Illuminations: Stories
Moore hasn’t retired from storytelling. He is now an estimable writer of fiction with three books, including his latest, the story collection Illuminations, and while none of these volumes have the gamma-ray punch of his comics, all of them burn with Moore’s soaring intelligence and riotous humanity ... Illuminations, Moore’s first collection of short fiction, finds the writer working on a smaller scale but still swinging for the firmament. An assemblage of eerie sublimities with more pyrotechnics than Guy Fawkes Day — and just as many shadows — the book showcases all of Moore’s strengths as a fantasist ... Moore has never encountered a genre he cannot subvert, often fiendishly...and yet what lingers is not his creative irreverence but his ability to inhabit his human and inhuman characters alike ... Moore has written both a dynamite story collection and a dynamite monster manual. Rather fitting, considering that this is a book obsessed with revelations; nothing, after all, reveals our logics, our fears, our desires — in short, ourselves — quite like a monster.
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He crams his sentences past bursting point, displaying the lexical gluttony you might expect from somebody whose prose has largely been kept within the spartan confines of speech bubbles for 40 years ... His prose fiction thrums with the zest of somebody who feels newly untrammelled ... His postlapsarian anger gives it a vigour and depth of feeling that will resonate even with readers who don’t know the heavily hinted at real-life identities of the characters ... Moore’s prolixity is oddly energising, conveying the exhilarating sense of words rushing to catch up with the author’s never-ending stream of ingenious ideas. Still, without wishing to put anybody off Jerusalem, 50 or so pages at a time seems like the ideal dose.
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... a collection of solid, well-written yarns that would have been groundbreaking to a teen comics reader 30 or 40 years ago (me again) ... Technically, Mr. Moore’s writing is as brilliant as ever—from dizzying wordplay in scene-setting detail to cuttingly succinct summaries ... As for the stories themselves, there is no shortage of wild invention ... Loyal fans of Mr. Moore in all his incarnations will love this collection. Boring grown-up people who can also appreciate a well-written 'graphic novel' (a term the author despises) will also enjoy them—if while sighing a little, with, it has to be said, nostalgia.
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