for comics since he was a child, it’s obvious he loves the medium (evidenced by scenes like the pages-long description of the shining, jeweled, shelf full of treasures that is the magazine stand at the local five-and-dime). It’s just the industry itself that’s rotten to its core, for what it does to its own, what it can do to its readers, and how its output can be shaped by the meanest, crudest, greediest parts of society.
“I know shit like this happens everywhere, but with the comics business it seems fifty times worse, and do you know why? It’s the absurdity. I worked it out. It’s the huge disconnect between these dopey fucking children’s characters and the appalling lives of the guys writing them and drawing them. And publishing them.”
The story is told out of chronological order, untethered from time, and sometimes from reality. We see in scattered pieces the evolution from a starry-eyed boy deciding what priceless treasures he can buy with his seventy-five cents, to the same boy as a teenager experiencing the transcendent thrill of his first comic book convention, to the boy grown into a weary adult, watching the January 6 riot in his boxers, surrounded by a careless pile of promotional issues. We see the birth of the superhero culture, formed in boyhood enthusiasm and corporate theft of intellectual property (all names – real world and comic characters – have been changed, but we know exactly who they’re talking about), and the body count of suicide, murder, and careers destroyed by corporate greed and congressional hearing keeps getting higher and higher.
I can’t…I’m not even sure how to describe exactly how strange this story is. Giant supervillains roam the streets along with the Manson Family, and the Apollo astronauts gain superpowers. Meanwhile at a local diner, the revered comic-book creator – let’s just call him “Sam” – is convinced by a shadowy figure that his next comic book characters need to be anti-Commie and pro-atomic-energy heroes, ones made by the miracle of good-old American-made radiation, ones maybe a little more down-to-earth than spacemen or playboy millionaires.
“Why can’t good, ordinary Americans, like nuclear scientists, cyberneticists, arms manufacturers, why can’t people like that be super-guys?”
A female executive marries a photograph. The dialog from a child’s comic book is merged with the bitter words thrown by his divorced parents. A magazine column runs through a list from best to worst of every single TV and film appearance of Thunderman, and yes the idiotic decision to CGI out facial hair is mentioned. Somebody swims, literally swims through a hoarding situation that’s as horrifying as it is utterly pitiful. Events will hinted at (the Funeral, the Satyricon Memorial) that won’t be fully explained until chapters later. Some things are never fully explained, but you can figure out what happened. Unless you can’t. (What the HELL was it that sounded like a cough after the door closed?) Everyone involved is terminally dysfunctional with no actual working relationships, and since Alan Moore is pulling from his own experiences you’re left to wonder how much of this craziness is true. The overarching theme seems to be The Comics Industry is Broken, It’s Exactly What America Deserves, And It Will Never Get Any Better.
What I’m saying is, read at your own risk.
The last remaining story is “Not Even Legend”, my favorite. On the surface it’s a trope I’ve seen before: the plucky crew of eccentrics investigating rumors of the abnormal, completely unaware of the actual supernatural elements around them. (In fact no one in the story knows what’s really going on. Read it carefully; there’s one reveal that if someone had understood it then the story wouldn’t have happened). But there’s an element of this story that elevated this to something unique. One of the supernatural beings in this story sees things differently. Experiences time differently. And so does everyone in his species. There’s a moment when you realize what birth, and death, and the end of relationships looks like for someone like that, and it absolutely took my breath away. Alan Moore has always been able to look at things differently and tell stories differently, and he still has the ability to just startle me to the point where I’ll be in a daze for the rest of the day.