Heat Death No. 1

New Juche Heat Death No. 1 (2023)
One of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists writing today, according to Dennis Cooper, and sure enough there's an undeniably spacious wilderness dividing the writing of New Juche from that of almost everyone else I might name off the top of my head. The latest evidence comes in the form of this irregular - but hopefully not too irregular - journal. Heat Death sees our man venturing forth to the island of Phuket where a once fevered tourist economy has been destroyed by the pandemic leaving only the desolation of tropical ghost towns. Given that his words and powerfully stark images document a cultural signal to noise ending in a sea of undifferentiated trash, it's tempting to read the title of the journal as a metaphor, referring as it does to entropy and the eventual extinction of the universe; except this is no metaphor.

More than once I've encountered a sort of running joke, popular amongst the pre-digital generation, about how the first photographs you take when someone - usually employed in further education - hands you a camera will inevitably be of ruined buildings and urban decay. The humorous aspect of this truism is supposedly that it's a cliché amounting to teenagers expressing affected and therefore fashionable alienation. It's therefore a revelation, at least for me, to view the images of ruin reproduced herein - and New Juche is also a superb photographer, for what it may be worth - as pertaining to something truly profound, in turn suggesting all those alienated teenagers were genuinely reaching out for something even if they were ill-equipped to express it in original terms, or even anything more lucid than society innit.

 

I am perplexed as to what taking pictures of modern ruins means, and I'm ambivalent about why they attract me so strongly. I think that for Europeans they are cursed to evoke the Second World War and its photographic legacy which appears so difficult and prurient to people today. Just like photographs of suffering bodies or corpses, one that shows the modern ruins cannot be seen by Europeans as purely didactic tools like memento mori, nor as a subject that can be interpreted with reference to more-or-less-classical aesthetics in isolation from historical and social context. A photograph of a modern ruin, and only a modern ruin, may suggest prurience or exploitation because it shows individual, collective, economic, or ideological failure in a purely aesthetic rather than social context, such that it evokes or appears to nourish schadenfreude. Pornography appeals to specific lustful tastes, provokes sensation, is designed to titillate and arouse, can be the fruit of unequal relations, coerces the individual into the general. I aspire to pornography and often think of myself casually as a pornographer, further still, the precise sexual value of ruined buildings and their penetration is a particular one for me that will be difficult to explain here. But ultimately my attempts at pornography are themselves a failure because I can never seem to render anything in what is called a purely aesthetic context.

 

Nevertheless, Heat Death comes so close as for it to make little difference from where I'm sitting, building something which has the cumulative effect of music with its relentless barrage of hundreds upon hundreds of images of ruin, desolation, abandonment and lives indefinitely postponed. This effect is strongly reinforced during the final thirty or so pages - full colour and double page landscapes of relentless landfill which repetition gradually transforms into something entirely and confusingly natural before it comes to resemble abstract expressionism. It's absolutely overwhelming and hardly the effect you might anticipate from a book in which the author doesn't once get his chopper out; and ultimately New Juche does indeed explain that which will be difficult to explain here.

Darker than dark though his subject matter may occasionally seem, there's something very life-affirming in New Juche's unflinching dedication to mapping even the smelliest, most neglected corners of human experience.

Lazarus Planet

Mark Waid and a cast of thousands Lazarus Planet (2023)
I really should have limited myself to the issue featuring the Doom Patrol, although I suppose had I done so I would have been left wondering whether the rest was any better; but no, I just had to buy the collection because I wanted the whole story, except it turns out this isn't the whole story and the saga - such as it is - somehow manages to sprawl off into issues of World's Finest, Batman, and others because can you really have too much of a good thing?

Lazarus Planet is DC's version of the White Event from Marvel's New Universe line back in 1986, or possibly an homage to that issue of the Simpsons comic where the power plant blows up  irradiating everyone and turning them all into superheroes. This telling of the same tale features a magic volcano which erupts, blanketing the Earth with material which causes certain individuals to develop special powers. However, this collection isn't so much a conveniently linear account as a bunch of loosely related strips set against the background of the aforementioned occurrence, and most of them are pretty much self-contained to the point of being incidental. Being the work of writers and artists other than Mark Waid and Riccardo Federici - whose alpha and omega issues sandwich the bulk of the narrative and are the best things here by some margin - Lazarus Planet looks a lot like obscure hopefuls given the chance to create exciting new superheroes for the DC Universe because, as we all know, if there's one thing wrong with the DC Universe it's that it doesn't have enough superheroes.

So once you're done with Mark Waid and Riccardo Federici's bookends, this thing looks massively uneven and, on close inspection, not actually much good. Sure, it's lavishly produced, printed, and coloured, and it looks expensive, but the taint of manga is overpowering with big eyes and cutesy postures at almost every turn, because apparently that's what the kids want. I remain unconvinced by homegrown American manga on the grounds of it all looking the fucking same with a homogeneity that not even seventies Marvel managed. It pushes buttons rather than making its point with an actual narrative, so far as I can see, and its a lazy affectation. Everything on the page is a quotation. Maybe there's some good stuff out there somewhere but I've yet to see it, and what we apparently have right now makes everyone channeling Rob Liefeld back in the nineties seem like a period of wildly adventurous experimentation.

This wouldn't be so bad were it limited to the art, but much of the writing is engaged in the same bland low calorie impersonation - cutesy TikTok teenagers with purple hair going crosseyed when confused, communicating in teenspeak, short clipped sentences dripping with irony, like yeah, right? Take the imaginatively named City Boy, a spawn of that pesky magic volcano. Here's a kid who casually notices that he's acquired powers akin to psychometry which somehow put him in touch with the soul of Gotham city, so he can sink into the pavement or see through the asphalt to the utilities buried beneath the streets. He finds an old tiara which his power tells him was mislaid by some society woman many years before. He meets Nightwing, Batman's pal, for no obvious reason beyond establishing continuity. Then he finds the society woman, now an old lady, and returns the tiara which makes her happy; and that is somehow the fucking story because it's job, I assume, is to impersonate something you've already read. It sits on the page, barely moving, and with less actual content than a three-panel Garfield once you're done looking at the cheekbones, lacking even presence sufficient to be condescending in its pose of simplicity. Stay tuned for more from the same spigot, loyal consumers.

So yeah, Lazarus is mostly bollocks, and the latest Doom Patrol revival doesn't fare much better for looking as though it was drawn by Philip Bond, perhaps even written by him given the dreary emphasis on the power of friendship and hugs. The back story to the entire thing is drawn from the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, which likewise deserves better than this.

I guess the comic book industry has been merchandise to its own big screen success for a while now, which is presumably why so much of Lazarus Planet screams tie-in product and no-one is reading the fucking things these days.

The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959

William S. Burroughs & Oliver Harris (editor)
The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959 (1993)
Much as I loves me some Billy, I've never found this one particularly enticing - four hundred plus pages of private correspondence which I picked up from somewhere or other mainly out of a sense of duty to the author, because I probably have almost everything else he wrote. Thusly has it sat untouched on my shelves year after year emanating an aura which, even as I approach sixty, I still associate with homework. Nevertheless, having committed myself to reading all those books I never got around to reading and having now read most of them, I finally come to Billy's letters, partially thanks to Ted Morgan's biography providing an incentive.

It turns out that my instincts were coincidentally on the money for the first hundred or so pages, taking us up to the early fifties and Burroughs' time in Mexico City. Our man spent the second half of the forties mooching around the US, attempting to get rich though farming. Much of his correspondence from this time fixates on how much dosh he thinks he's going to make, insisting Ginsberg at least think about growing carrots, whining about unions and liberals, and helping the reader understand just why his long-suffering parents considered him something of a disappointment. It's frankly a bit of a chore getting though this first quarter, and so much so that you're almost looking forward to him accidentally shooting his wife and thus generating something worth writing about.

Ted Morgan's biography reveals, at least in part, a side of Burroughs which wasn't really obvious from the books or the attendant legend, namely that he was initially something of a lost soul, fecklessly wandering along with no real idea of where he was going, screwing up and never quite having to face the consequences of the same thanks to the pocket money which Mom and Pop continued to send every fucking month. The letters clearly demonstrate that Morgan wasn't just making that stuff up.

Anyway, It gets more engaging once he's settled in Mexico, and remains so as he moves all over - South America, Paris, Tangiers, London and so on, very much sharpening his wits in the process and gradually gearing up towards the work for which he is most widely celebrated. There's a very strong sense of progress running throughout these monthly, often weekly reports, and one which affords an insight which isn't framed in quite such direct terms by Literary Outlaw, and it's an insight for which even the first hundred or so yawnsome pages are probably essential. The closer I get to Burroughs, the more important he seems, and the more obvious it is how poorly understood is most of his writing, even by those who seem to think they've got it.

So that all worked out very well.

The Dreamthief's Daughter

Michael Moorcock The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
I had no plans to read beyond the first six tidily collated Elric books given that everyone's favourite albino sword swinger sits at the very edge of my field of thematic interest, and wouldn't get a second glance from my direction were it anyone other than Moorcock; but I had four of the six and needed to fill the gaps, and this was on the same eBay page as the other two, so fuck it, I thought.

The Dreamthief's Daughter turns out to be a big, fat novel rather than short stories welded together in a slimmer volume, but serves as a good example of Moorcock's tendency to stretch genres beyond breaking point in the name of keeping things interesting. This one inhabits his celebrated and frequently imitated multiverse, without which we probably wouldn't have had the Moore or Morrison versions, and the camera is pulled back so as to reveal Elric as inhabiting just one segment. Another segment, which may or may not be where we live, is occupied by Ulric von Bek, an Elric variant who has the misfortune to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, which is itself tied in with goings on in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos. If this is sounding a bit familiar, you're possibly thinking of one of numerous cheap, less satisfying imitations, because Moorcock merely joins dots while resisting the temptation to reveal that Hitler was actually working for those outer space robot people, or Cthulhu, or the three-legged bloke on the Manx flag. Nope - these Nazis are the real thing, driven by exactly the same bullshit which seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity out here in the real world. This presents a canny balancing act given the celebrated Nazi love of mystical bollocks remaining bollocks in the context of a novel featuring actual magic swords.

Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

Thus we get an Elric book which seems to channel Abraham Merritt - given how much time is spent underground - gets the absolute best from its genre, has quite a lot to say, and keeps Nazi Germany in horrifying perspective without turning the fuckers into generically cool bad guys to be booed and hissed like the empire in Star Wars. Possibly ironically, given my opening paragraph, this may even be the best Elric book I've read.

St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

D.H. Lawrence St. Mawr and The Man Who Died (1928)
I've been working my way through Dave's back catalogue in roughly chronological order, and this one comes as a massive relief after The Plumed Serpent and Moanings in Mexico - although I probably mean this pair given that it's a couple of novellas in one book. Of course, they do the same thing as most of his fiction did at this point, but the grimacing, clenching, and general xenophobia has reduced, and digestion is less problematic. Our man wasn't long for the world by the time he wrote these, and began coughing up tubercular blood before he'd finished St. Mawr - marking the beginning of a decline from which he never recovered.

St. Mawr is the story of a vaguely familiar and entirely self-contained woman of wealth who is more or less Mabel Dodge Luhan - Lawrence's landlady during his time at the artists colony in Taos, New Mexico - possibly with some Frieda in the mix too. St. Mawr is a stallion of the kind about which Sexton Ming sang in Muscle Horse.

High on a hill, I stand erect,
My flanks are sweaty.
I am Muscle Horse!
I am Muscle Horse!

Lawrence drew a lot of his fiction from his own life, and the central character is nearly always himself to a greater or lesser degree. I've seen it suggested that Dave is actually St. Mawr in this one, but it seems unlikely beyond the horse representing his ideas about blood consciousness - and doing a frankly better job than anyone in The Plumed Serpent. Beyond the woman based on Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Phoenix who is clearly intended to be her Native American husband, Tony, where St. Mawr draws from Lawrence's existence, it doesn't draw so much as to constitute autobiography.

Anyway, the tale is that our gal purchases the horse, they all move to America, and the character of Phoenix in particular allows the author to explain why he never liked Tony Lujan. The horse represents Lawrence's conception of the most fundamental spiritual truths of nature at its most primal. He's a sort of Platonic ideal of how the world looked before we all started drowning everything in ceremony and bullshit - something priapic to which we should aspire but can't because we're full of shit. He's a horse, and unlike Mr. Ed, is therefore unable to convey specific meaning beyond general truculence, and yet everyone in the novel is directed by his silent power, even when they sail to America to live on a ranch.

Most surprising to me was that none of the inhabitants of the novella are painted with quite the same scowl as Lawrence tended to deploy when basing characters on people he regarded as arseholes. This makes a pleasant change from the grimacing and muttering of The Plumed Serpent, presenting a breezier narrative, and certainly one which doesn't feel quite such an uphill struggle with so little reward for one's efforts. Even Phoenix appears relatively amiable up until the end, as marked by several pages of malicious sneering which feel as though they may have been written immediately in the wake of a coughing fit - malicious and actually sort of racist, although at least without a significant suggestion of the character assassination applying too far beyond its unfortunate target.

The Man Who Died, on the other hand, is essentially a missing adventure in the Jesus canon, retelling the resurrection of Himself after his having come back to life in a cave, followed by a number of encounters which probably weren't in the Bible. Firstly there's the incident with the rooster equivalent of Houdini which gave the story its original title, The Escaped Cock. Naturally, the publisher suggested this made it sound like a story about a penis, to which Lawrence expressed unconvincing astonishment followed by testy denial, but the title was changed anyway. Jesus ends up making sweet lurve with a priestess dedicated to the Goddess Isis, establishing the sacrificial link between Jesus and Osiris while also bringing us:

He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.

'I am risen!

No, it's not about erections as a matter of fact, Lawrence tersely explained to his publisher, although I don't think anyone bought it. As with St. Mawr, the story is approximately about the fundamentals which contemporary religion has been misinterpreting, getting wrong, or ignoring altogether - following a theme which has permeated almost all of Lawrence's writing; and here adding understandable ruminations on mortality and its attendant promise of everlasting loneliness.

Although far from Lawrence's greatest, it - or rather they - make up for the previous couple, indicating that he hadn't lost it after all, and possibly also that growing awareness of his own mortality restored a sense of perspective which had been lost to him at least since the end of the war.

Literary Outlaw

Ted Morgan Literary Outlaw (1988)
Bill was still more or less with us when I first read this, so the re-read seemed about due given the number of his books I've been getting through in recent times. I've absorbed enough to have formed a reasonably accurate impression of the guy's existence, but it's nice to be reminded of all the small print I'd long since forgotten. Literary Outlaw is blessed with a lot of said small print and couldn't be termed a casual read by any description.

As one might expect, Morgan kicks off with a history of Burroughs' lineage, the adding machine which wasn't quite so significant as we have apparently remembered, and a family who remained poorly defined in his fiction out of all proportion to their influence. No attempt is made to paper over the cracks of the man who shot his own wife, or to facilitate the patronage of those who require that their authors tick all the boxes on whichever morally responsible list is doing the rounds this month. Additionally, the author knew Burroughs and makes sparing use of his narrative technique on the grounds of fiction occasionally serving as a more faithful transmission of truth than simple reportage. Some of it is horrible, not least the tragedy of Burroughs' emotionally estranged son, author of Speed and forever doomed to remain a footnote in the life of his father; but it's all part of the general weave and, I would argue, essential for an understanding of the man.

Despite everything, Burroughs comes out of it well - if not someone you could ever have described as cuddly, certainly someone you could respect and a sympathetic figure - which may have surprised some. I don't honestly know whether he was the greatest writer of the twentieth century - assuming such an accolade has any meaning - but there's a fair chance that he may have been, and Literary Outlaw presents as good a supporting argument as you're likely to find.

Analog November 2011

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog November 2011 (2011)
I am often stopped in the street by strangers who ask me, what is this thing we call science-fiction? I can't help but smile as I give my reply - always the same reply - which is that just as Albert Einstein explored the boundaries of theoretical physics, so too do science-fiction authors such as Runcible V. Bottywang or Melvin Felch investigate the outer limits of science, imagination, and wonderment; and I leave my eager audience with the recommendation that they perhaps catch a few episodes of a certain television serial called Babylon 5. If it amuses me to explain that which most soon-to-be science-fiction fans will surely discover for themselves, it is a kindly amusement, for it isn't a bad question.

So what is this thing we call science-fiction?

You might respond with the name of some computer video game set on an amazing alien planet which you've recently enjoyed, but it is also Star Trek and Doctor Who and even a little movie you might just have heard of. It was quite popular in my day. Star Wars, I believe it was called.

This issue of Analog opens with Adam Troy-Castro's With Unclean Hands in which his Andrea Cort is sent to the homeworld of the Zinn, a once-powerful race now on the long path to extinction. She's expected to sign the approval for a simple prisoner transfer, but why are the Zinn so eager to take custody of an unremarkable human murderer? Cort becomes suspicious when she makes friends with a Zinn child - or fotir - named First Given, whose behaviour seems odd even for an extraterrestrial comprising bags of organs suspended beneath a carriage of spindly legs. Cort travels to the island upon which Simon Farr, the serial murderer, is allowed to live in relative liberty. It seems that humanity will receive a futuristic star drive in return for Farr, but Andrea Cort realises that a brutal crime is being planned against an innocent, and that the price is too high.

There's more but I can't be arsed to type out the whole fucking thing, particularly given that I found it a chore to read; and possibly excepting Jerry Oltion's Rocket Science, this issue didn't do much for me at all; and when the stories turn out to be mostly duds, the book reviews you find in these digest magazines are sometimes worth a look, usually featuring either something you've read and enjoyed or something you may potentially enjoy in the future. For what it may be worth, I've written this review of the November 2011 issue of Analog in the style of its book reviews - inconsequential musing as preamble, then a detailed description of characters, plot, and almost everything that happens, with finally a closing sentence telling us whether it was any good; and this issue of Analog is massively underwhelming. Here's some of what Don Saker wrote about Peter David's novelisation of a Transformers movie.

This one is a lot of fun. It starts with the truth about the Apollo program: despite what the world believes, Armstrong and Aldrin had a secret mission on the moon. They were sent there to explore an alien starship that crashed in 1961. They brought back some of the alien tech that they found there.

Curtain up in the present day. Sam Witwicky, human friend of the Autobots, meets British scientist Carly Spencer and immediately falls in love. But there's more than love on the agenda: the ship that crashed on the moon was a Transformer vessel, the evil Decepticons have learned of its cargo, and they'll stop at nothing to get it.

I know it doesn't all have to be J.G. Ballard, which I state as someone who isn't even a fan of the guy, and yes I'm the proud (or at least not significantly ashamed) owner of a collection of about fifty-million X-Men comics, but Jesus fucking Christ - robots that turn into cars. Call me cynical, but a line must be drawn somewhere before we all end up falling out over the uneven continuity of fucking Paw Patrol.

I don't think I've ever read an issue of Analog which didn't have something wrong with it on some level. There have been flashes of inspiration here and there, and I genuinely believe Stanley Schmidt to be a decent guy; but the magazine has seemingly spent most of its publishing history as exciting and imaginative tales for an audience of people who are otherwise deeply suspicious of excitement, imagination, strangers, anything fancy, and colours which aren't either brown or light gray.

Thankfully this is the last of my unread issues.

Never again.

My Fault

Billy Childish My Fault (1996)
I first encountered Billy Childish at Maidstone College of Art, late 1984 I think. Traci Emin, who probably doesn't need much of an introduction, was on the printmaking course and had organised a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. I had no real interest in poetry, except I'd heard of Childish, having read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper. Sounds seemed to think he was a big deal and this was enough to spike my curiosity. I enjoyed the reading, and Bill Lewis in particular gave a memorable performance. Childish himself seemed less of a showman, and read aloud from his own book as though he was keen to get away or was expecting to be challenged over the quality of his work. He looked as though he was ready for a fight - which wasn't necessary because the quality of his work was astonishing and not even the resentful monotone delivery could diminish its impact. Traci had copies of the recently printed Poems from the Barrier Block for sale after the show so I bought one.

I was nineteen and it was the first time I ever truly connected with anything which had been sold to me as poetry. The words - spelled phonetically without grammar or punctuation, numbers as shorthand, 2 and 4 standing in for to and for - seemed like bursts of rage splattered across the page, but not even rage - more like the numb sensation left in its wake when, confronted with the severity of one's own bullshit, you just have to accept that that's how it is. Like the very best punk rock - to which Billy's writing was clearly a cousin - it seemed simple but wasn't.

Had it been as simple, as raw, and as basic as it looked, everybody would have been doing the same thing, or doing the same thing better than they were.

It turned out that Traci had recently split with Billy - a separation seemingly foreshadowed by the appearance of Kera in Poems from the Barrier Block, presumably referring to Kyra De Coninck - and was thus getting rid of various chapbooks he'd given her, many of them signed. I bought the lot. It seemed like I needed as much of this stuff as I could find.

Five or six years later, I ended up living in Chatham, and being on the dole I spent a lot of time in a cafe on Rochester High Street. The cafe was named Gruts after the Ivor Cutler monologue and was where all the bands hung out, and being in a band, that included me. Billy Childish was also a regular. It took me a while to speak to him because I was awestruck by both his writing and his work ethic, and slightly terrified. He was huge - tall and fiercely handsome. His arrival always silenced the piano player. He kept himself to himself and I was never knew whether his presence represented tranquility or menace. By his own testimony, he'd been through the wars and you could tell. He seemed like he'd be hard to kill. It felt as though the second I opened my mouth I would become painfully aware of my own bullshit, the existence of which was beyond question.

Anyway, as the weeks passed, I realised Billy had enough of his own thing going on to care too deeply about whatever the rest of us were selling. We eventually talked to pass the time, we joked, and we even played chess - although it took him about three minutes to wipe me off the board. Against expectation, I found him surprisingly amiable and very, very funny.

I met him in passing years later at Highbury & Islington Tube. He didn't remember me but conceded your face looks familiar, I must admit. That was good enough for me, should it seem as though I'm trying to sell anyone on the idea of my old pal.

The point of this preamble is to illustrate why I probably lack objectivity when it comes to My Fault, Billy's autobiographical debut novel; also to underscore that while I don't actually know the guy and never really did, it feels as though I've spent time at the periphery of something that was quite important in its own way, and still is quite important - at least moreso than my occasionally having crossed the orbit of Trace Emin - and it's important because of its honesty, which I would argue borders on unique in the year 2025 through the subtle distinction of a man trying to make a living by it, rather than selling you something.

My Fault is roughly the first twenty years of Billy's existence, much of it miserable for reasons which will be familiar to a few of us. It succeeds because the author is interested only in the truth, including the bits he'd made up, which are made up so as to better illustrate the truth. He was never concerned with painting himself as a victim of circumstance, or even as necessarily sympathetic, but neither is there any suggestion of ticking the usual bad boy boxes, because that would be as much about bullshit as any of the forces busily going at it with the slings and arrows. Shitty schools, shitty father when he's even there, disease, poverty, bullying, bad teeth, rape, sodomy, kiddy fiddling, booze, ciggies, endless disappointment, the long shadow of the second world war, failure to learn how to read and write - it's all there in unflinching detail, occasionally thrown into sharp relief with flashes of sunlight, although it's mostly rain. My Fault is unmistakably the author of those poems getting to grips with the written word, joining the gaps and filling out the picture. The influence of Céline is tangible, although much of it may simply be the Childish cultural DNA being so steeped in post-war cultural austerity; and it reminds me a little of Genet but for being more direct, and frankly just plain more interesting.

I'm doubtless biased, being familiar with a few of the names, places and even pubs herein, but I feel there's something universal here, some fairly profound insight into our lives at this end of the twentieth century, regardless of how much of this we have ourselves experienced. I hesitate to claim My Fault as the greatest novel ever written, because that would be ridiculous, but I've a feeling it sort of might be.

The Doll's House

Neil Gaiman Sandman: The Doll's House (1990)
I went bananas for the Sandman comics when they first appeared but by issue twenty - give or take a few - I was dutifully buying it each month mainly just in case it got interesting again, which it didn't. I grew to dislike Neil Gaiman's writing more and more. It feels like something done to a formula with an awful lot of the readers' buttons being pushed, although beyond this admittedly vague impression, it's difficult to really say what doesn't work for me. It feels obvious somehow, dull and bereft of surprises, except I can see the art in what he does, and even appreciate that it is art, and the man clearly knows what he's doing*, so maybe it's just me.

That being said, the early issues of Sandman still retain some of the magic to my way of thinking, and it may be significant that Gaiman has come to regard the first issues as awkward and ungainly. The art was, I thought, fucking terrible - all huge heads and leering boggle-eyed faces presumably in homage to those fifties horror comics but otherwise looking amateurish and rushed; but the story was such that it didn't seem to matter. The Doll's House continues to explore and reconfigure the mythology introduced in the first issues but with significantly improved art, and seemingly represents the pinnacle of this book, at least for me. This is the one featuring - among other things - a serial killers' convention, an idea which should have fallen flat on its stupid arse but somehow works and conveys genuine horror whilst slipping in an unexpected and pertinent commentary on transgressive narratives in general. It's probably no coincidence that the fictional publisher of Chaste, for example, shares initials with the real-life publisher of Pure - and I'd strongly advise against looking that one up on Google for what it may be worth.

The Doll's House is properly gothic - disturbing and quietly horrifying for the right reasons and told with wild flourishes of imagination and invention rather than rearranging grim clichés in different but vaguely familiar sequences for the edification of self-harming teenagers.

Of course, it couldn't last. We've already met Death incarnate as the generically cute gothic girl you can't quite work up the courage to talk to, and someone has a Cure poster on their wall in one of these issues, and William bloody Shakespeare turns up for a couple of pages with tedious inevitability; but just for a while, this thing was still worth reading.

*: The above was written about eighteen months ago, before we also knew what Neil was doing. As my opinions regarding his work remain unchanged and I never had a particularly high opinion of the guy in the first place, I'm posting this as it stands without further comment, aside from that parallels to the fictional publisher of Chaste suddenly seem even less of a coincidence.

Barefoot in the Head

Brian Aldiss Barefoot in the Head (1969)
This was probably a lousy choice immediately following Lanark, but never mind. Barefoot in the Head very much reflects its time in describing the aftermath of the Acid Wars, a sort of psychedelic apocalypse in which Colin Charteris - our main character, and yes, he named himself after the author of his favourite series of spy novels - undergoes a particularly weird hero journey to emerge as the new Messiah. Its composition suggests that Brian took his research very, very seriously.

'Breathing the old west dust and breathing out the old west dust. No. That old ethic-ethnic LSD has automated us two thousand years and now the fracture there's been a mislocation so let's jump it from the steamcross and say for ever farewell to that crazy nailedup propheteer. Look girl I don't refuse to go your way or refuse to go Laundrei's way or refuse to go Cass's way or refuse to go any way. I refuse to hit the worn-out Creased or anti-creased way. For me new tracks and stuff the old ding-dong the belfrey belt.'

At near three-hundred pages, it's not what you'd call light reading, but is rewarding providing you hold on really tight, allowing the narrative to form through association with what's on the page - which is far from being the random gibberish that often passes for experimental prose these days. That being said, this all depends on whether you feel inclined to make the effort. I managed for just long enough to detect what felt like genuine philosophical depth - despite the frequent references to Ouspensky and Gurdjieff - but it became a bit joyless after a while.

Barefoot in the Head seems to be the real thing - as distinct from the usual Austin Powers level approximations of that decade - and accordingly fixates on soap powder advertising as the harbinger of Ragnarok, but it's a demanding read and probably worked better in more easily digested instalments in New Worlds magazine.

Lanark

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

Kingdom Come

Mark Waid & Alex Ross Kingdom Come (1996)
I'd stopped reading the caped stuff when this was first published and only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The reason I stopped reading the caped stuff was due to the entire mainstream comics biz having taken to impersonating Rob Liefeld, or at least Todd McFarlane, and it had all begun to look like a massive pile of wank from where I was stood. Nearly three decades later I realise I wasn't the only one to feel that way, and Kingdom Come features a host of established DC superpersons who, having reached retirement age, find themselves significantly bemused at the younger generation of bloodthirsty cyborg assassins wielding shuriken swords and way too much angry crosshatching. It's a weird one because it's approximately an epic war between, on one side, the traditionally wholesome and brightly coloured comic book heroes of the fifties - hence the non-ironic cameo by Krypto the Super Dog - and all that fucking awful shite inspired by Liefeld and his buddies; so on at least one level it's pitched firmly against not so much the comic book growing up (which it sort of didn't in any case) as what it grew into, told by both means and medium far removed from the newsstands and legitimately juvenile audience whose legacy it directly represents. So it's Miller's Dark Knight flipped to more positive and progressive aspirations - or possibly where Alan Moore would have gone with 1963 had he finished the thing.

In caped terms, I didn't always get DC, generally preferring Marvel and usually rolling my eyes during streamed documentaries identifying the difference as being that DC deals in legends, man; but now having read and re-read a few of the various Crisis books - and re-reading is essential because they are otherwise often incomprehensible - I think I understand the distinction. Marvel superheroes tend to be Gods and monsters which also happen to be ourselves with all of our baggage and characteristic failings. DC superheroes are, for the most part, more remote, something to which I suppose we aspire rather than which we become. There are numerous exceptions to this generalisation, but that's what I take from Multiversity, Infinite Crisis, and now this; and it's why, I would suggest, those Marvel movies have generally been more watchable than the DC jobs, because everything looks epic if you throw enough CGI at it, so movie-epic isn't that impressive in and of itself.

Anyway, this works because although the story is probably not actually anything special, being masses of caped folks flying angrily at each other whilst shooting rays from their outstretched hands for two-hundred pages, the art is genuinely breathtaking; and so breathtaking that even the most ridiculous aspects of the genre are rendered with sublime grace and beauty as befits tales of the Gods and their kin. Accordingly Kingdom Come also demonstrates why it's mostly a waste of time trying to transfer this stuff to the big screen. The strapline about how you'll believe a man can fly never really worked for me because I could see it was just some guy in a leotard hanging from a near invisible wire, but Kingdom Come is, on the other hand, unusually persuasive.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

Charles Bukowski The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983)
Here's another after the fact assemblage of short stories Chuck fired off to assorted magazines of vaguely literary persuasion, possibly without remembering that he'd done so in a few cases. Most are probably autobiographical, but not all; and a couple of them could be counted as science-fiction if you felt inclined to do so, even if the speculative details of sex robots and Adolf Hitler mind-swapping with the president tend to be overshadowed by the familiar themes of booze, fucking, and hangovers. For someone who, according to his numbskull critics, only ever wrote one thing and wrote it over and over and over, there's a lot of variation here, and thankfully none of it in terms of quality - as has been the case with other, similar collections of the man's peripheral works. As usual, it's hardly pretty, and there are a couple of instances of surprising brutality, even for Bukowski, and yet everything is delivered with equal emphasis, no emotional bias, as the even drone of daily life in a hangover of existence, warts and all, and with the sort of pathos and even tenderness which few other writer's ever quite achieved. Each time you read Bukowski you learn something important, or if you don't learn it then you are reminded of it; and if you still don't get it, then you're probably doing it all wrong.

Stormbringer

Michael Moorcock Stormbringer (1965)
My general view of Moorcock's Elric books has been subject to a seemingly endless cycle of re-evaluation, as follows:

• Suspected that, being fantasy, they were probably shit.
• Read Moorcock and realised they might be all right after all.
• Was told Moorcock wrote them purely for the money, meaning they were probably shit.
• Read the first one anyway and realised that it was actually pretty decent, regardless of having possibly been written for the money.
• Read the next few, and sort of enjoyed them but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels. Ho hum.

Stormbringer is the final novel of the original six volume series. I get the impression it was intended to be the final Elric book, but the popularity of the series obliged a continuation. Of the first six, it's the one which reads like a proper novel rather than a series of short stories bolted together. Moorcock's brief introduction introduces it as his first attempt at a full-length book, then thanks David Britton for hanging onto the magazines in which it was originally serialised, and Wikipedia claims it was yet more short stories bolted together, so I guess the conclusion here is that nobody fucking knows.

Anyway, I suppose my problem with the Elric books - not that it kept me from reading these first six - is a certain absence of humour, possibly aside from the sort of humour which occasionally smashes wooden flagons of ale together with a hearty ha ha! Then again, I can see the sense in preserving the mythic thrust of these tales by avoiding knowing winks to camera, and they're all about the mythic. Stormbringer wraps everything up nicely by pushing its mythic agenda to the border of philosophy, or at least something deeper than routine chivalry and stuff about dragons. It draws back a little, at least compared to the others, to reveal the bigger and significantly weirder picture, and in doing so making Tolkien seem positively pedestrian. I now understand that Jack Vance's Dying Earth books may have been an influence, and this feels very much like a distant relative inhabiting the other end of human history, or prehistory to be specific.

So what I'm saying here is that, Stormbringer really is sort of mind-blowing by some definition, and if the previous four weren't quite so startling as the first, this grand finale rewards the effort of having read them. Even if Moorcock's principal motivation was paying off the mortgage, it doesn't really matter because this one justifies the hype.