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Luda
Luci LaBang is a star: for decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she’s the leading lady in a smash hit musical. But as time takes its toll, Luci fears her star is beginning to dim.
When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene: Luda, whose fantastical beauty and sinister charm infatuate Luci immediately... and who bears a striking resemblance to herself at a much younger age.
Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom, and reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the The Glamour, a mysterious discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike transformative effects.
But as Luci tutors her young protegee in the art, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered The Glamour all too well... and exploited it to achieve her dark ambitions.
What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and perhaps, the brightest star of them all.
When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene: Luda, whose fantastical beauty and sinister charm infatuate Luci immediately... and who bears a striking resemblance to herself at a much younger age.
Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom, and reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the The Glamour, a mysterious discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike transformative effects.
But as Luci tutors her young protegee in the art, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered The Glamour all too well... and exploited it to achieve her dark ambitions.
What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and perhaps, the brightest star of them all.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published September 6, 2022
About the author
Grant Morrison
1,533 books4,303 followersGrant Morrison has been working with DC Comics for twenty five years, after beginning their American comics career with acclaimed runs on ANIMAL MAN and DOOM PATROL. Since then they have written such best-selling series as JLA, BATMAN and New X-Men, as well as such creator-owned works as THE INVISIBLES, SEAGUY, THE FILTH, WE3 and JOE THE BARBARIAN. In addition to expanding the DC Universe through titles ranging from the Eisner Award-winning SEVEN SOLDIERS and ALL-STAR SUPERMAN to the reality-shattering epic of FINAL CRISIS, they have also reinvented the worlds of the Dark Knight Detective in BATMAN AND ROBIN and BATMAN, INCORPORATED and the Man of Steel in The New 52 ACTION COMICS.
In their secret identity, Morrison is a "counterculture" spokesperson, a musician, an award-winning playwright and a chaos magician. They are also the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods, a groundbreaking psycho-historic mapping of the superhero as a cultural organism. They divide their time between their homes in Los Angeles and Scotland.
In their secret identity, Morrison is a "counterculture" spokesperson, a musician, an award-winning playwright and a chaos magician. They are also the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods, a groundbreaking psycho-historic mapping of the superhero as a cultural organism. They divide their time between their homes in Los Angeles and Scotland.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 172 reviews
June 13, 2022
"For me it was always about the drag...flamboyant clothes and cosmetics...on six-inch platform heels, made regal and ridiculous in a towering Louis Quatorze bleach-blond wig...I played the part of Twankey...in the musical production of Phantom of the Pantomime at the Vallhambra Theatre in Gasglow's Broadway." "Tonight I intend to vanish behind the florid features of wily Chinese washerwoman Widow Twankey...when faced with panto[mime's] melting boundaries and blurred identities...". My name is Luci LaBang. "In the blink of a mascara-clotted false eyelash... [I had] fresh creases, in double parenthesis every times I smiled... Go bold when you are old". In conversational style, this unreliable narrator shares her story...but...is she to be believed?
While Widow Twankey is a role played by an older man in drag, a replacement needed to be found for "The Principal Boy", the lynchpin of the pantomime...the audience [needed] to buy wholeheartedly into the boy hero's simple story...". "A repeated rifle shot ricochet of heel on tile approaching down the hall...the syncopated snare-drum strike and counterstrike of spiked stilettos...suddenly stops into the roaring silence...Luda was there...impossible, turquoise glacial eyes, the voice, educated, measured and too precise. [Luci LaBang] was aware of something odd about [Luda's] heel spin and the afterimage she left behind...We missed every warning, seeing only the answer to our prayers...Isn't it funny she just turned up and was that good...but there was a skull-and-crossbones rippling beneath Luda's generous smile."
Luci was tasked with the job of mentoring Luda, the newbie. When Luda requested the honor of sitting at Luci's dressing table, Luci acquiesced. Luci was soon to learn of Luda's menacing agenda starting with attempts to usurp Luci's position of prominence. Luda, a striking "close copy" of Luci. Luda, a fantastical beauty.
"Luda" by comics legend Grant Morrison, is the author's first foray as a novelist. The read is outrageous, ominous and over-the-top! I chose this tome based upon my love of Broadway musicals, however, a surprise was in store for me! The written prose was vulgar and flamboyant. It was crude, lewd, eye-popping and humorous. That said, this is a novel for some, but not for everyone.
Triggers: sex, incest, drugs, vulgarity, brain-wipes
Thank you Random House Publishing Group, Del Rey Books and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
While Widow Twankey is a role played by an older man in drag, a replacement needed to be found for "The Principal Boy", the lynchpin of the pantomime...the audience [needed] to buy wholeheartedly into the boy hero's simple story...". "A repeated rifle shot ricochet of heel on tile approaching down the hall...the syncopated snare-drum strike and counterstrike of spiked stilettos...suddenly stops into the roaring silence...Luda was there...impossible, turquoise glacial eyes, the voice, educated, measured and too precise. [Luci LaBang] was aware of something odd about [Luda's] heel spin and the afterimage she left behind...We missed every warning, seeing only the answer to our prayers...Isn't it funny she just turned up and was that good...but there was a skull-and-crossbones rippling beneath Luda's generous smile."
Luci was tasked with the job of mentoring Luda, the newbie. When Luda requested the honor of sitting at Luci's dressing table, Luci acquiesced. Luci was soon to learn of Luda's menacing agenda starting with attempts to usurp Luci's position of prominence. Luda, a striking "close copy" of Luci. Luda, a fantastical beauty.
"Luda" by comics legend Grant Morrison, is the author's first foray as a novelist. The read is outrageous, ominous and over-the-top! I chose this tome based upon my love of Broadway musicals, however, a surprise was in store for me! The written prose was vulgar and flamboyant. It was crude, lewd, eye-popping and humorous. That said, this is a novel for some, but not for everyone.
Triggers: sex, incest, drugs, vulgarity, brain-wipes
Thank you Random House Publishing Group, Del Rey Books and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Read
December 6, 2022Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that some people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
*******************************************
Oh Jesus Christ, I have no idea how to even begin to review this book.
There’s an episode of the (now very old) Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry adaptations of Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster books, where Laurie (as Wooster) is seated at the piano, trying to teach himself “Puttin’ on the Ritz”. After failures to get past the opening lines, he turns to Fry (as Jeeves) and says something like, ‘This Irving Berlin fellow seems to have come a bit of a cropper, Jeeves. Too many words, not enough notes.”
And regardless of every other complicated thing going on with Luda I think this probably sums up its main issue for me. Too many words, not enough notes. Because there are a lot of words in this book. And, yes, there’s intentionally a lot of words in the book—the whole vibe is essentially the drag queen protagonist confiding in (or lying to?) the reader as she puts her make-up on before the mirror—but I honestly can’t tell if there was enough going on underneath them that all 135,000 of them were strictly speaking necessary.
Again, I understand that there was a particular effect Grant Morrison was going for with the digressions and the rambling, the high concept language and the stylistic flourishes, but there’s part of me that is convinced the same thing could have been achieved with, say, 120,000 words.
In any case, Luda is part mystery, part mindfuck, part history, part confessional, part bullshit. Its narrator is Luci LaBang, an ageing drag queen whose career has been presently revived via a starring role in a meta pantomime called The Phantom of the Pantomime. When their Principle Boy (a role traditionally played by a girl) is mysteriously hospitalised, a mysterious young woman calling herself Luda turns up to audition and mysteriously proves by far the best prospect for the role. From her first introduction, there are questions surrounding Luda’s gender identity: the director assumes she’s a trans woman, Luci concludes she’s a drag queen. As it turns out, she’s sort of both and neither, and Luci ends up taking her under her wing. The dynamic between the two characters is immediately intense and complicated, with Luci half-desiring Luda, and half just wanting to be her, or at the very least to be young and beautiful herself again. Luda, meanwhile, wants to learn Luci’s secrets—less, perhaps, than to live as a woman (or a drag queen) but to, as she says, disappear inside someone. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast of the pantomime seems to falling prey to various accidents and disasters, Luda’s relationship with Luci, is growing increasingly messy and the secrets of Luda’s past may well be over-spilling into the present.
As summaries go, that barely scrapes the surface of what’s happening in this book. We learn about Luci’s past, there are lengthy (and, if I’m honest, somewhat laboured) digressions into the exact action of the pantomime itself, shades of Oedipus, Arthurian legend, and All About Eve, as well as the history of the fictional (fictionalised?) city of Gasglow where the story takes place. I should also say, this is—loosely—a speculative fiction story. While the world itself feels like a close echo of our own, there are small, de-stabilising differences and also, err, literal magic. Most specifically, the Glamour which, as well as being a metaphor, is also the force that inspires and, to some degree, drives Luci: “the original name for magic, for spells made of words and intent— was the dazzling cloak we threw over the ordinary world to make it shine and dance and live up to its potential.”
Sidenote: I’m going to use the pronoun she/her for both Luci and Luda. This is a simplification of both their identities but it’s the best I can do.
Luda is … Luda is fun, dazzling, exhausting, camp, shameless, and absolutely, categorically too much. Which is either a bug or a feature, depending on your perspective, and how many of those 135,000 words you’ve ploughed through. There’s also what read to me as a fair amount of pulling Alan Moore’s pigtails, about which your mileage may vary. To be honest, there’s a fair bit that mildly grated on me with Luda. It’s determined to prove that its cleverer than you at all costs. There’s a lot of stuff that is really just Grant Morrison being Grant Morrison. And while drag queens are not known for their (to use a tired phrase) political correctness, there were moments when I felt that Luci’s Twitter-baiting observations weren’t actually serving any purpose. By which I mean, they weren’t funny, thought-provoking, or challenging. For example, the constant fatphobia towards her director was just plain *boring*. He’s overweight, and that makes him unhealthy, we get it. More to the point, these sections stand in stark contrast to when Luci is actually doing something to deconstruct the mores she finds restrictive or hypocritical (or at the very least being witty about it all). The thing is, I am aware, that Luda is basically a book about being problematic and what that means: a book, ironically, about if it is a problem to be problematic. It’s just that’s quite a narrative tightrope to navigate; and an impossibly subjective one.
Also (and this is the mildest of spoilers, but only mild because the context matters) I’m not sure how I feel about a book that wants to show off this hard at me hinging one of its plot twists on whether a particular character can tuck effectively. This, Luci insists, is the ‘grand mystere’ and … uh. This sounds pedantic of me, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. Like you can find a good tutorial for that trivially easily. And I think that sort of highlights one of the difficulties of books that are trying to deliberate transgress your boundaries or startle your sensibilities: sometimes they just plain don’t and then everybody is left as feeling as awkward as a wayward bollock.
Ultimately, I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed the act of reading Luda. It dazzled me (how could a book that opens with an epigraph from Idylls of the King and casually throws out lines like “Our lives are rock hard candy with one word—Irony—written in sour sugar icing all the way down to the hole in the centre of everything” not dazzle me) but it also slightly wearied me. I suspect a lot of how people will feel about Luda comes down to how much time they have for Grant Morrison: and, as someone who has a distinctly moderate amount of time for Grant Morrison I felt I was probably the audience least served by the book as it currently stands. If you love Grant Morrison you’ll find plenty of the things you love about them (arguably to excess) and if you hate them you’ll find plenty of the things you hate about them (once again, arguably to excess).
Retrospectively, though, I have found myself thinking about the book a lot, and talking about it a lot … and my admiration for, if nothing else, its fearlessness has only grown. As I said above, Luda is a book about being problematic, but it’s also a book about (and perhaps even a celebration of) unreliability. Not just of art, history, and narrative, but of selfhood and identity. It is, after all, a story about two gender ambiguous, lying protagonists. And, look, it is not for me to sit here and try to entangle all the ways either this book’s portrayal of gender, and possibly Grant Morrison themself, run contrary to current discourse. For a start, it would take hours. But I am, honestly, increasingly troubled by what feels like a tendency, especially in the places where such discourse flourishes, to seek a universal right and wrong for something as unique and as subjective as identity. To subsume individual truth in group consensus. I read a lot of queer books this year that presented queerness in very specific ways. Ways that ultimately left me feeling alienated. I didn’t necessarily feel more spoken to by Luda, but I felt spoken to by its exultant defiance.
I would never try to argue that Luda doesn’t have the capacity to be a hurtful book, either individually or more broadly—Luda herself, a deceptive, murderous, maybe trans woman, is just a mess of tropes that play, shall we say, complicatedly in a transphobic world—but it is also a book fully conscious of its own subjectivities. It might not be your truth; indeed it might be nobody’s truth except Grant Morrison’s. But I think we need to get better at accepting that identity—like a book—can and should contain multiple truths. Because none of this is simple.
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that some people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
*******************************************
Oh Jesus Christ, I have no idea how to even begin to review this book.
There’s an episode of the (now very old) Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry adaptations of Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster books, where Laurie (as Wooster) is seated at the piano, trying to teach himself “Puttin’ on the Ritz”. After failures to get past the opening lines, he turns to Fry (as Jeeves) and says something like, ‘This Irving Berlin fellow seems to have come a bit of a cropper, Jeeves. Too many words, not enough notes.”
And regardless of every other complicated thing going on with Luda I think this probably sums up its main issue for me. Too many words, not enough notes. Because there are a lot of words in this book. And, yes, there’s intentionally a lot of words in the book—the whole vibe is essentially the drag queen protagonist confiding in (or lying to?) the reader as she puts her make-up on before the mirror—but I honestly can’t tell if there was enough going on underneath them that all 135,000 of them were strictly speaking necessary.
Again, I understand that there was a particular effect Grant Morrison was going for with the digressions and the rambling, the high concept language and the stylistic flourishes, but there’s part of me that is convinced the same thing could have been achieved with, say, 120,000 words.
In any case, Luda is part mystery, part mindfuck, part history, part confessional, part bullshit. Its narrator is Luci LaBang, an ageing drag queen whose career has been presently revived via a starring role in a meta pantomime called The Phantom of the Pantomime. When their Principle Boy (a role traditionally played by a girl) is mysteriously hospitalised, a mysterious young woman calling herself Luda turns up to audition and mysteriously proves by far the best prospect for the role. From her first introduction, there are questions surrounding Luda’s gender identity: the director assumes she’s a trans woman, Luci concludes she’s a drag queen. As it turns out, she’s sort of both and neither, and Luci ends up taking her under her wing. The dynamic between the two characters is immediately intense and complicated, with Luci half-desiring Luda, and half just wanting to be her, or at the very least to be young and beautiful herself again. Luda, meanwhile, wants to learn Luci’s secrets—less, perhaps, than to live as a woman (or a drag queen) but to, as she says, disappear inside someone. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast of the pantomime seems to falling prey to various accidents and disasters, Luda’s relationship with Luci, is growing increasingly messy and the secrets of Luda’s past may well be over-spilling into the present.
As summaries go, that barely scrapes the surface of what’s happening in this book. We learn about Luci’s past, there are lengthy (and, if I’m honest, somewhat laboured) digressions into the exact action of the pantomime itself, shades of Oedipus, Arthurian legend, and All About Eve, as well as the history of the fictional (fictionalised?) city of Gasglow where the story takes place. I should also say, this is—loosely—a speculative fiction story. While the world itself feels like a close echo of our own, there are small, de-stabilising differences and also, err, literal magic. Most specifically, the Glamour which, as well as being a metaphor, is also the force that inspires and, to some degree, drives Luci: “the original name for magic, for spells made of words and intent— was the dazzling cloak we threw over the ordinary world to make it shine and dance and live up to its potential.”
Sidenote: I’m going to use the pronoun she/her for both Luci and Luda. This is a simplification of both their identities but it’s the best I can do.
Luda is … Luda is fun, dazzling, exhausting, camp, shameless, and absolutely, categorically too much. Which is either a bug or a feature, depending on your perspective, and how many of those 135,000 words you’ve ploughed through. There’s also what read to me as a fair amount of pulling Alan Moore’s pigtails, about which your mileage may vary. To be honest, there’s a fair bit that mildly grated on me with Luda. It’s determined to prove that its cleverer than you at all costs. There’s a lot of stuff that is really just Grant Morrison being Grant Morrison. And while drag queens are not known for their (to use a tired phrase) political correctness, there were moments when I felt that Luci’s Twitter-baiting observations weren’t actually serving any purpose. By which I mean, they weren’t funny, thought-provoking, or challenging. For example, the constant fatphobia towards her director was just plain *boring*. He’s overweight, and that makes him unhealthy, we get it. More to the point, these sections stand in stark contrast to when Luci is actually doing something to deconstruct the mores she finds restrictive or hypocritical (or at the very least being witty about it all). The thing is, I am aware, that Luda is basically a book about being problematic and what that means: a book, ironically, about if it is a problem to be problematic. It’s just that’s quite a narrative tightrope to navigate; and an impossibly subjective one.
Also (and this is the mildest of spoilers, but only mild because the context matters) I’m not sure how I feel about a book that wants to show off this hard at me hinging one of its plot twists on whether a particular character can tuck effectively. This, Luci insists, is the ‘grand mystere’ and … uh. This sounds pedantic of me, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. Like you can find a good tutorial for that trivially easily. And I think that sort of highlights one of the difficulties of books that are trying to deliberate transgress your boundaries or startle your sensibilities: sometimes they just plain don’t and then everybody is left as feeling as awkward as a wayward bollock.
Ultimately, I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed the act of reading Luda. It dazzled me (how could a book that opens with an epigraph from Idylls of the King and casually throws out lines like “Our lives are rock hard candy with one word—Irony—written in sour sugar icing all the way down to the hole in the centre of everything” not dazzle me) but it also slightly wearied me. I suspect a lot of how people will feel about Luda comes down to how much time they have for Grant Morrison: and, as someone who has a distinctly moderate amount of time for Grant Morrison I felt I was probably the audience least served by the book as it currently stands. If you love Grant Morrison you’ll find plenty of the things you love about them (arguably to excess) and if you hate them you’ll find plenty of the things you hate about them (once again, arguably to excess).
Retrospectively, though, I have found myself thinking about the book a lot, and talking about it a lot … and my admiration for, if nothing else, its fearlessness has only grown. As I said above, Luda is a book about being problematic, but it’s also a book about (and perhaps even a celebration of) unreliability. Not just of art, history, and narrative, but of selfhood and identity. It is, after all, a story about two gender ambiguous, lying protagonists. And, look, it is not for me to sit here and try to entangle all the ways either this book’s portrayal of gender, and possibly Grant Morrison themself, run contrary to current discourse. For a start, it would take hours. But I am, honestly, increasingly troubled by what feels like a tendency, especially in the places where such discourse flourishes, to seek a universal right and wrong for something as unique and as subjective as identity. To subsume individual truth in group consensus. I read a lot of queer books this year that presented queerness in very specific ways. Ways that ultimately left me feeling alienated. I didn’t necessarily feel more spoken to by Luda, but I felt spoken to by its exultant defiance.
I would never try to argue that Luda doesn’t have the capacity to be a hurtful book, either individually or more broadly—Luda herself, a deceptive, murderous, maybe trans woman, is just a mess of tropes that play, shall we say, complicatedly in a transphobic world—but it is also a book fully conscious of its own subjectivities. It might not be your truth; indeed it might be nobody’s truth except Grant Morrison’s. But I think we need to get better at accepting that identity—like a book—can and should contain multiple truths. Because none of this is simple.
Read
January 24, 2023I DNF this at 50 pages unfortunately. I'm a fan of the majority of Grant Morrison's comics over the last 35 years. Unfortunately, this was his first prose novel and as a prose novelist, he's a great graphic novelist. It's about a famous crossdresser in Gasglow (instead of Glasgow where Morrison lives.) It's from their point of view and there are so many asides, metaphors, similes and the like that I felt like the story was going nowhere. It was just this character droning on and on but going nowhere. There's probably about 100 pages of actual content in this 400+ page novel. I have read his nonfiction book and it was a chore to get through as well. This will probably be the last time I step outside of comics with Morrison unfortunately although I may try his TV work at some point (an adaptation of his own Happy and Brave New World.)
August 28, 2022
I was the second editor at DC Comics to hire Grant Morrison. Putting him on Doom Patrol was definitely a successful move on my part and I have enjoyed watching his meteoric rise among comic book writers ever since. And now, he’s a novelist. Thanks to NetGalley, I had a chance to read it before the book is unleased in early September.
Luda is as overindulgent a novel as most of Grant’s Vertigo work, where ideas and language obscure narrative and characterization.
There is a lot to unpack in this dense novel which can be fascinating at times, and a slog for the most part. Essentially, it’s the All About Eve story as Graeme, a drag performer, takes in young Luda, who is mesmerizing and a sponge. Along the way, Graeme reveals secrets of the Glamour, this amorphous concept about performance art, which is an overarching theme throughout the novel.
Luda’s backstory is a mystery until the final quarter when the storyline swerves into psychological Frankenstein territory. Graeme is slowly figuring it out while also falling under police suspicion for things going sideways.
This is all set against a revival of the popular play The Phantom of the Pantomime, which uses the Aladdin story mixed with Leroux’s classic tale. So all sorts of doings fill out the story.
Morrison takes each action and embroideries it with analysis, asides, digressions, and more so by the time the story moves, you’ve forgotten where you are. Worse, based on what we learn about Graeme, our narrator, he is not as erudite and worldly as Morrison writes him; instead, it’s the author showing off his breadth and depth of knowledge.
I wanted to like this but like so much of his output since 1988, clever ideas are buried beneath detritus, refusing to get you emotionally connected with the characters.
Luda is as overindulgent a novel as most of Grant’s Vertigo work, where ideas and language obscure narrative and characterization.
There is a lot to unpack in this dense novel which can be fascinating at times, and a slog for the most part. Essentially, it’s the All About Eve story as Graeme, a drag performer, takes in young Luda, who is mesmerizing and a sponge. Along the way, Graeme reveals secrets of the Glamour, this amorphous concept about performance art, which is an overarching theme throughout the novel.
Luda’s backstory is a mystery until the final quarter when the storyline swerves into psychological Frankenstein territory. Graeme is slowly figuring it out while also falling under police suspicion for things going sideways.
This is all set against a revival of the popular play The Phantom of the Pantomime, which uses the Aladdin story mixed with Leroux’s classic tale. So all sorts of doings fill out the story.
Morrison takes each action and embroideries it with analysis, asides, digressions, and more so by the time the story moves, you’ve forgotten where you are. Worse, based on what we learn about Graeme, our narrator, he is not as erudite and worldly as Morrison writes him; instead, it’s the author showing off his breadth and depth of knowledge.
I wanted to like this but like so much of his output since 1988, clever ideas are buried beneath detritus, refusing to get you emotionally connected with the characters.
Read
October 6, 2023Comic book legend Grant Morrison turns their hand to prose in the form of an urban fantasy novel, and the results are twisted, eccentric, theatrical, and magical.
Morrison has written some of the most revered and celebrated comics in the history of the medium, including some of the finest Batman and Superman stories.
Where they’ve always shone brightest is in their original work — in comic book stories like The Invisibles and Nameless. That remains true in the transition to prose. Luda is another success story for Grant Morrison.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/best-fantasy-...
Morrison has written some of the most revered and celebrated comics in the history of the medium, including some of the finest Batman and Superman stories.
Where they’ve always shone brightest is in their original work — in comic book stories like The Invisibles and Nameless. That remains true in the transition to prose. Luda is another success story for Grant Morrison.
My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/best-fantasy-...
August 29, 2022
LUDA is the most unique and utterly bizarre book I've read in a long time. This book will not be for everybody. The story centers around Luci LaBang, a drag queen who also is a live performer of the arts, and her tenure as her career starts to fade. Luci ends up being hired for a pantomime Aladdin show and meets her mysterious costar, Luda. Luda is immediately mesmerized by Luci and wants Luci to take them in and help them learn how to be as successful as Luci. As Luda becomes more and more involved in Luci's life, the cast and crew of the show are all targeted mysteriously. Who exactly is Luda?
I don't really know if I liked this book or not. It's overwritten and unnecessarily wordy, and it also felt like Luci was sitting at her make up counter telling you the story rather than you experiencing it in the voyeuristic way I wish the story was presented. That being said, the book is very unique and intriguing in a sense that Luci is a character you just want to know more and more about. I wish the storytelling was conveyed differently because I think that the dense writing style kept me from ever feeling completely engaged. With elements of horror and mystery, Luda is ultimately an imaginative character-driven novel with a protagonist that is one that will stay with me for a long time.
I don't really know if I liked this book or not. It's overwritten and unnecessarily wordy, and it also felt like Luci was sitting at her make up counter telling you the story rather than you experiencing it in the voyeuristic way I wish the story was presented. That being said, the book is very unique and intriguing in a sense that Luci is a character you just want to know more and more about. I wish the storytelling was conveyed differently because I think that the dense writing style kept me from ever feeling completely engaged. With elements of horror and mystery, Luda is ultimately an imaginative character-driven novel with a protagonist that is one that will stay with me for a long time.
Read
July 12, 2022DNF at page 85.
I wanted to like this book. In fact I was positive I was going to love this book, but it is painful for me to read. I have been trying for weeks!! It's too wordy and I frickin' LOVE WORDS!! And I love Drag more than anything in life but I just can't with this book. It's trying too hard to be clever and I don't even know what the hell anyone is even talking about, nobody talks this way.
Sorry Luda, sashay away.
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.
I wanted to like this book. In fact I was positive I was going to love this book, but it is painful for me to read. I have been trying for weeks!! It's too wordy and I frickin' LOVE WORDS!! And I love Drag more than anything in life but I just can't with this book. It's trying too hard to be clever and I don't even know what the hell anyone is even talking about, nobody talks this way.
Sorry Luda, sashay away.
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.
Read
September 24, 2022DNF at the 100 page mark - and it's taken me a month to get here.
I think there might be a decent story here, but it's buried beneath dense, wordy, self-indulgent, first-person, flashback storytelling. Sigh.
I think there might be a decent story here, but it's buried beneath dense, wordy, self-indulgent, first-person, flashback storytelling. Sigh.
February 19, 2023
grant morrison butchers drag culture like no other.
November 24, 2022
Whether you dig Grant Morrison's approach to comic bookery, often filled with complex metatextual interactions between the reader and the material, it's hard to deny that they have pushed the boundaries of the format over the last few decades. So, it was with great curiosity that I approached their debut novel, which immediately engages in a dialogue with the reader. In this case the narrator is Luci LaBang, a drag performer in a high-profile panto, a show that is itself a deconstruction of the traditional pantomime. Morrison, who came out as nonbinary in late 2020, explores theatre and fiction through a character who has been "declaring war on fixed gender identity" since the height of LaBang's fame years earlier. As such, there's a lot to unpack here, perhaps too much for a single reading, and that might be one of the barriers to enjoyment. Every paragraph, and indeed every line, is couched in a wonderfully flippant camp (a true sign of an unreliable narrator). Yet there are no clear paths from A to B, and that's sometimes in a single sentence! After thirty years of writing in a medium with words and pictures, Morrison still feels as though they are exploring the possibilities of a purely prose piece. Which is exciting for their fans.
August 26, 2022
dnf @20%
im soooo sad to dnf this, i was so excited for it! a novel about an older drag queen with some magical horror elements sounds like my new favorite book!
unfortunately i just really did not vibe with this writing style at all. i liked the sarcastic, witty narration of our protagonist but it felt super overwritten and unnecessarily wordy. I tapped out about 100 pages in and i’m struggling to figure out why this book needed to be almost 500 pages
i’m still giving this a 3 star rating because i DO want to see more stories like this one and i feel like this one will have an audience and i’d love to recommend something like this, it just wasn’t for my personal taste sadly
im soooo sad to dnf this, i was so excited for it! a novel about an older drag queen with some magical horror elements sounds like my new favorite book!
unfortunately i just really did not vibe with this writing style at all. i liked the sarcastic, witty narration of our protagonist but it felt super overwritten and unnecessarily wordy. I tapped out about 100 pages in and i’m struggling to figure out why this book needed to be almost 500 pages
i’m still giving this a 3 star rating because i DO want to see more stories like this one and i feel like this one will have an audience and i’d love to recommend something like this, it just wasn’t for my personal taste sadly
September 28, 2022
There's a lot going on in this book and I both loved it and was bored by it.
I loved how it felt like the making of a drag queen and the backdrop of a fancy theatre trying to put on a show.
I got bored at times despite the bonkers plot of drag queen Luci teaching apprentice Luda to do the occult stuff to remain beautiful. This book is overwritten and full of purple prose as the main character rattles on and on more than Stephen King describing a baseball game in Maine.
You might find yourself skipping ahead and singing "la di da blah blah blah" as you try to decipher what's happening...or maybe that's just me. Either way this was quite the fever dream of a book and it's like nothing else I've read
I loved how it felt like the making of a drag queen and the backdrop of a fancy theatre trying to put on a show.
I got bored at times despite the bonkers plot of drag queen Luci teaching apprentice Luda to do the occult stuff to remain beautiful. This book is overwritten and full of purple prose as the main character rattles on and on more than Stephen King describing a baseball game in Maine.
You might find yourself skipping ahead and singing "la di da blah blah blah" as you try to decipher what's happening...or maybe that's just me. Either way this was quite the fever dream of a book and it's like nothing else I've read
May 22, 2022
Book #220
4 ⭐️
ARC REVIEW: September 1 2022.
Thank you netgalley for this ARC . I gave this book 4 stars at first i didnt think i would enjoy it because im really not a huge fan of narrator books but i saw a drag queen on the cover and a drag queen as the lead and i NEEDED to read it. At times i was confused i wont lie i also was so intrigued and just wanted to keep reading it was alot of reading ill tell you that. However i loved the fierceness of this book and it gave me party monster vibes at times and i loved the
marilyn monroe references at times it went a little off the rail and i got confused but then i started being so into it again. I loved that it felt like the lead was talking to me the whole time keeping me in the story and it mostly felt like a memoir. The author of this novel wrote very descriptive chapters and i loved them they write very good stories. Definitely a good book hands down. It was FIERCE
4 ⭐️
ARC REVIEW: September 1 2022.
Thank you netgalley for this ARC . I gave this book 4 stars at first i didnt think i would enjoy it because im really not a huge fan of narrator books but i saw a drag queen on the cover and a drag queen as the lead and i NEEDED to read it. At times i was confused i wont lie i also was so intrigued and just wanted to keep reading it was alot of reading ill tell you that. However i loved the fierceness of this book and it gave me party monster vibes at times and i loved the
marilyn monroe references at times it went a little off the rail and i got confused but then i started being so into it again. I loved that it felt like the lead was talking to me the whole time keeping me in the story and it mostly felt like a memoir. The author of this novel wrote very descriptive chapters and i loved them they write very good stories. Definitely a good book hands down. It was FIERCE
May 31, 2023
I've seen plenty of prose writers stumble and trip on their way into comics, but this is the first I've had of the reverse.
I'm a fan of Grants work, so I was really looking forward to this. I think ultimately all it needs is a trim. I found myself slogging through it even though it's not a particularly dense piece.
I enjoyed the setting, the framing, and the themes of mysticism, spirit, and identity, and I think the back third genuinely hits those notes very well. It was a genuine page turner for the last hundred or so, but there's still 300 pages of slog to geth through.
I was finding myself forgetting that there was a murder mystery happening behind the flashy occult goings-on, and it was saving too much of the actually interesting stuff for after the big reveal.
Maybe over time I'll think back on it more fondly because there was a good amount to enjoy in it, maybe it's just the wrong time for me.
Let's call it 2.5 or something.
I'm a fan of Grants work, so I was really looking forward to this. I think ultimately all it needs is a trim. I found myself slogging through it even though it's not a particularly dense piece.
I enjoyed the setting, the framing, and the themes of mysticism, spirit, and identity, and I think the back third genuinely hits those notes very well. It was a genuine page turner for the last hundred or so, but there's still 300 pages of slog to geth through.
I was finding myself forgetting that there was a murder mystery happening behind the flashy occult goings-on, and it was saving too much of the actually interesting stuff for after the big reveal.
Maybe over time I'll think back on it more fondly because there was a good amount to enjoy in it, maybe it's just the wrong time for me.
Let's call it 2.5 or something.
Shelved as 'gave-up-on'
September 27, 2023This one’s just not for me.
May 31, 2022
Friends, this is Grant Morrison being extremely On Their Shit, in possibly the best kind of way. All that stuff you’ve seen in their creator owned comics? Turn it up to 11 and add a dose of the real good drugs. When they reference Phantom of the Opera right in the opening, they are showing their hand as to the degree of ambiguity they are willing to play with with an unreliable as hell narrator. Hell, at one point the phrase “scar tissue purple prose” is used, and p(hilosophical) zombies are a core plot point. You think you’re getting into a story about an older, aging star being deposed by their younger protege, but it is, unsurprisingly, so much more than that. Don’t be afraid to take breaks while reading this; there were several points where I just took several long blinks at a chapter end and put it down earlier than I had planned to. The narrative leans into being transgressive and taboo, but again, to some degree, you know what you’re getting into with a Morrison story. (I will warn for implied, but never shown, incest, sexual assault, brain/personality wipes, genocide logic, among others.) Definitely worth picking up when it comes out, and I will be intrigued to see the community’s reaction when it does.
October 19, 2022
Too much of a great thing, Grant. Love the dark magick drag protoge premise of Morrison's first novel, but their editor should've stepped up and advised Grant to ease up on the verbosity. I wanted more about the other characters besides Luci and Luda, or at least more of them cavorting around Gasglow, but everything was crowded out by Lucy's over the top and around the corner style of narration,...or is the obscuration intentional? I'm sure. I think this could've been twice as good if it were half as long. Still, there's some great twisted moments, and the Luci's revelations about The Glamour are worth a read. And I couldn't help but read some autobiography into the disastrous mentorship dynamic between Luci and Luda. Oh Luda, you are so frustratingly what you are.
January 8, 2023
“SHE’S BEHIND YOU!”
I WANTED TO FINISH THIS BOOK SO BAD. if u know me u know that i am a completionist at heart. the plot seemed very interesting, it was just i physically could not get through it coz there was so much exposition.. ☹️☹️had my sibling explained to me the details of the whole story, and i can confidently say that what they described and the plot twists was interesting! this isn’t a bad book!! it’s just that there’s so much explanations for everything, so much introduction, that the actual story doesn’t start till much later. i don’t mind slow-paced or long books, but this was just so much exposition that i couldn’t ☹️☹️i’m sure if i just stuck with this and read the whole thing i’d love it 100%
I WANTED TO FINISH THIS BOOK SO BAD. if u know me u know that i am a completionist at heart. the plot seemed very interesting, it was just i physically could not get through it coz there was so much exposition.. ☹️☹️had my sibling explained to me the details of the whole story, and i can confidently say that what they described and the plot twists was interesting! this isn’t a bad book!! it’s just that there’s so much explanations for everything, so much introduction, that the actual story doesn’t start till much later. i don’t mind slow-paced or long books, but this was just so much exposition that i couldn’t ☹️☹️i’m sure if i just stuck with this and read the whole thing i’d love it 100%
December 16, 2022
Postoji puno, ili makar nekolicina, izuzetnih strip scenarista. Ali kad razmišljamo o genijalnim strip scenaristima, nameću se samo dva imena. Prvo je Alan Mur, drugo je Grent Morison. Njihovi stripovi i pristup pisanju se pak bitno razlikuju. Iako su obojica pisali i superherojske stripove koji pripadaju dvema velikim korporacijama, DC i Marvel, kao i sopstvene duže ili kraće serijale, Mur je najpoznatiji po detaljno istraženim, realističnim i pesimističnim stripovima kao što su Nadzirači, V kao Vendeta i Iz Pakla, dok je Morison često lutao u psihodeliju koja, čini se, samo zahvaljujući njegovom geniju nije potpuno hermetična. Njegov serijal Nevidljivi bio je toliko uticajan da se poveo spor i da li je film Matriks plagijat tog stripa. A verovatno je on jedini scenarista koji me je mogao naterati da čitam Supermena (sad mi je to jedan od omiljenih stripova, a ne samo što nisam zaljubljenik u Supermena već generalno ne volim superheroje). The Filth je pak strip iz toliko slojeva da se ni posle desetak čitanja ne može potpuno raspakovati, ali to nijedno prethodno čitanje nimalo ne obesmišljava niti mu umanjuje draž.
Vest da je Morison napisao roman prvenac – nakon što se nedavno uspešno dokazao kao TV scenarista pri adaptaciji sopstvenog stripa Happy!, koji je delovao kao nešto što je nemoguće adaptirati – svakako nije mogla proći neprimećeno. Nije Morison svakako prvi strip scenarista koji se oprobao i u prozi. Gejmen je poslednjih decenija gotovo potpuno zamenio jedan medij za drugi, pomenuti Mur je objavio čak dva romana (jedan na preko hiljadu strana), kao i zbirku priča, Voren Elis je takođe potpisao dva romana, a Majk Keri svako malo izbaci ili samostalni roman ili kolaboraciju. Međutim, čini se da, osim Gejmena, niko s prozom nije imao toliko uspeha koliko sa stripovima.
Prvo što se može reći za Ludu je da je Morison njenom pisanju pristupio hrabro. Ovaj roman nikako nije prošireni scenario, niti je u bilo kom smislu stripičan, pa čak ni filmičan. Sa druge strane, kao i kod Tarantinove novelizacije filma Bilo jednom u Holivudu, stiče se utisak da je to odstupanje previše svesno.
Luda je roman o Lusi LaBang, drag performans umetnici (ili umetniku?), koja trenutno radi, kao glumica, na postavci avangardnog pozorišnog komada Fantom pantomime. Reč je o tekstu koji na ekstravagantan i interaktivan način spaja Aladinovu lampu sa Fantomom iz opere. Kako pripreme na komadu napreduju, a audicija za ulogu Aladina biva neuspešna, zabrinutost počinje da raste. A onda se niotkuda pojavljuje Luda, mlađa, lepša i još neoblikovana verzija Lusi. Njihovo prijateljstvo i kompleksna veza istog trenutka kreće da se razvija i odvodi do niza neočekivanih otkrića (a kod Morisona se ako ništa drugo, neosporno može reći da su ta otkrića doista neočekivana i netipična).
Najpre će se saznati za postojanje nečega što Lusi zove Glamur, a što je, po njenim rečima, magija koja pojedincu omogućava da postane ono što želi i da izgleda onako kako želi. Dok lutaju noćnim klubovima i Lusi uči Ludu Glamuru, neobični događaji počinju da se odigravaju. A svi se tiču ili članova trupe ili Lusinih starih poznanika-saradnika.
Zatim se saznaje i Ludin oridžin stori, bizarna priča o odrastanju sa dvoje uvrnutih psihijatara, koji su joj u potpunosti izbrisali identitet (i pol) i onda je iznova „stvorili" po uzoru na svoju preminulu kćerku. A razmotava se i sve ono što je prethodilo da bi Lusi postala to što jeste, kao i žrtve koje je zbog toga podnela (od kojih za neke do susreta sa Ludom nije bila ni svesna).
Luda je napisana u prvom licu, s mnoštvom introspekcija i šetanja kroz vreme. Jezik je u potpunosti prilagođen drag svetu, tako da je sve, ponekad i previše, prenaglašeno i na nivou nekog drag slenga ili igranja rečima, najčešće sa seksualnim panč-lajnom. A dijaloga, kao i kod Tarantina, ima neočekivano malo.
A doneti sud o Ludi je izuzetno teško. Nije to knjiga koja će promeniti svet, ali nije ni knjiga koja će biti posve nebitna i zaboravljiva u Morisonovoj karijeri (kao što je slučaj s romanima Vorena Elisa). Međutim, koliko god da cenim Morisonovu odvažnost pri pisanju Lude, ipak ne mogu da ne pomislim kako bi ovaj roman, makar u mojim očima, izgleda osetno bolje, ili makar prohodnije, da je kraći i upravo s više dijaloga. Morison svakako nikad nije bio neko ko će ići utabanim stazama, niti podilaziti čitaocima, čak i kad je pisao tako ikonične likove poput Supermena ili Betmena, tako da je verovatno i pitanje da li će vam se Luda dopasti ili ne verovatno više do senzibiliteta i trenutka nego do same materije-obrade.
U svakom slučaju, mislim da bi bila šteta da se njegova veza s prozom okonča na ovom flertu (da se poslužim žargonom iz Lude).
Vest da je Morison napisao roman prvenac – nakon što se nedavno uspešno dokazao kao TV scenarista pri adaptaciji sopstvenog stripa Happy!, koji je delovao kao nešto što je nemoguće adaptirati – svakako nije mogla proći neprimećeno. Nije Morison svakako prvi strip scenarista koji se oprobao i u prozi. Gejmen je poslednjih decenija gotovo potpuno zamenio jedan medij za drugi, pomenuti Mur je objavio čak dva romana (jedan na preko hiljadu strana), kao i zbirku priča, Voren Elis je takođe potpisao dva romana, a Majk Keri svako malo izbaci ili samostalni roman ili kolaboraciju. Međutim, čini se da, osim Gejmena, niko s prozom nije imao toliko uspeha koliko sa stripovima.
Prvo što se može reći za Ludu je da je Morison njenom pisanju pristupio hrabro. Ovaj roman nikako nije prošireni scenario, niti je u bilo kom smislu stripičan, pa čak ni filmičan. Sa druge strane, kao i kod Tarantinove novelizacije filma Bilo jednom u Holivudu, stiče se utisak da je to odstupanje previše svesno.
Luda je roman o Lusi LaBang, drag performans umetnici (ili umetniku?), koja trenutno radi, kao glumica, na postavci avangardnog pozorišnog komada Fantom pantomime. Reč je o tekstu koji na ekstravagantan i interaktivan način spaja Aladinovu lampu sa Fantomom iz opere. Kako pripreme na komadu napreduju, a audicija za ulogu Aladina biva neuspešna, zabrinutost počinje da raste. A onda se niotkuda pojavljuje Luda, mlađa, lepša i još neoblikovana verzija Lusi. Njihovo prijateljstvo i kompleksna veza istog trenutka kreće da se razvija i odvodi do niza neočekivanih otkrića (a kod Morisona se ako ništa drugo, neosporno može reći da su ta otkrića doista neočekivana i netipična).
Najpre će se saznati za postojanje nečega što Lusi zove Glamur, a što je, po njenim rečima, magija koja pojedincu omogućava da postane ono što želi i da izgleda onako kako želi. Dok lutaju noćnim klubovima i Lusi uči Ludu Glamuru, neobični događaji počinju da se odigravaju. A svi se tiču ili članova trupe ili Lusinih starih poznanika-saradnika.
Zatim se saznaje i Ludin oridžin stori, bizarna priča o odrastanju sa dvoje uvrnutih psihijatara, koji su joj u potpunosti izbrisali identitet (i pol) i onda je iznova „stvorili" po uzoru na svoju preminulu kćerku. A razmotava se i sve ono što je prethodilo da bi Lusi postala to što jeste, kao i žrtve koje je zbog toga podnela (od kojih za neke do susreta sa Ludom nije bila ni svesna).
Luda je napisana u prvom licu, s mnoštvom introspekcija i šetanja kroz vreme. Jezik je u potpunosti prilagođen drag svetu, tako da je sve, ponekad i previše, prenaglašeno i na nivou nekog drag slenga ili igranja rečima, najčešće sa seksualnim panč-lajnom. A dijaloga, kao i kod Tarantina, ima neočekivano malo.
A doneti sud o Ludi je izuzetno teško. Nije to knjiga koja će promeniti svet, ali nije ni knjiga koja će biti posve nebitna i zaboravljiva u Morisonovoj karijeri (kao što je slučaj s romanima Vorena Elisa). Međutim, koliko god da cenim Morisonovu odvažnost pri pisanju Lude, ipak ne mogu da ne pomislim kako bi ovaj roman, makar u mojim očima, izgleda osetno bolje, ili makar prohodnije, da je kraći i upravo s više dijaloga. Morison svakako nikad nije bio neko ko će ići utabanim stazama, niti podilaziti čitaocima, čak i kad je pisao tako ikonične likove poput Supermena ili Betmena, tako da je verovatno i pitanje da li će vam se Luda dopasti ili ne verovatno više do senzibiliteta i trenutka nego do same materije-obrade.
U svakom slučaju, mislim da bi bila šteta da se njegova veza s prozom okonča na ovom flertu (da se poslužim žargonom iz Lude).
October 6, 2023
Luda is a sprawling novel about a drag star working in a new pantomime who becomes obsessed with their mysterious new co-star. Luci LaBang has had a varied career, but now she's appearing in a meta-pantomime in her hometown of Gasglow, an alternate version of Glasgow. When the Principal Boy playing Aladdin has an accident, the mysterious Luda appears to take the part, and with it, capture Luci's interest, wanting to know the secrets of the Glamour to be able to transform yourself, but as might be expected, things means not everything is as it seems.
I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did, as it has a great concept and some really fun elements woven in. The thing that I—and I think many people—found difficult was the narration style, which is very purposefully too verbose and full of digressions as Luci's style. I appreciated what it was doing, but even with this, it felt like it still needed more cutting down or honing, so that the style didn't actually become a barrier to wanting to keep reading. It is all about obfuscating, both the style and the book, and I like that, but it wasn't always enjoyable to read.
In terms of the plot, it's fairly simple, with a lot of bits of backstory (that may or may not be true, as the whole book is fashioned with layers of lies and ambiguity) thrown in as well: obsession, mirroring, and people mysteriously dying. A lot of the twists are very obvious, and it was hard to tell if this is purposeful or not, which might in itself be intentional. The setting of Gasglow is a whole thing, though for me I found there wasn't actually as much of it as a setting as I might've expected, and I felt like the speculative element (which isn't so much my thing anyway) often got lost amongst the narration. I did like the way you slowly learnt things about Luci's history and these felt like they could've been whole books in themselves, which is a testament to the messy ambiguity that was conjured around them.
One of the themes that really comes across when reading is the idea of being who you are without worrying if it's what people expect or problematic or anything else, and it's interesting how it addresses this, with Luci's narration often focusing on weird details and comparisons to be edgy and shocking, but at other times being very nuanced about who people are and what is expected of them. If nothing else, it gets across the complexity of a person's inner self, whether or not it is actually authentic, but hilariously, at the same time, the book argues that pantomime shouldn't be politically correct or change, maybe because it's too much of a mess to actually be offensive (and 'messy' definitely describes Luci and Luda, too).
I like that Luda is bold and, yes, messy, playing around with what is appropriate and the reliability of anything you are told in a book. It also takes a very British look at queerness and drag, filtered through the eyes of a very specific character. At first, I could handle the narrative style, but the further I read, the more it grated on me, and by the end I was lost in the swirling references and digressions. I don't know Morrison's other work though I'm aware of them, so maybe fans of their work will enjoy this more, but for me, I would've maybe liked the same vibe but just more cut down.
I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did, as it has a great concept and some really fun elements woven in. The thing that I—and I think many people—found difficult was the narration style, which is very purposefully too verbose and full of digressions as Luci's style. I appreciated what it was doing, but even with this, it felt like it still needed more cutting down or honing, so that the style didn't actually become a barrier to wanting to keep reading. It is all about obfuscating, both the style and the book, and I like that, but it wasn't always enjoyable to read.
In terms of the plot, it's fairly simple, with a lot of bits of backstory (that may or may not be true, as the whole book is fashioned with layers of lies and ambiguity) thrown in as well: obsession, mirroring, and people mysteriously dying. A lot of the twists are very obvious, and it was hard to tell if this is purposeful or not, which might in itself be intentional. The setting of Gasglow is a whole thing, though for me I found there wasn't actually as much of it as a setting as I might've expected, and I felt like the speculative element (which isn't so much my thing anyway) often got lost amongst the narration. I did like the way you slowly learnt things about Luci's history and these felt like they could've been whole books in themselves, which is a testament to the messy ambiguity that was conjured around them.
One of the themes that really comes across when reading is the idea of being who you are without worrying if it's what people expect or problematic or anything else, and it's interesting how it addresses this, with Luci's narration often focusing on weird details and comparisons to be edgy and shocking, but at other times being very nuanced about who people are and what is expected of them. If nothing else, it gets across the complexity of a person's inner self, whether or not it is actually authentic, but hilariously, at the same time, the book argues that pantomime shouldn't be politically correct or change, maybe because it's too much of a mess to actually be offensive (and 'messy' definitely describes Luci and Luda, too).
I like that Luda is bold and, yes, messy, playing around with what is appropriate and the reliability of anything you are told in a book. It also takes a very British look at queerness and drag, filtered through the eyes of a very specific character. At first, I could handle the narrative style, but the further I read, the more it grated on me, and by the end I was lost in the swirling references and digressions. I don't know Morrison's other work though I'm aware of them, so maybe fans of their work will enjoy this more, but for me, I would've maybe liked the same vibe but just more cut down.
Shelved as 'dnf'
January 19, 2023I ended up DNFing this, but it's with great reluctance. I originally started reading the arc before putting it aside and waiting for the published audiobook. I thought it would make it easier to consume, and while I think that's true, it's still a lot. The story is wild and all over the place, which isn't necessarily something that bothers me, it's just there's so much... maybe too much? It felt a bit like hanging out too long with that one friend who just sucks the life out of your social battery, but you love them anyways so you try to keep up. I don't know that I've ever had that feeling with a book, so this is new territory for me.
Is this a forever DNF? Maybe not. It's definitely not a forever ban on Morrison, I liked quite a lot of what I read... it was just a lot stuffed into a lot.
Is this a forever DNF? Maybe not. It's definitely not a forever ban on Morrison, I liked quite a lot of what I read... it was just a lot stuffed into a lot.
October 10, 2023
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC to review
2 stars!
Now hold up. LOOK AT THAT COVER! READ THAT SUMMARY! MY GOD! Perfection!!!!
BUT I wanted to like this SOOOOO BADLY I was so ready for this and excited but it's so wordy that I just could not get into the story at all. I just kept thinking about how wordy it was and I was just sadly reading just to finish it. The story seems so so so so good but it's overshadowed by dense words.
2 stars!
Now hold up. LOOK AT THAT COVER! READ THAT SUMMARY! MY GOD! Perfection!!!!
BUT I wanted to like this SOOOOO BADLY I was so ready for this and excited but it's so wordy that I just could not get into the story at all. I just kept thinking about how wordy it was and I was just sadly reading just to finish it. The story seems so so so so good but it's overshadowed by dense words.
January 18, 2024
contrapoints video essay turned camp horror fever dream spiral
July 9, 2023
Synesthetic and hypnotizing. The language and imagery gave me frisson. Still didn’t know what the hell was going on a good chunk of the time, but damn I loved it.
September 6, 2022
Talk about hopes dashed and a disappointing read. I don’t think I’ve been so surprised that a book I’ve been looking forward to could fall so far from even the average mark… ever? Yeah. Possibly ever.
Grant Morrison writes a novel with a drag queen protagonist who takes on a protege and passes on her myriad secrets played against the background of rehearsals for a pantomime in Glasgow (which does have a very large drag scene in real life). Sounds absolutely spectacular, but my issue isn’t the plot: it’s everything else about this book that’s the problem.
As I was reading this book, I got the feeling this book thinks it’s precious. Precocious even. It’s not. Told to the readers like we’re sitting there with her as if friends or confidantes by the protagonist, drag queen Luci LaBang, she is narrator, stand-in impressionist for all other characters, her own judge and jury for all actions taken during the tale she’s weaving for us, and both her own comic relief and foil. As is the tradition of novels told entirely in first person when drugs, alcohol, and crime are involved, she’s terribly narcissistic and undeniably unreliable. Yet Luci expects we will hang on to her every word, every sentence, and every god-awful tangent she runs off on. To be honest? This book is utterly exhausting.
Why explain in one sentence what you could explain in three pages? Why stick to a simple explanation when you could spend a whole chapter in sloppy exposition? And for pete’s sake, do you have to fill every sentence with words that most readers will need to look up in the OED?
This book is vulgar in places (which I loved), but also offensive in the wrong way in other places. I don’t know if that’s just me, being American and fond of binge-watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I just didn’t have the time to put up with this book and its supposed meta self-awareness and nihilistic outlook. It gets a no from me.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine for the opportunity to review this title. Owing to the 3 star or lower rating, this review will not appear on any social media or bookseller website.
Grant Morrison writes a novel with a drag queen protagonist who takes on a protege and passes on her myriad secrets played against the background of rehearsals for a pantomime in Glasgow (which does have a very large drag scene in real life). Sounds absolutely spectacular, but my issue isn’t the plot: it’s everything else about this book that’s the problem.
As I was reading this book, I got the feeling this book thinks it’s precious. Precocious even. It’s not. Told to the readers like we’re sitting there with her as if friends or confidantes by the protagonist, drag queen Luci LaBang, she is narrator, stand-in impressionist for all other characters, her own judge and jury for all actions taken during the tale she’s weaving for us, and both her own comic relief and foil. As is the tradition of novels told entirely in first person when drugs, alcohol, and crime are involved, she’s terribly narcissistic and undeniably unreliable. Yet Luci expects we will hang on to her every word, every sentence, and every god-awful tangent she runs off on. To be honest? This book is utterly exhausting.
Why explain in one sentence what you could explain in three pages? Why stick to a simple explanation when you could spend a whole chapter in sloppy exposition? And for pete’s sake, do you have to fill every sentence with words that most readers will need to look up in the OED?
This book is vulgar in places (which I loved), but also offensive in the wrong way in other places. I don’t know if that’s just me, being American and fond of binge-watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I just didn’t have the time to put up with this book and its supposed meta self-awareness and nihilistic outlook. It gets a no from me.
Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine for the opportunity to review this title. Owing to the 3 star or lower rating, this review will not appear on any social media or bookseller website.
February 12, 2023
I have to begin by admitting that I am buying what Grant Morrison is selling. I enjoy his mainstream comic book work (All-Star Superman, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Doom Patrol, and so on...), and his forays into television like Happy! and Brave New World.
But for me, the most Morrisonian Morrison are the works that directly explore his ideas on magic, self-creation, and the nature of reality. Luda is a solid entry into this latter category, which I expect explains both the lovers and haters of his first novel.
Luda pursues several interlocking stories at once. On its face, we have a memoir from drag dynamo Luci LaBang as she returns to the Glasglow stage for one last hurrah. In the course of staging Aladdin with a meta-Phantom of the Opera twist, Ms. LaBang meets the titular Luda, a rising upstart with charm to spare.
Amidst their burgeoning relationship, we follow along with Luda's initiation into the Glamour, a system of magic somewhere between Chaos Magick and the concept of the fiction suit introduced in earlier Morrison works.
Reality seems to ripple under our feet as the play spins out of control, and Luda's shocking past is slowly revealed. As we race towards opening night, we're left questioning our narrator's reliability, the motivations of all involved, and the very limits of what is real.
Full disclosure, some readers may find Morrison's writing style challenging. The book reads like poetry, and there were several points that I read out loud for the sheer delight of the language. Like Joyce, it's best to immerse yourself in the hypnotism of the poetry instead of plodding along word to word. I found myself looking up fashion and music references pretty often, but I still made quick progress and never lost the plot.
If you've enjoyed some of the stranger aspects of Morrison's work and are willing to enjoy a thrilling break-neck ride into the unknown, I highly recommend Luda. And I suspect that as with much of this work, it will continue to reveal new layers on future reads.
But for me, the most Morrisonian Morrison are the works that directly explore his ideas on magic, self-creation, and the nature of reality. Luda is a solid entry into this latter category, which I expect explains both the lovers and haters of his first novel.
Luda pursues several interlocking stories at once. On its face, we have a memoir from drag dynamo Luci LaBang as she returns to the Glasglow stage for one last hurrah. In the course of staging Aladdin with a meta-Phantom of the Opera twist, Ms. LaBang meets the titular Luda, a rising upstart with charm to spare.
Amidst their burgeoning relationship, we follow along with Luda's initiation into the Glamour, a system of magic somewhere between Chaos Magick and the concept of the fiction suit introduced in earlier Morrison works.
Reality seems to ripple under our feet as the play spins out of control, and Luda's shocking past is slowly revealed. As we race towards opening night, we're left questioning our narrator's reliability, the motivations of all involved, and the very limits of what is real.
Full disclosure, some readers may find Morrison's writing style challenging. The book reads like poetry, and there were several points that I read out loud for the sheer delight of the language. Like Joyce, it's best to immerse yourself in the hypnotism of the poetry instead of plodding along word to word. I found myself looking up fashion and music references pretty often, but I still made quick progress and never lost the plot.
If you've enjoyed some of the stranger aspects of Morrison's work and are willing to enjoy a thrilling break-neck ride into the unknown, I highly recommend Luda. And I suspect that as with much of this work, it will continue to reveal new layers on future reads.
August 25, 2022
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a review.
Soooo......I am a big fan of Grant Morrison. The Invisibles is my second favorite comic of all time. I was very much excited to read this book and was thrilled when I was approved for an ARC.
I gave up on the book last night.
This is not a bad book. It's got an interesting subject and there's a definite appeal. And if you enjoy densely written books, you might really enjoy this. I felt trapped by the density and wished for less exposition in some places and more exposition in others.
I read about 20% of the book, but it took me months to get there. I am left feeling that I may come back to this book at a later date and start over again. But for right now, while I acknowledge the potential of the ideas in the book, it's not a book I can get through.
Soooo......I am a big fan of Grant Morrison. The Invisibles is my second favorite comic of all time. I was very much excited to read this book and was thrilled when I was approved for an ARC.
I gave up on the book last night.
This is not a bad book. It's got an interesting subject and there's a definite appeal. And if you enjoy densely written books, you might really enjoy this. I felt trapped by the density and wished for less exposition in some places and more exposition in others.
I read about 20% of the book, but it took me months to get there. I am left feeling that I may come back to this book at a later date and start over again. But for right now, while I acknowledge the potential of the ideas in the book, it's not a book I can get through.
December 27, 2022
How on earth did this get published? Why was this even published? I was all in and wanted to love this book. I ended up hate reading/listening to the audiobook. I screamed in my car so much at this trash. This fell apart around chapter 4, went off the rails, fell off the cliff and tumbled through sewage before hitting a propane tank with a fizzle. TOO. MANY. WORDS. Characters that came out of nowhere to further a pretty thin plot (I’m talking nanometers thick) and then disappeared again. Then other characters slightly introduced died without fanfare or purpose. This isn’t horror or thriller or literature or anything! And the book simply wouldn’t end. I was hoping that all the characters would die just so this steaming pile would end. I believe that this pointless word soup was published just to be condescendingly weird and vague. And Gasglow? Really???? When you use other correct Scottish locations. You couldn’t type Glasgow? You had to be that annoying. Nice.
Ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
September 6, 2022
“Luda” is an incredible, disorienting, hypnotic, work of creativity. The prose and the story are unlike anything I’ve ever read. Impossible to categorize and label. Much like drag queens themselves it’s over the top and almost too much! It’s filled to the brim with flash,flair, glamor and intrigue that builds with no satisfying release. It is bold and daring and will have its detractors but I loved it and was left quite speechless at many moments. It is a fascinating work of queer fiction that should be praised and argued over. My only gripe is that it’s just sooooo much and at times it’s daunting, overwhelming and exhausting. Still I was seduced by the power of the Glamour and I hope other readers will be too! Thank you Netgalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review!
May 10, 2023
Of all the retellings of the last days of Merlin set in the Drag and Panto theatre scene of Scotland, this is easily one of the best.
Beautiful, Brilliant, and Bonkers! Grant Morrison is a masterful storyteller, but also has a true love of stories that comes through on every page. I love how much this book forced me to take my time through all of its metanarrative references, unreliable narrators, and reality bending prose. If you're interested and willing to do the work, there's a really fascinating examination of gender, aging, the trauma of life, and our own desire to make our lives a story worth telling. I absolutely loved this book.
Beautiful, Brilliant, and Bonkers! Grant Morrison is a masterful storyteller, but also has a true love of stories that comes through on every page. I love how much this book forced me to take my time through all of its metanarrative references, unreliable narrators, and reality bending prose. If you're interested and willing to do the work, there's a really fascinating examination of gender, aging, the trauma of life, and our own desire to make our lives a story worth telling. I absolutely loved this book.
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