Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (Graphic Adaptation by P Craig Russell; 2014)

Today's third, and last, 'Illustrated Title' for review is this graphic novelisation of Gaiman's Graveyard Book: orchestrated by P Craig Russell and featuring the penmanship of Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, and Stephen B. Scott. It's all very professionally accomplished: a thoroughly realised bande dessinée. It's so well done, indeed, that it feels petty to carp. Nonetheless there was a small still voice, at the back of my head, that wondered at the point of the exercise. It's not as though Gaiman's prose (never less than plainly efficient at communicating its story) doesn't work in the original at getting the whole over to its YA readership. The rather wordy, explanation-heavy original has been scripted, here, into some text-dense panels, lots of fat speech balloons lousy with words, and a slightly sluggish pace. It's by no means bad though. By no means.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods (2014)

An 'illustrated' theme today; this graphic novel by Emily Carroll collects together five deliciously chilling and haunting stories, all set in a Gothic-y, Grimms-y forest world somewhere between about 1800 and about 1920. These tales work through fascinations with murder, guilt, the disinclination of the dead to rest calmly in their graves. It's beautifully done. The worst I might say is that the illustrations, and the choices Carroll has made about individual or multiple panels, occasionally force or compress the pacing in ways that seemed to me disadvantageous to the larger mood;

More, at the end of the day Through the Woods is only five, fairly short stories, which perhaps makes the book seem, overall, a touch slight. But they are all very cleverly constructed, readable and every one of them stays with you after you've finished. That's the true test of this sort of tale.

The visual style is clear-line and moderately exaggerated cartoon-y figures rendered in a more atmospherically realised world of bold primary colours, blocks of composition and filigree detail. The latter are better than the former, and the art is (I thought) better as establishing an initial mood of unease and dread...

...than at cashing-in shock moments, or startling us with visualised horror:

You may disagree, of course: these things are not measured against absolute aesthetic tables, but upon the pulse of the individual reader. And it's possible I'm only registering the old truth of horror: what's not shown but intimated is much, much more terrifying than what's shown. It's not in the thing that terror resides, you see: it's in our own minds.

A. F. Harrold, The Imaginary (2014)

Lovely older child/YA fable by the impressively bearded A F Harrold, beautifully illustrated by Emily Gravett, concerning the state of whose facial hair I have no information at present. It's about imaginary friends, but from the point of view of those imaginary friends, troped here as real but supernatural entities. Amanda, the heroine, discovers Rudger (not Roger!) in her cupboard.

They have splendid play-adventures together. Some delicious chills are provided by the alarming Mr Bunting, who has unnaturally extended his lifespan by devouring imaginary friends, and now has got a whiff of Rudger. Amanda is well realised; Rudger's adventures, pursued by Mr Bunting, and properly tense and thrilling; but the most moving part of the whole novel, perhaps surprisingly, is the secondary story of Amanda's mum, who has forgotten about her own childhood imaginary friend, a dog called Fridge; who recalls him, and then forgets him again. Heartbreakingly written! All in all: a very lovely novel indeed.

Nick Harkaway, Tigerman (2014)

The Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
(For Tiger(man)'s a Harkaway thing):
Its tops are made out of Batman;
Its bottom is made out of Greene.
Its bouncy, flouncy, lit'ry, bit twee, fun fun fun fun fun,
But by far the most Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
Is its tangled-yet-self-aware-complicity-with-upper-middle-class-White-English-masculine-codes-of-right-behaviour-in-a-postcolonial-context:
Po-o-o-ost
colonialcontext.

John Darnielle, Wolf In White Van (2014)

I might say 'I enjoyed this', except that 'enjoy' doesn't seem the right word, exactly. For a first novel it's a very accomplished piece of work indeed: sensitively, evocatively and occasionally alarmingly written. It is eerie and weird and sticks in the mind after reading, like a piece of pungently delicious food sticks in the teeth. Quite apart from anything else, it offers a portrait of the inward oddness of the SF fan (the crossover between SF and gaming especially) a healthy distance away from the rather self-congratulatory cosiness of Jo Walton's Hugo-winning Amongst Others. There's little to love and much to recognise in this portrait of what it means to be a geek. Wolf In White Van shares with Walton's book a deliberately aimless structure, and little actually happens in it. A better book, though, I think.

Story: our narrator, Sean, lives alone in Californian suburbia, coping with the consequences of some terrible incident in his youth that left his face hideously disfigured. A nurse calls four times a day to check on him and top up his treatment. The rest of the time he runs a retro-style, postal-only role-playing game called 'Trace Italian': people write to Sean detailing their next move in the post-nuclear-disaster dystopia of his game-space, and he writes back with personalised details as to how their game is going. The novel is written, in a sinuous sort of way, backwards: so we start at the end, rewind through the story of two teenage players of Trace Italian who confused the game and reality and suffered (one died, one badly hurt) as a result, and end up with the initial trauma that wrecked Sean's face. Along the way are some beautifully written excursi on solitude, imagination, science fiction and games -- the stuff on the porousness of game-players' sense of game and world struck me, post-Gamergate, as prescient (Sean has a thing for Conan, and also for John Norman's Gor novels, although not to read, just to stare at their 'shamesful and garish' covers, 'pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way': 'I didn't need to hear the stories the books were trying to tell me: their skins haunted me enough' [49]). Sometimes these excursi drag a little, but often they are marvellous embedded essays on the side of being a genre Fan upon which Amongst Others prefers not to dwell. Sean is keen not to be thought a creep and a freak, and works hard not to be; but there is something creepy about him nonetheless, and as you read through the novel it starts to dawn upon you that this freakishness is nothing to do with his ruined face or hermit existence. It's the freakishness he shares with you: the combination of desire to escape and desire to control, the passion, passivity and hatred of being passive, the strange potage of imagination, generosity, anger and perversity that is mixed in the head of the true science fiction geek. I know whereof I speak.

It's a novel about SF rather than a SF novel, without even the set-dressing of magic that made Amongst Others Hugo-acceptable. But it's a very, very good novel for all that.

Downsides: Darnielle is, perhaps, a little too obviously coy about withholding the precise details of the 'event' that led to young Sean Phillips's disfigurement. Sometimes the prose strays into mere whimsy (though this is rare). And, though the blame for this can't be laid at Darnielle's door, that cover is rather too EEEEEK! for my taste. In fact, if you stare at it, and rotate it slowly through 35° you find yourself feeling physically nauseous.

Liesel Schwartz, Chronicles of Light and Shadow 3: Sky Pirates (2014)

Liesel Schwartz’s Chronicles of Light and Shadow 3: Sky Pirates is a 400-page Adventure. There’s much incident and little depth, and a great deal of painstaking pointing-out of the states characters are in rather than trusting the Idiot Reader to figure it out for herself. For example, near the beginning, the protagonist finds herself ‘in the vastness of the Sudan’ and we’re told ‘the sight of it made a lump well up in her throat. Being out here in the vastness ... the emptiness of her surroundings perfectly matched the emptiness she felt in her heart—she felt desolate and alone’ [9]. Those last five words in particular are the prose-style equivalent of bellowing into a person’s ear because you think they’re deaf, or dim, or both. The effect on the normally calibrated ear is not an agreeable one.

Elle Chance feels an emptiness in her heart—she FEELS DESOLATE—AND ALONE—because in a previous instalment of this multi-volume Adventure her husband went missing in the netherworld, a wraith now, perhaps dead, possibly retrievable. The novel steers Elle across her steampunk world on a book-length quest for him, fighting all the time through an endless blizzard of clichés: ‘throw caution to the wind’; ‘a dull ache’; ‘a dizzying height’; ‘her back straight as a ramrod’; ‘she hated him with every fibre of her being’. It’s like this all the way through: teeth are gritted; mettle is tested; trouble kicks off. Not once but several times we have the exchange: ‘There was a knock on the door. “Enter!” X said’, where X might be any of the sinister men in Schwarz’s dramatis personae. This is how the pirates speak: ‘gold! The cap’n is going to be pleased!’ [69]. Indeed these pirates do pretty much everything you'd expect them to except actually say ‘arrr!’ ‘Dashwood’s words had struck a nerve. That nerve had been connected to sensitive thoughts she had buried deep within her’ [139]. Oh THAT sort of nerve! Moments of ultra violence jar awkwardly against this cosily over-familiar texture:

Elle raised her Colt and shot the pirate in the face. His head exploded like a melon, with bright red gore splattering against the wood panelling behind him. [68]

There’s also a sex scene in a jungle lake, where Elle shags the Pirate Captain (despite being still on the search for her hubbie) whereupon ‘they both climaxed with such force’ that it made the whole lake ‘vibrate’. That’s some shagging!

Rachel Pollack, The Child Eater (2014)

Pollack's Golden-Compassy braiding of 'fairy tale world' and 'modern Western society' story strands starts with such storming brilliance it can almost not help itself but slide, a little, and diminish as the story is spooled out to 350 close packed pages. Matyas, a potboy at a run-down inn in fairyland hangs out after his shifts with the young daughter of the local blacksmith. They swap stories to alleviate the boredom.

They talked of women with fishtails and the heads of birds who sang to sailors and drove them mad. And angels, or maybe demons, that rode on great fish that could swallow men whole, with room inside for the men to build homes, and fires to keep themselves warm.

When they tired of talking about the sea they imagined the cities they might visit if they could ever cross the water. Cities where the animals had taken over and now the people had to beg for bones at the feet of long tables where dogs lay on silk pillows. Cities where the buildings sang strange songs all night long and everyone had to go deep underground to be able to sleep. Cities where golden heads on silver poles lined the streets and would tell you anything you wanted to know. Cities where the children had killed all the adults and used the blood for magic spells that forced angels to give them whatever they wanted. [1-2]

Potentiality being so much more magical than actuality, it proves impossible for the on-the-page story of The Child Eater to live up to these marvellous glimmers of possible story. It's by no means a bad novel. On the one hand, there's Matyas's dream, equal measures starry-eyed (or starry-haloed) and ruthless-selfish, of escaping poverty and becoming a 'Master' wizard, through which we get a great deal of magical specificity. On the other, over in our world, there's Jack's magic-stifling obsession with being 'normal, and the consequences it has for him, and later for his son, witch-born Simon. It's good, readable stuff. It's just a little ponderous after that gorgeous beginning. What is it Auden says?

The empty junction glitters in the sun.
So all quays and crossroads: who can tell
These places of decision and farewell,
To what dishonour all adventure leads?

It's not that the actual bi-plot drags its heels: if anything both storylines are a trifle too busy. The Child Eater entity itself is less gory than you might be thinking, although it certainly has its bloody moments; and I found the rather egregious Tarot theme more tiresome than anything. But the novel is detailed, intermittently powerful, and full of excellent things. It is a notable book. Ah, but ... but ...