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 . . . Fans of Mr. Moore in all his incarnations will love this collection.” —Wall Street Journal
“One of the most significant fiction writers in English . . . Moore's influence can be felt everywhere-in our literature, on our screens, in our politics.” —Guardian
“His bighearted passion for his people . . . and the whole monstrous endeavor of the human condition is infectious. I'm not sure there's a God, but I thank Her for Alan Moore.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Hilarious . . . [Moore] deconstructs the industry that sells superheroes by using its own myths against it . . . The collection is really good.” —Slate
““Illuminations is a fascinating book . . . from the mind of one of the most celebrated comic book writers in the English language . . . you're in for a wild ride, from start to finish.”” —Alex Kingsley, Ancillary Review of Books
“Legendary graphic novelist Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and many others) burnishes his reputation in his first prose collection, which features nine career-spanning tales. The standout 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 his subversive talent is equally on display in shorter tales. This brilliant volume dazzles at every turn.” —Publishers Weekly
“Moore's dark humor and expert twists are on full display in these fictions. Fans of dark fantasy and dark humor will enjoy this collection from one of fantasy's greats.” —Booklist
“I was glued to the pages just like when I first read Moore's Miracleman or Swamp Thing as a pasty adolescent. Moore is a chameleon, a mimic, and a magician, both literally and figuratively.” —Book and Film Globe, a Best Book of 2022
“The stories found in his new collection Illuminations [has] a range of styles on display encompassing haunted memory pieces and formally inventive folk horror. The short novel “What We Can Know About Thunderman” finds Moore drawing on his background in comics and unearthing disquieting histories, eventually winding up at a jaw-dropping place.” —Inside Hook, a Best Book of 2022
“[This] fiction showcases Moore's patented virtues: spirituality blended with worldliness; transgressiveness mixed with honor for traditions and the classics; a maximalist approach to style and plot; and a prose that's sometimes recondite but always assimilable, asking the reader to be a full partner.” —Locus Magazine
“Burn[s] 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 . . . the book showcases all of Moore's strengths as a fantasist . . . Moore has written both a dynamite story collection and a dynamite monster manual . . . Moore's failures are few, his radiances many . . . Remarkable.” —Junot Diaz, The New York Times Book Review
“An indispensable and hilarious tome of Alan Moore's usual cerebral fare, Illuminations shines as a worthy exhibition of storytelling by one of the world's finest writers.” —Screen Rant
“A prolific writer with a healthy sense of the absurd. This short story collection spans 40 years, and yes, does include a satirical history of the comics business. Readers may come for that one, but stay for tales of concubines, extradimensional beings, and aging.” —Superhero Hype, a Best Book of 2022
“Clever and vivid.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The Shakespeare of the comic book . . . His prose fiction thrums with the zest of somebody who feels newly untrammelled . . . conveying the exhilarating sense of words rushing to catch up with the author's never-ending stream of ingenious ideas.” —The Daily Telegraph
“Moore makes the parochial universal, the mundane sublime and the temporal never-ending.” —Financial Times
“One of the great fiction minds of his generation.” —Rolling Stone
“Moore's prose is rich and complicated . . . Once you slip into the rhythm of it, it is also poetic, insightful, and beautiful.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Lovers of fantasy stories will love unwrapping 'Illuminations' by Alan Moore, a collection of short-stories with an underlying theme of comics and the industry. Perfect for the young gamer or comix reader.” —Terri Schlichenmeyer, Macro Eagle
“It's almost impossible to deny that [Moore] is among the finest craftsmen most of us can name.” —The Comics Journal
2022-08-17
The first short story collection from the author of several iconic graphic novels and comic-book series.
When a comic-book writer switches to prose only, they might have trouble conjuring the fleshed-out descriptions usually provided by pictures. But Moore, creator of such legendary graphic works as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has never had this problem. His works typically include several picture-light text extracts, and if Moore’s debut novel—the sprawling Jerusalem (2016)—is anything to go by, the difficulty is getting him to stop his flow of words. One might hope, then, that the restrictive length of a short story would provide some necessary structure. This collection definitely includes some tight, clever, and vivid entries, including “Not Even Legend,” about a cabal of mythological creatures prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that ordinary humans never get a hint of their existence; “Hypothetical Lizard,” which chronicles a brothel worker’s nasty revenge on his former lover; “Location, Location, Location,” concerning a real estate agent officially signing over a house to Jesus after the Rapture; and “And, at the Last, Just To Be Done With Silence,” a creepy tale of madness-inducing penance in the late 12th century. The title story, in which a man longs to recapture his youth, and “Cold Reading,” which features a successful fake medium who learns the perils of disbelief, have an entertaining if slightly derivative Twilight Zone vibe. But Moore goes off the rails with “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” the book's longest work, taking up fully half the pages. It’s a self-indulgently savage lampoon of the comic-book industry, wandering over several decades, taking the occasional clever potshot, very occasionally affirming the way that comic books and comic-book conventions can bring lonely nerds together, and frequently veering into the grotesque, petty, and bizarre. The story never has any clear destination other than to suggest that the industry is a cesspool that’s impossible to escape in any clean way. The well-informed reader will infer that Moore is still extremely angry at DC for a number of intellectual property issues, remains upset with the way Warner Brothers adapted his works for film, and isn’t exactly happy with Marvel, either.
A mixed bag with a misshapen boulder in it.