Illuminations
Stories
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times bestselling author Alan Moore-one of the most influential writers in the history of comics- "a dynamite story collection" (The New York Times Book Review) which takes us to the fantastical underside of reality.
In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover--and in some cases even make and unmake--the various uncharted parts of existence.
In "A Hypothetical Lizard," two concubines in a brothel of fantastical specialists fall in love with tragic ramifications. In "Not Even Legend," a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In "Illuminations," a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella "What We Can Know About Thunderman," which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry's major players over the last seventy-five years, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business.
From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that--a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Legendary graphic novelist Moore (Watchmen) further burnishes his reputation in his first prose collection, which features nine career-spanning tales. The stand-out short novel, "What We Can Know About Thunderman," is a scathing take on the American comic book industry and its impact on popular culture and politics, and will undoubtedly attract the most attention, given Moore's history with the genre. In it, Moore imagines a reality in which thinly disguised versions of characters like Superman have grown so grim that "everybody had decided that comics weren't just for kids, then that they weren't for kids at all"—and now their audience is on the verge of dying off. It gets so bad that comics writer Dan Wheems decides that unless he escapes the industry, he will be reduced to "a quickly understood cartoon, the way it did with everything and everybody." Moore's subversive talent is equally on display in the shorter tales: "Not Even Legend" follows a group of paranormal investigators who eschew ghost hunting to instead study "things that nobody had ever said existed in the first place," while the cynical psychic protagonist of "Cold Reading" justifies his work as a "spiritual sugar pill." The superhero genre's loss is fantastic fiction's gain.
