Fringes of the bizarre

Celebrated comic book writer Alan Moore's latest collection of stories bring out his outlandish creativity, sharp wit and dark humour, all in his distinctive literary voice.

Illuminations is a collection of short stories from the renowned Alan Moore who is widely regarded as one of the best comic book writers in the English language. His works include the legendary V for Vendetta graphic novel, the Watchmen series, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. Illuminations marks a retreat from his natural storytelling form in visual media to prose. A mixed bag of highly cerebral stories, the collection brings out Moore’s bizarre creativity, sharp wit, vivid language and dark humour, all in his distinctive literary voice.

The book starts with the bone-chilling ‘Hypothetical Lizard’, a thriller set in a brothel called The House Without Clocks whose inhabitants have various talents and are trained to service very select clientele. The story’s narrator is Som Som, a girl who was sold to the brothel at a tender age and mutilated in a way that has severed the two halves of her brain leaving her in an eternal silence unable to comprehend what she sees and hears so she may serve mighty wizards and be forever unable to communicate the secrets they may spill behind closed doors. Through her lobotomized perception, Som Som is troubled by the relationship between the charismatic Rawra Chin and the less talented, but attractive Floral Yatt but silence renders her incapable of intervening. This dark fantasy is deeply haunting and the perfect story to start the book.

In ‘Not Even Legend’, a group of supernatural investigators decide to put aside creatures already known to humans to discover those that are yet unknown, oblivious to the fact that one of their own members is an undiscovered supernatural being who then seeks, obviously, to protect his own future. ‘Location, Location, Locations’ is probably the wackiest story of the lot. The last woman on Earth is tasked with closing out a property deal as part of a switch of hands with the son of God while horrors right out of the Book of Revelations walk the streets and celestial beings incinerate each other overhead. ‘Cold Reading’ is a classic ghost story where a conniving medium gets more than what he bargained for with a client.

‘The Improbably Complex High-Energy State’ is best described as a science-textbook-meets-fantasy story that documents the evolution of a being from nothing into grappling self-awareness. “Blithely originating reason, the brain reasoned that if it existed, as appeared to be the case, it seemed conceivable that there might be some broader pasture of existence, somewhere for it to do its existing in.” Not light reading but truly one of the most exquisite stories I’ve ever read: absurd yet delightful, wickedly satirical, and creative beyond limits.

Much of the book is taken up by ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’, a novella that goes back and forth in time depicting the comic book industry’s ruthless ways and seems like Moore’s personal critique of the industry. Despite the harsher undertones, his adoration for comic books also bleeds through like when he describes the magnetic pull that new comic books on a local store’s stand hold for a young boy (and future comic book executive), “They were all so enticing, with their covers lit-up windows on to worlds of blazing satisfaction. All the pictures and the colours printed so much better on the shiny cover paper than they did on the insides, so that each one became a longed-for jewel, with skies of beautifully graded cyan, capes like banners, ochre Kansas dust. He loved the arcane cover furniture, the little disc up at the top left where it said American and Thunderman, the large, serrated stamp at the top right that meant the issue was approved of by the Comics Code Authority, the glorious logos hurtling with speed lines or in chiselled platinum on brooding violet cumulus. They had a glaze, a lustre that was metaphysical.”

Illuminations is wildly original. The prose is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read; the style did take me a while to get used to and tested the limits of my ability to visualise the writer’s words. Alan Moore presents surreal and bewitching tales. Every story is filled with its own palpable tension that creates an electrifying atmosphere. Beneath the seemingly innocuous, languid settings there lies a dark undercurrent poised, tightly waiting. Although conceptually lush and creatively fertile, the stories tend to ramble and on occasion feel overwritten, which leads me to believe that the book is meant to be relished and not rushed in one sitting. You need that languorous state of mind to appreciate the beauty of the prose versus impatiently waiting to get to the punch line. This story collection is utterly uncategorisable as any I have ever read, many times convoluting, but uncanny in its final impact and spectacularly delivered.