Inescapably one of the finest comics I've ever read, but unfortunately, only the beginning of the series is available, and it is the weakest part. It Inescapably one of the finest comics I've ever read, but unfortunately, only the beginning of the series is available, and it is the weakest part. It will be a crime if the lack of success of these early bits forestalls the entire series becoming available, because it stands up as the equal of any other Vertigo title. Milligan is still trying to find his voice in these early stories, which are more standard fare, but soon he catches his stride and reaches levels of thoughtfully absurd wit to rival Moore's 'Swamp Thing', Gaiman's 'Sandman' or the better arcs of 'Hellblazer'.
Good as they can be, it's a shame Morrison and Gaiman get the lion's share of the attention for the Britwave movement, because Milligan wrote a much more innovative book. The art is solid, if not always remarkable. Bachalo is a bit weak at the beginning but he does some of the best work of his career around the middle. The illustrators who replace him for the closing of the series are competent, but don't have the same strikingly idiomatic visions.
The real star here is the writing, and Milligan is a talent who deserves to be better known and widely respected. His 'Enigma' is as unusual and insightful as Watchmen, his Extremist and Skin are darker and more transgressive than anything else put out by a major publisher. Yet Shade is his most imaginative and wide-ranging book, an amazing feat of constant reinvention with a smart, literary sensibility unrivaled in comics.
When people ask what my favorite comic is, I still say 'Shade', and I'm always sad at the lack of recognition when I say it.
Inescapably one of the finest comics I've ever read, but unfortunately, only the beginning of the series is available, and it is the weakest part. It Inescapably one of the finest comics I've ever read, but unfortunately, only the beginning of the series is available, and it is the weakest part. It will be a crime if the lack of success of these early bits forestalls the entire series becoming available, because it stands up as the equal of any other Vertigo title. Milligan is still trying to find his voice in these early stories, which are more standard fare, but soon he catches his stride and reaches levels of thoughtfully absurd wit to rival Moore's 'Swamp Thing', Gaiman's 'Sandman' or the better arcs of 'Hellblazer'.
Good as they can be, it's a shame Morrison and Gaiman get the lion's share of the attention for the Britwave movement, because Milligan wrote a much more innovative book. The art is solid, if not always remarkable. Bachalo is a bit weak at the beginning but he does some of the best work of his career around the middle. The illustrators who replace him for the closing of the series are competent, but don't have the same strikingly idiomatic visions.
The real star here is the writing, and Milligan is a talent who deserves to be better known and widely respected. His 'Enigma' is as unusual and insightful as Watchmen, his Extremist and Skin are darker and more transgressive than anything else put out by a major publisher. Yet Shade is his most imaginative and wide-ranging book, an amazing feat of constant reinvention with a smart, literary sensibility unrivaled in comics.
When people ask what my favorite comic is, I still say 'Shade', and I'm always sad at the lack of recognition when I say it.
Kraken marks a digression for Mieville from his familiar madcap style. Where before we had come to expect moody, slow-burn plots interrupted by suddenKraken marks a digression for Mieville from his familiar madcap style. Where before we had come to expect moody, slow-burn plots interrupted by sudden action, and just as suddenly back to introspection, we now get a story that is dramatic, unbroken, and streamlined in punchy chapters and theatrical quick-cuts.
His vibrant, poetical asides into mad science and techno-thaumaturgy have been toned down: no longer a virulent undercurrent, twisting and shaping his world, they have become curiosities and explanations. He has been careful to ensure that he never loses his audience through obscure complexity.
In Kraken, most of the asides outline a freewheeling Kantian magic system built on belief and symbology, the other asides are fodder for his plot twists, which are somewhat obvious, if only because he has avoided the swirling eddies of uncertainty that would otherwise hide their trail.
Like his magic, his world is overtly symbolic, and as his magic is an allegory for the act of writing. We could describe his symbols as structuralist, because their meanings are open to interpretation. Unlike esoteric and hermeneutic magics, which are based upon knowledge, history, and the discovery of secrets, Mieville's system is built around free creation of meanings.
Like Grant Morrison's 'Chaos Magic', his rituals and spells could be anything you make of them. Morrison took this to an extreme in his own London-based Contemporary Fantasy, 'The Invisibles', flooding his plot and characters with so many meanings, traditions, and details that he often loses the thread of his story completely. Contrarily, Mieville never loses the thrust of his story, because his magic is not weighted down with the compulsive details of history.
And yet it has always been those details that subgenre-defining authors drew on to create their vision of a magical London, from Gaiman to Milligan to Moore. Mieville uses historical elements, but never interweaves them through the convolutions of history--the externalized structure of his magic doesn't require it. He does use historical details, but since power comes from reputation, not lore, he need not delve too deeply.
Yet in many ways, his is the same system Gaiman often uses, in American Gods, for example. But for Gaiman, the power of a symbol is not merely the sum of its reputation--it also retains the accrued power of its history and influence. There is an interwoven foundation of esoterica in his magic, even when he bases the power of his magic on modern concepts, as in Neverwhere.
Kraken often evokes Neverwhere, whether by converging influences or homage. The violent, intimidating villain duos who chase the protagonists throughout both books share styles, descriptions, roles, and ironically erudite soliloquies.
The plot-driving behind-the-scenes villains are both incomprehensibly powerful, mysterious, unknown figures, though in Gaiman you do get a motive. Mieville's has no lines, a technique which tends to work better in cthonic horror. He's chiefly a plot-mover, and there is an impressive amount of plot-moving to be done to keep a five-hundred page book steaming along at a clip.
Mieville keeps his plot aloft, and there's never a dull moment, though there are a number of artificially dramatic moments, his short chapters often ending in sudden twists and evoking the cliffhangers of a radio melodrama "Will Abigail survive? Tune in next week!" (cue organ)
This pacing leaves little room for introspection, psychological progression, or denouement, but Mieville's quirky melodrama is no place for psychological sketches, he's writing characters, not people. Like his magic, his characters are symbolic, and chiefly important for their surface qualities. In this book, first impressions will never let you down, so don't look for subtle internal conflicts or psychological shifts.
The characters are vibrant, interesting, and flawed, but not human, they are too perfectly constructed and unchanging. Like figures from Greek drama, we do not get men who are cowards or men who are intelligent, we get characters whose intelligence or cowardice continually define them and establish their roles in the story.
Such characters can grow tedious: their conversations progressing in the same ways, their particular strengths, weaknesses, and insights reappearing over and over. One example is the fish-out-of-water protagonist who spends the first hundred pages belaboring his confusion at the incomprehensible world he has been thrust into. His undifferentiated complaints soon form a somewhat irritating leitmotif. Some character progression and transition wouldn't have run amiss, or, barring that, at least using that reminiscent dialogue to explore new, subtle angles in the world Mieville was building for us.
More than his other books, Kraken shows the pulp roots of New Weird, a genre he has helped to define. The quick, action-packed plot, the melodrama, the cliffhangers, and the idealized characters are all familiar to any pulp fans. The length, however, is not, and Mieville shows the difficulty of trying to stretch his comparatively straightforward story and characters to the length established by introspective novels.
As Hitchcock pointed out, you have to repeatedly build and break a story, or it begins to bloat and sag. With a bit more of the subtlety, introspection, and wild, sensory-overload fervor I've come to expect from him, Mieville might have put his own idiomatic stamp on the Contemporary Fantasy, instead of giving us a fun and light (if unusual and well-written) pulp adventure.
His entrance to the subgenre intives comparison to the giants who have come to inhabit it in its recent boom years. He's written a mature Harry Potter, an intellectual's Dresden Files, a devilishly eccentric Anita Blake. His is a strong, intelligent, and literate vision of the growing and popular subgenre of modern-day magic. Yet we are still waiting for a novelist who can use the strengths of their medium to revolutionize the original vision of the comic book authors who have defined this subgenre for thirty years.
I would like to thank Goodreads and Del Ray for sending me an uncorrected proof of Kraken through the Goodreads First Reads program.
In his introduction, C.J. Henderson expresses a disappointment that Lovecraft's heroes are never able to fight back, that they never just get a gun anIn his introduction, C.J. Henderson expresses a disappointment that Lovecraft's heroes are never able to fight back, that they never just get a gun and start shooting at any otherworldly interdimensional beasts that show up. Perhaps he also feels a disappointment that more people don't fire their guns to fend off encroaching lightning bolts or tornadoes. Lovecraft's entire point is that there are some things larger than the human arsenal.
Beyond that, there are a multitude of stories featuring more stalwart heroes facing the horrors of the mythos. Firstly, there's Lovecraft's own 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward' which features a remarkably complex protagonist surviving in the incomprehensible world of the elder gods. There are also Alan Moore's 'Yuggoth Cultures' and Neal Gaiman's 'Only The End of the World Again'. Lovecraft often corresponded with R.E. Howard, whose Conan the Barbarian provides an excellent example of a hero who faces the cyclopean horrors and comes away relatively unscathed.
Conan also provides many parallels with the classic hard boiled detective, the other genre from which Henderson draws inspiration. Conan's no-nonsense machismo and sense of self-preservation in the face of the unknown could have served as an excellent mold for a detective protagonist.
Hard boiled detective fiction meshes rather well with Lovecraft, as the protagonists must know not to get in too far. Private eyes know there is such a thing as knowing too much. That's why we have a witness protection program. Henderson could have created an interesting setting by pointing out the similarities of both genres, especially being 'drawn in too far' and 'losing one's humanity'.
However, despite wanting a strong hero, and drawing from a genre renowned for men who place survival above all else, Henderson instead creates the most cheery, incautious detective he can. While both Lovecraft and hard boiled fiction depend on mood to create a sense of depth and danger, Henderson's book has none.
Though claiming Detective fiction and the Mythos for inspiration, he instead writes a rompy adventure. While Douglas Adams was able to pull humor from detective fiction, and Joss Whedon managed it with otherworldly horror, Henderson is, unfortunately, neither funny or quirky, despite numerous attempts.
The book doesn't fit with either the horror or detective genre, it is almost pure monomyth adventure. The soft boiled protagonist is a literal 'chosen one' with magic powers, and the cast is filled out by a beautiful damsel-in-distress with zero personality, an 'average guy' and two 'magical minorities'.
The latter two are both apparently American-born, firstly a black voodoo weaponeer, and secondly a mystical Asian psychic with the requisite chilled emotions. Though she does not seem to be an actual foreigner, Henderson still describes her by the racist 19th-century epithet 'an oriental'.
The Mandingo is suitably oversized and laconic, and apparently able to get his hands on the most unlikely of weapons. They will certainly need them, if they want to shoot that hurricane before it has a chance to kill them. Besides land mines and rocket launchers, he gets the whole party a set of Pancor Jackhammers, which are fully automatic shotguns. Unfortunately, these weapons were never actually produced, except for two prototypes.
Only gun nuts and fans of certain classic VRPGs would know this fact, so it would only harm disbelief in a small percentage. But then, why add a small detail that will be meaningless to most of your readers, who won't get it, and faulty to the few who will?
The weapon also brings up both the question of how the guy got a hold of them in the first place and why he would give unique weapons to some guy for free. The answer to the latter point is that everyone in this book intuitively knows whether anyone else is telling the truth. It's never explained whether that's a characteristic of this particular magical world, or whether Henderson thinks that's actually how human beings interact, but it certainly saves him from having to write multi-syllabic dialogue or portray human conflicts.
Our weaponeer (who Henderson once describes as shushing the hero with 'a thick black finger') also bores out the middle of the shotgun slugs and puts nitroglycerin inside of them. Nitro is the most unstable explosive we have, meaning these slugs would explode if you dropped them on the floor. Let's all imagine what would happen if you suddenly set off a firing pin next to one. That's right, exploding gun. Now lets imagine you have a whole clip full of these things. Take that, you damned flash floods!
Our Celestial psychic serves the purpose of introducing us to the main mover of this books' plot: the intuitive message from beyond. Nearly every problem Henderson sets before his characters is solved within the next half page, and usually by some sudden epiphany from out of the blue. Whether it's simple mistrust or the secret location of the bad guys, nothing is too small or too large for the author to simply put directly into his characters' brains.
Ironically, this bypasses any thought or emotional strength that would make the characters 'strong in the face of overwhelming odds', as he originally envisioned them. By removing any purpose or will, he ensures that the characters can have no personality, growth, or ability to actually overcome challenges.
At one point, the protagonist begins to doubt, falling into an uncharacteristic moment of introspection, which is then rudely interrupted by a magical voice in his head saying 'believe' and removing all his doubts in one fell swoop. Apparently, Henderson has to personally enter his books and bully his characters back on track, because not even they can believe how poorly-written their world is.
This book also gives an opportunity for him to represent his lack of understanding in the areas of science and mathematics when he begins to explain all about the world of the elder gods. While explaining that the evil only comes at times of grand syzygy (no cliche left behind) he suggests that planets are kept in motion by their own gravitational wells, which is the opposite of true. Gravity saps away energy.
His original suggestion that the placement of planets allows the otherworldly creatures to enter our world is likewise fraught, since the effect of gravity quickly diminishes over distance For example: the gravitational pull of Jupiter on you at its greatest is about equal with the television set across the room. If you really want to stop the elder gods, just rearrange the furniture.
He then misquotes 'A Brief History of Time' concerning the expansion and contraction of the universe. Between that and the Pancor reference, I expected this book to have been written circa 1987, not 2006.
As a sort of final insult, Henderson indicates that Lovecraft's own works were the result of him psychically connecting to the coming horrors which occur in this book. This is like saying that the Bible was only written so it could eventually be a footnote in the Da Vinci Code (not that Dan Brown actually cited references).
The title of the book really says a lot more than it means to. It evokes the Lovecraft story "The Things That Should Not Be", except Lovecraft's title is frightening. We are naturally afraid of things that should not exist, but things which don't exist are understandably less threatening.
The title clearly doesn't refer to the monsters themselves, which show up early and often, and leave their very corporeal body parts all over. Rather, it refers to the fact that this book is without many things, including mood, tone, character, humor, suspense, fear, conflict, research, or editing. Henderson misuses numerous words and metaphors throughout. One example is using 'sweating bullets' to indicate lots of hard work, instead of anxiety over the fast approach of death.
Finally, the book bears as much resemblance to Lovecraft's work as a Michael Bay film. The hero even talks to 'Cthulhu' at length, showing that Henderson has never come close to comprehending Lovecraft's style or philosophy. The very thoughts of these creatures are too complex for the human mind to comprehend. Just as no single person could memorize all the books that have been written, so too we could not comprehend such complex, alien minds.
Instead of blasting the hero's brain with unbelievable thoughts, 'Cthulhu' prattles on about death, sounding like a child paraphrasing Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Then Henderson puts into effect the threat from the introduction of taking on incomprehensible forces of nature with blazing pistols.
It's much easier to shoot them once Henderson makes the naive mistake of creating a theological pseudoscientific explanation to make the creatures small, simple, and understandable. At which point, nothing remains at all which ties this book to Lovecraft's legacy.
In the end, Henderson is not creative enough or experienced enough to produce anything new or interesting, even when mixing two such promising and interesting genres. One comes away with the sense that his personal experiences with fear, human conflict, and the insurmountable are so limited that he couldn't imagine anything that would create more than a half-page's difficulty for his characters.
This book achieves about the same level of horror, plot, and character depth as your average made-for-TV sci fi channel movie. His monsters even feel rubber-suited, which is odd, since books don't have limited CGI budgets. I hope Henderson's Kolchak novelizations are better than this, because one man shouldn't make fodder out of two previously enjoyable worlds....more
I've come to recognize that one of the main reasons I enjoyed this book so much was that I listened to the audiobook, performed by comedian Lenny HenrI've come to recognize that one of the main reasons I enjoyed this book so much was that I listened to the audiobook, performed by comedian Lenny Henry, whose background as a Brit of Caribbean descent made him the perfect choice to bring the characters to life. A lot of audiobooks aren't very good, but this one way great, and really brings out the fact that Anansi stories are meant to be heard.
It's recognizable Gaiman stuff, with the fish-out-of-water narrator in a modern fantasy world, with the author sxploring the history and the form of the mythic story, but there's a level of deprecating humor in this book that is lacking in other works by Gaiman.
One can catch snips of wit in any of his books. Any good book must include some humor: an author might as futilely try to excise pain or desire from life as humor. Gaiman has never placed any such artificial limits on his work; indeed, the only limits on his books are those he, himself cannot overcome.
Previously, his humor was only an occasional element, but there was apparently something in the writing of this particular book which finally allowed him to unleash his sense of the comic as a whole entity. The text swims and bobs with the ridiculous, the unfortunate, and the clever.
After reading 'Good Omens', written by Gaiman and Prachett, I was told that without Prachett, it would have retained none of the humor. I now begin to wonder whether if Pratchett added anything at all. Indeed, this work of Gaiman's overshadows that earlier work in both degrees and shades of the insightful and entertaining.
With the focus on Anansi and stories, the book provides an amusing analysis of storytelling itself, so that anyone who studies the nature and classification of tales will find certain asides and references particularly amusing. It is rare these days that an author will write a piece of fiction which explores on a subtextual level a concept or idea fundamental to the work itself. I have come to wish that more authors could gain the audacity that Gaiman found here.
There is a degree to which this story matches Gaiman's usual monomythic progression from naive outsider to coy insider, which at the outset was my greatest difficulty with the work. The inevitability and redundancy of this trope makes me wish for Gaiman's more eccentric and perverse moments. However, I found in the clever and skilled text a story worth experiencing, and one which matches or exceeds Gaiman's other attempts in the modern fantasy genre.
The story is not as epic or dire as Gaiman's tend to be, and without that there is a loss of urgency in the story. This is not really a deficiency, however, as the playful humor could not cohabitate comfortably with an ever-steepening plot curve.
The work fits into Gaiman's usual mode, exploring the myths and psychologies that most interest him. It may lose some of his fans in that it is less dark and brooding, less hopeless, but this could hardly be counted a loss. Any reader who wants more of the same can re-read his old works. the rest of us may appreciate seeing a master storyteller exploring his form in a new and engaging way.
J.G. Keely
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