Annihilation (2015) by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation: Book One of the Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer: Interesting, cosmically horrifying ideas are relentlessly stripped of all horror and weirdness by the attenuated, flat nature of both characterization and description in this first, shortest novel of Jeff VanderMeer's double-named Area X/Southern Reach trilogy.

VanderMeer seems to be striving for the sort of vague horror of his Weird Fiction touchstone M. John Harrison, specifically in the vein of Harrison stories that include "The New Rays" and "Egnaro." Which is to say, the two Harrison stories included by VanderMeer in his massive and massively flawed anthology The Weird. Harrison's stories take place in places that seem contemporary, but vaguely so, with both time and place being disturbingly off-kilter.

So some time in the near future in the Southern United States, a research team of five women ventures into an area called Area X. They're the 13th such team. Or are they? Is this the near future or is this going on 'now'? Do the characters have names or are they only referred to by their occupations? 

Our Biologist narrator lost her husband to Area X. Just getting into Area X somehow wipes one's memory of getting into Area X. The whole place is a sort of mutated dimensional space caused by Something from Outside crashing into a lighthouse some time in the past. Or that's what it appears to be. To the lighthouse, then!

Ciphers squabble with other ciphers. No one figures much out. There's a weird thing in an underground complex. There are signs of bloody battle at the lighthouse. The narrator's husband nicknamed her Ghost Bird, a nickname that doesn't seem to apply much to our characterless main character.

VanderMeer throws around italicized words and phrases like August Derleth editing H.P. Lovecraft stories. Is that intentional? Because the set-up of Area X is pretty much the set-up of Lovecraft's 1928 classic "The Colour Out of Space," in which the titular something mutates and destroys a New England landscape and everything in it.

It takes a special sort of genius to make events and things as weird as are posited in this novel so boring, so enervating to this reader that there is no way I'm reading the second and third books. Your results may vary. It all feels like horror for people too refined for horror. Not recommended.

The Horror in the Museum by H.P. Lovecraft and Others

The Horror in the Museum  by H.P. Lovecraft and Others (1970/1989/This edition 2007): edited by August Derleth, Stephen Jones, and S.T. Joshi:

Primary Revisions: Which is to say, stories that are almost entirely rewritten by HPL from stories or notes from other writers.

• The Green Meadow (1918) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Lewis Theobald, Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley]: Really a Dunsanian prose-poem more than anything else.
• The Crawling Chaos (1921) by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Lewis Theobald, Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley]: Again, really a Dunsanian prose-poem more than anything else.
• The Last Test (1928) by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro [as by Adolphe de Castro] : Enjoyable, overlong novella about a scientist's descent into madness, his descent speeded by the advice of a monstrous survival from eons past. Set primarily in late-19th-century San Francisco.
• The Electric Executioner (1930) by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro [as by Adolphe de Castro]: So far as I know, the only story written or rewritten by HPL to be set primarily on a train. 
• The Curse of Yig (1970) by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop [as by Zealia Bishop]: Should be moved to the HPL canon. One of Lovecraft's generally top-notch "collaborations" with Zealia Bishop that moved the Cthulhu Mythos into the Midwestern environs of Oklahoma.
• The Mound (1940) by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop [as by Zealia Bishop]: Another top-notch, almost-canonical Lovecraft-Bishop Joint. A secret land of Great Old One worshippers hides about a mile below the surface of Oklahoma. Well, that explains a lot! 
• Medusa's Coil (1939) by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Zealia Bishop]: Oh, Lord. Brace yourself for the most racist ending in Lovecraft's stories and revisions, so anomalously ascendant over much more dire information that the ending almost seems like a parody.
• The Man of Stone (1932) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Minor horror stuff.
• The Horror in the Museum (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Solid Mythos material set at... a wax museum?
• Winged Death (1934) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Somewhat goofy Africa-set horror story.
• Out of the Aeons (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Another piece that could be considered canonical Mythos horror.
• The Horror in the Burying-Ground (1937) by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald [as by Hazel Heald]: Very minor horror material.
• The Diary of Alonzo Typer (1938) by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley [as by William Lumley]: Promising beginning, somewhat muted ending to a haunted house story with shades of the Great Ones looming behind it. Bears more than a passing resemblance to Stephen King's early-career homage to HPL, "Jerusalem's Lot."

Secondary Revisions: Which can range from a lot of HPL to almost none at all.

• The Horror at Martin's Beach (1923) by H. P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene  (variant of The Invisible Monster) [as by Sonia H. Greene]: Minor horror stuff with hypnotic sea monsters.
• Ashes (1924) by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Minor science-fictional horror that seems inspired by Robert W. Chambers.
• The Ghost-Eater (1924) by H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr. [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Really minor lost-in-the-woods horror.
• The Loved Dead (1924) by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Oh, brother. Controversial (for its time) story about a guy who, though his actions are never completely described, seems to be a necrophiliac.
• Deaf, Dumb and Blind (1925) by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft [as by C. M. Eddy, Jr.] : Minor piece of cosmic horror.
• Two Black Bottles (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft and Wilfred Blanch Talman [as by Wilfred Blanch Talman] : Droll tale of zombies and churchyards.
• The Trap (1932) by Henry S. Whitehead and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Henry S. Whitehead] : Minor piece of horror revolving around optics.
• The Tree on the Hill (1934) by Duane W. Rimel : Under-developed piece of cosmic horror.
• The Disinterment (1935) by H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel [as by Duane W. Rimel] : Minor horror that seems mainly inspired by Poe.
• "Till A' the Seas" (1935) by H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow  (variant of "Till All the Seas") [as by R. H. Barlow] : Downbeat fragment of end-of-the-world melancholy.
• The Night Ocean (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow [as by R. H. Barlow]: Probably the "weirdest" tale here in the modern sense, as atmosphere and suggestion take front place over specific, horrific occurrences. Extremely strong piece. 

Overall: Essential to the Lovecraft fan and/or scholar, and with enough rewarding tales of horror and the macabre to satisfy the casual reader as well. Highly recommended.

Acolytes of Cthulhu (2001) edited by Robert M. Price

Acolytes of Cthulhu  (2001/ This edition 2014): edited by Robert M. Price:

1. Doom of the House of Duryea  (1936) by Earl Pierce, Jr.
2. The Seventh Incantation (1963) by Joseph Payne Brennan
3. From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy (2008) by Robert M. Price and Hugh B. Cave 
4. The Jewels of Charlotte (1935) by Duane W. Rimel
5. The Letters of Cold Fire  (1944) by Manly Wade Wellman
6. Horror at Vecra (1943) by Henry Hasse
7. Out of the Jar (1941) by Charles R. Tanner
8. The Earth-Brain (1932) by Edmond Hamilton
9. Through the Alien Angle (1941) by Elwin G. Powers
10. Legacy in Crystal (1943) by James Causey
11. The Will of Claude Ashur (1947) by C. Hall Thompson
12. The Final War (1949) by David H. Keller, M.D.
13. The Dunstable Horror (1964) by Arthur Pendragon
14. The Crib of Hell (1965) by Arthur Pendragon
15. The Last Work of Pietro of Apono (1969) by Steffan B. Aletti
16. The Eye of Horus (1968) by Steffan B. Aletti
17. The Cellar Room (1970) by Steffan B. Aletti
18. Mythos (1961) by John S. Glasby
19. There Are More Things (1975) by Jorge Luis Borges
20. The Horror Out of Time (1978) by Randall Garrett
21. The Recurring Doom  (1980) by S. T. Joshi
22. Necrotic Knowledge  (1976) by Dirk W. Mosig [as by Cemetarius Nightcrawler]
23. Night Bus  (1985) by Donald R. Burleson
24. The Pewter Ring  (1987) by Peter Cannon
25. John Lehmann Alone  (1987) by David Kaufman
26. The Purple Death  (2001) by Gustav Meyrink  (trans. of Der violette Tod 1902)
27. Mists of Death  (2001) by Richard F. Searight and Franklyn Searight 
28. Shoggoth's Old Peculiar (1998) by Neil Gaiman 

Excellent selection of Lovecraftian short stories spanning the years 1932 to 2001. Acolytes of Cthulhu is probably better suited to a reader well-acquainted with Lovecraftian weird fiction. Not all the stories are great. But I hadn't run across most of them, making the anthology a lot of fun as it avoids reprinting stories that have become familiar from multiple appearances.

In some stories, the Lovecraftian taint is faint -- perhaps as little as some curious tome of apocalyptic demon lore sitting on a desk. Other stories are just plain nuts, David Keller's "The Final War" chief among them. I won't even try to describe it in detail. It's just plain bananas.

Jorge Luis Borges' nod to HPL, "There Are More Things," gratifyingly appears, and is about as Borgesian a nod to Lovecraft as one could hope for. A piece of juvenilia by Weird-Fiction Historian-Supreme S.T. Joshi is a fun pastiche. 

The stand-out is Randall Garrett's tricky, fun "The Horror Out of Time." The kicker really kicks. Neil Gaiman's humourous "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" closes the anthology with a wink. A squamous, batrachian wink.  Though the winner for best title has to be "From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy" by editor Robert M. Price and Hugh B. Cave, whose career in weird fiction began around the same time that HPL's ended in the 1930's. 

Price has done an admirable job of seeking out stories previously excluded from virtually all Lovecraftian anthologies. They may not all be great, or even good, but they are a historic delight. Highly recommended.

The Great White Space (1974) by Basil Copper

The Great White Space (1974) by Basil Copper: The amazingly prolific Basil Copper gives us a splendid homage to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, with perhaps a smidgen of Moby Dick, in this tale of an expedition into a mysterious cave system located beneath mountains somewhere in Asia. The exact location is never given because the narrator doesn't want anyone to follow in his expedition's footsteps for reasons that become abundantly clear as the narrative progresses. He only is escaped alone to tell thee.

Narrated decades after the (thankfully fictional) attempt of the 1932 Great Northern Expedition to penetrate the mysteries of that cave system, The Great White Space goes not into the southern polar regions (as Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Jules Verne's The Sphinx of the Ice, and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did) but beneath the Earth. 

Copper devotes a lot of space and detail early in the text to explaining the technical and logistical preparations for the descent and then the long voyage to 'The Black Mountains', where the entry to the cave system exists. Along the way, two different and somewhat odd Asian tribes are met, and possible taboos about entering the caves encountered. The natives do not go in there, through an artificial cave mouth that stands several hundred feet high.

Once inside the system -- which is, to use a favourite Lovecraftian adjective, cyclopean, as in monstrously huge -- the expedition soon discovers that the entire cave system is artificial, carved or somehow otherwise scooped out of the rock through unknown technological means. Something lurks, of course, though much of the terror of the novel lies in what comes before the Big Reveal. 

Unnerving details and an attention to both the squeamish and the Sublime build to the revelation of what waits in the region of The Great White Space, a region paradoxically located miles beneath the Earth. There are things in bottles, a library, and great forms glimpsed in the distance, coming closer. And there comes occasionally from far off the sound of enormous wings.

Some may find this brief novel a tad slow -- the horrors come on-stage fairly late in the game, and explanations are abandoned in favour of mystery and dread. I quite liked the modulation of this novel -- it's quiet and it demands concentration, but it's a page-turner nonetheless. Highly recommended.

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991/This edition 2015) by Thomas Ligotti

Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991/This edition 2015) by Thomas Ligotti, containing the following stories:

• Introduction: Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991): Janus-like, the introduction peers toward pomposity and parody.
• "The Last Feast of Harlequin" (1990): Almost certainly Ligotti's most-reprinted work, a novella that is both somewhat obliquely an homage to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Festival" and its very own thing, a striking, funny, droll, disturbing journey through a small town and its mysterious festival and the narrator who gets pulled into stranger and stranger situations as he investigates the town for anthropological reasons. Ligotti takes a number of horror tropes and makes them seem new and horrible again through the sheer force and inventiveness of his imagination and his narrative POV. One of the all-time great stories of cosmic horror, and perhaps Ligotti's most accessible major work.
• "The Spectacles in the Drawer"  (1987): Quintessential Ligotti in its combination of reality-busting and extraordinarily idiosyncratic characters.
• "Flowers of the Abyss" (1991): Another tale of a polluted reality and its peculiar attraction for people who should probably know better.
• "Nethescurial" (1991): Another oft-reprinted piece of Ligotti's Major Arcana. Vaguely Lovecraftian in tone and content, but distinctly a working-through of these things from Ligotti's assured, unique perspective. Puppet alert.
• "The Dreaming in Nortown" (1991): Reality breaks down in disturbing ways, all narrated by Ligotti's most Poe-esque protagonist.
• "The Mystics of Muelenburg"  (1987): Oblique, bleak reality-bender.
• "In the Shadow of Another World" (1991): Very strange and distinctive tale takes the haunted-house story and utterly scrambles it.
• "The Cocoons" (1991): Very, very horrific piece of absurdism, or at least near-absurdism. One of Ligotti's stories that disturbs without offering anything in the way of an attempt to frame things within a rational explanation.
• "The Night School" (1991): Worst night class ever.
• "The Glamour" (1991): A trip to a movie becomes a nightmarish, inexplicable tour of some peculiar, horrible sights and sounds. One of Ligotti's stories that leaves one shaken without any real way to parse what has happened in the story.
• "The Library of Byzantium" (1988): Sinister drawings, sinister priests, a sinister book, and a surprisingly traditional use of holy water.
• "Miss Plarr" (1991): Nothing really terrible happens in this tale of a boy and his nanny, yet the story defies simple explanation while it constructs a world that alternates between claustrophobic interior spaces and fog-erased exterior spaces.
• "The Shadow at the Bottom of the World" (1990): One of Ligotti's more straightforward stories in terms of its construction of what Evil is and what position it occupies in the universe. Another horror trope (the scary scarecrow) becomes revitalized by Ligotti's imagination. 

In all: a great collection of Ligotti's late 1980's and early 1990's work with all its cosmic, absurdist, horrific, comic, infernal devices. Highly recommended.

Man-eating Toilets and Flowers with Faces

Novels:

Irrational Fears by William Browning Spencer (1998): I can't think of many funny, sad novels involving Alcoholics Anonymous, a thinly veiled Church of Scientology, and the dangers of thinking H.P. Lovecraft was writing fact rather than fiction, but this would be one such novel. An organization called The Clear (cue Scientology alarm whistle -- 'becoming clear' is a major catchphrase in Scientology) has taken it upon itself to try to discredit Alcoholics Anonymous by advancing the 'theory' that alcohol and drug addiction are actually the result of a transferable psychic curse cast upon certain humans by dark alien gods.

The Clear is actually a front for one man's completely bizarre obsession with discrediting and destroying AA while also perhaps bringing about global armageddon as well. Much of The Clear's mythology is lifted wholesale from the H.P. Lovecraft revision "The Mound", which appears in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, a Lovecraft collection I reviewed about a month ago. It's amazing how these things come together!

The mythology I'm referring to above is the monster stuff and not the AA stuff. HP Lovecraft did not write stories about aliens causing alcoholism.

In any event, an oddball assortment of AA members that includes a fallen American Literature professor, an angry old coot who's been sober for 68 years and a late middle-aged man who may actually be some sort of retired US secret agent come together to try to figure out what The Clear is up to, and how to stop it before it plunges the U.S. into telepathically induced anarchy.

Irrational Fears is pretty much its own book, though Spencer certainly shares certain traits with Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut. A previous novel, Resume with Monsters, managed to suggest The Cthulhu Mythos meets The Office, an impressive feat given that The Office was still several years in the future when that novel came out in 1995. Highly recommended.


The Shadow of the Torturer (Part One of The Book of the New Sun) by Gene Wolfe (1980): Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy is probably the most critically praised science fiction or fantasy series of the last 30 years, both in genre circles and in the mainstream press. Set so far into the future that technology has become, in some cases, indistinguishable from magic, the series ends up being somewhat unclassifiable. 'Science fiction', 'fantasy' or that handy hybrid 'science fantasy'? That it often more resembles the works of Voltaire, Rabelais and Jonathan Swift just makes classification that much more pointless. It may contain many of the rough plot stages of an epic quest, and the overall arc of a bildungsroman, and so on and so forth, but it is its own thing in the end, an enjoyable, deeply weird and challenging thing on pretty much every level one can think of.

The bare-bones plot of this first novel in the series is quite simple: Severian, a young member of the Torturers' Guild is cast out of the guild to find his way in the world after he shows mercy to a prisoner. The planet he lives on, Urth, appears to be our Earth so far into the future that the sun is going out and all the coloured glass of our era now covers certain beaches with coloured grains of sand. Technology and biotechnology have advanced to such a point that certain events seem like magic. And some members of humanity long ago left for the stars, while on Urth the rulers have decided to purposefully retrogress society to a quasi-medieval state, albeit one in which the more learned citizens are well aware that their society's structure is wholly imposed and artificially retrograde. Somewhat bizarrely, that last sentence makes me think of a number of Islamicist nations. Oh, well.

Severian's adventures here sometimes baroque, sometimes whimsical, and always prone at any instant to plunging into the starkest matters of life and death. Though the Torturer's Guild operates entirely at the whims of the rulers of Severian's nation, the torturers themselves are despised and shunned by most who meet them. Or at least they used to be. By Severian's time, society's institutions and the general knowledge of them have declined to the extent that many greet him as a wonder, especially the farther he gets from the center of the great city. He meets companions" some of them loyal, some of them treacherous. And as Part One ends, he and his companions reach the edge of the great city and pass beyond its cyclopean walls to the countryside beyond. Highest recommendation.

Bill Clinton vs. Captain America: The Road to Victory

Book:

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions by H.P. Lovecraft and others: H.P. Lovecraft made a portion of his meagre living editing other people's stories. This Del Rey edition of the revised Arkham House volume collects 'primary' revisions -- in which there's very little of the original writer's work left in the finished story -- and 'secondary' revisions, which are closer to being collaborations. While some of the stories here are pretty minor, there are also some solid stories ("The Night Ocean" is an evocative and subtle secondary revision) and works as good as many of Lovecraft's 'own' ("The Mound" and "The Horror in the Museum" are fine additions to the Cthulhu Mythos, while "The Loved Dead" is a creepy bit of Poesque necrofetishism). Technically, the oft-collected "Abandoned with the Pharoahs" could be included here for the sake of completism -- it's the novella Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Harry Houdini -- but this is such a giant collection that it's hard to fault any omissions. Highly recommended for Lovecraftians; recommended for anyone else.


Comics:


Unknown Soldier: Haunted House, Between Here and There, Easy Kill and The Way Home by Joshua Dysart, Alberto Ponticelli and Pat Masioni (2008-2009; collections ongoing): The original Unknown Soldier was a Silver Age DC World War II hero who was a master of disguise, his real face always covered by Invisible-Man-type bandages. That hero's adventures ended in the early 1980's with the cancellation of most of DC's war titles. Subsequent attempts to resurrect the character have usually erred on the side of almost self-parodic grim-and-grittiness.

In this adult-oriented Vertigo title, Dysart and Ponticelli wisely throw out pretty much everything of the original character, keeping only the bandages and the overarching idea of 'one man's war.' The primary setting is now Uganda in the early oughts, where an African-born, American-raised doctor and his wife are attempting to raise global awareness of the terrible violence of Uganda's civil war. But the doctor's having nightmares about becoming violent himself, about something or someone living inside his own brain who's pretty much an expert at killing. And pretty soon, the doctor's part of the conflict, his self-scarred face hidden behind a mask of bandages.

Reductively speaking, the new Unknown Soldier is part Jason Bourne, part Jeckyll and Hyde. However, the setting for the series -- war-torn, divided Uganda -- gives us a milieu for a war comic that's rarely been even nodded at, ravaged post-colonial Africa. The stories and sub-stories are heart-breaking, and Ponticelli's art stands firmly in the tradition of Harvey Kurtzman's great war comics for EC in the 1950's, meticulously realistic and realistically bloody. There aren't many works in any medium that manage to make violence both thrilling and nauseating, sometimes at the same time. One of the things that highlights the quality of the series for me is that after 15 issues, we still know very little of what's made the doctor into some sort of pre-programmed killing machine with a conscience, and the slow pace of the revelations seems perfectly natural to the story. We aren't dealing with a puzzle piece. A great on-going title that deserves all the accolades it's getting. Highest recommendation.


The Greatest Shazam! Stories Ever Told by Bill Parker, Otto Binder, Denny O'Neil, Martin Pasko, Jerry Ordway, C.C. Beck, Kurt Schaffenberger, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Curt Swan and others (1940-2008; collected 2008): DC's editorial policy on its line of 'Greatest...' collections has never seemed more political and less quality-oriented than on this volume. Fawcett published the original Captain Marvel of the 1940's and early 1950's -- he who said Shazam! to change from young teen Billy Batson to Captain Marvel and back again.

For a time in the early 1940's, Captain Marvel outsold Superman. Why? Because it was the best superhero book in a still-young sub-genre, with crisp art and lively, fantasy-heavy stories pitting Captain Marvel against a terrific rogue's gallery of such weirdos and grotesques and Thaddeus Bodog Sivana, IBAC, King Kull the Beast-man and Mr. Mind, a hyper-intelligent worm (though he was drawn to look more like a fuzzy green caterpillar with eyeglasses and a little mechanical voicebox to translate his worm-language rantings into audible English). These were comics for children that an adult can read and enjoy now, and the imminent DC collection of the +20-part WWII Captain Marvel epic, The Monster Society of Evil, makes me feel all tingly inside.

DC would eventually exhaust Fawcett in court over similarities between Marvel and Superman, with Fawcett ceasing publication pretty much contemporaneous with the near-death of super-hero comics in the 1950's. Marvel would eventually publish its own Captain Marvel in the 1960's, hence DC's use of Shazam! on covers and promotional literature, despite the fact that their hero is still called Captain Marvel within. DC relaunched the good Captain in his own book in 1974, originally with pivotal original artist CC Beck drawing the book. But Beck would soon leave, and the book would soon become most notable for the reprints it ran of vintage Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Family stories during a period when Shazam! was a 100-page Giant. Once DC decided that Marvel should exist within the same universe as their other super-hero titles, most post-1980 attempts to revive the title either made the character far too realistic or, somewhat bizarrely, oafishly and naively dim.

And so what we get here are about 80 pages of original Captain Marvel goodness, somewhat compromised by a lengthy 1940's Joe Simon/Jack Kirby Captain Marvel story that is, frankly, not all that good. Then we get about 120 pages of various Captain Marvel stories spanning the various DC reboots of the character up to the present day. The best of those reboots, Jeff Smith's recent Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil, can't be included here because of length. A Jerry Ordway/Peter Krause story from the most recent ongoing Shazam title, Power of Shazam from the 1990's, is nice and earnest and heart-warming and pretty much entirely lacking in the zing and zip of the character at its 1940's best. The other recent stories are also exceedingly minor.

The one stand-out from the post-1950's material doesn't technically star Captain Marvel at all. "Make Way for Captain Thunder!" is a standalone story from the early 1970's Superman title by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan. DC was already publishing Shazam by this time, so I assume having Thunder stand in for Marvel was either a rights issue or an editorial decision related to when and where DC wanted an official crossover between the Marvel Family and DC's mainline universe of heroes. In any case, this story -- in which a dimension-lost Captain Thunder and Superman battle before the Man of Steel figures out how to cure Thunder of his villain-created madness and send him on his way back home again -- is a fairly light-hearted delight. It also demonstrates that Curt Swan drew the best-looking 'realistic' Captain Marvel of them all, regardless of name. Alex Ross's hyper-realistic Captain Marvel, so creepily effective in Kingdom Come and used for the cover here, has always looked sinister and not a little bonkers to me. Cartooning doesn't necessarily translate to more realistic forms of representation without a lot of reworking.

In any case, my recommendation of this volume is highly qualified -- you do get some vintage 1940's and 1950's Captain Marvel along with the Pasko/Swan story, but that's still less than half the volume. If you ever see the Harmony hardcover Shazam! from the 40's to the 70's, snap it up. Well, unless it's $200, which is what it sometimes goes for. But you'll also find equally good or better selections of vintage Shazam! reprints in back issues of those 1970's 100-page giants. So hit the back-issue bins!


Captain America: Operation Rebirth (2nd edition) by Mark Waid and Ron Garney (1995-96; coll. 2008): Marvel re-reprints the mid-1990's 'Death of Captain America' storyline with six more issues of context before and after that storyline (entitled 'Operation Rebirth'). Writer Waid and penciller Garney are one of the three or four great Captain America creative teams, and this storyline is a lot of fun. Not only do we get the Red Skull and the Cosmic Cube, staples of Captain America stories for decades, but we also get what must be the lengthiest appearance of a real-world American president in a super-hero comic prior to Marvel's various Obama projects. Seriously, Bill Clinton appears in multiple issues here. It's like some bizarre Marvel sequel to "Superman's Secret Mission for President Kennedy." Highly recommended.


Sebastian O by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell (1993; coll. 2004): Zany postmodern shenanigans from Morrison and Yeowell. In a high-tech, fin de seicle Victorian England, dandy assassin/aesthete Sebastian O battles to discover a sinister conspiracy while remaining witty and impeccably dressed. Weird fun. Highly recommended.

When Swamp Thing Left Birmingham

Comics:

Swamp Thing: Riverrun by Mark Millar, Phil Hester, Kim DeMulder, Chris Weston and Phil Jiminez (1995; uncollected): Given writer Millar's superstar status in comic books over the last decade, I don't why DC Comics hasn't collected his lengthy run on Swamp Thing. Just another mystery of DC's often bizarre collected editions policies (Showcase Presents Booster Gold before Jonah Hex Vol. 2? Seriously?).

Grant Morrison and Millar came onboard Swamp Thing after a lengthy run by Nancy Collins and pretty quickly got Swamp Thing out of the domestic life he'd been enjoying with Abby (and later daughter Tefe) since Alan Moore was on the book in the mid-1980's. Once Millar was established, Morrison left for about a dozen other DC books.

In this seven-issue storyline, Millar has Swamp Thing jumping to different alternate worlds which may or may not be 'real' -- they also may simply be the dying hallucinations of a suicidal writer who won't stay dead, and so asks Swamp Thing to get her 'out' of the world of her own stories in which she's trapped. This is an 'arc' structure used to good effect by previous Swamp Thing writers Alan Moore and Rick Veitch. Moore had Swamp Thing compelled willy-nilly through space for several issues, while Veitch had the same thing happen related to time. Indeed, Veitch's writer/artist run on Swamp Thing came to an end when Swamp Thing jumped to the crucifixion, complete with a cover depicting Swamp Thing as the cross upon which Christ was crucified. That issue never actually saw print, making it one of the most legendary of unseen comic-book stories.

In any case, Millar is in top form here. The writing's sharp and occasionally disturbing, and the situations are quite clever, with the 'Nazis won WWII' reality being especially interesting. Of course, it's not collected, so you'll have to hit the back-issue bins to read it. Oh, well.


Books:

The Watchers Out of Time and Other Stories by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft: Fantasy fiction owes a huge debt to Wisconsin writer/editor/publisher Derleth, whose Arkham House kept writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith in print during the 1940's and 1950's before the horror boom began in the 1960's. He also introduced Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley to the world, to name just two.

While Edgar Allan Poe had possibly the worst literary executor ever, Lovecraft had possibly the best -- maybe a bit over-eager and a bit too quick to italicize important paragraphs in Lovecraft's stories, but otherwise just about the best friend a dead author who never made much of a living from writing while he was alive could hope for. That Lovecraft earned a Library of America edition in 2007 is as much a testament to Derleth as to the Revelator from Providence.

Derleth made something of a cottage industry out of writing stories based on fragments and notes left behind by Lovecraft after his death in 1937, enough to fill several thick volumes. This book collects some of the best. Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos was a bit happier than Lovecraft's -- there were a lot more ways to thwart the forces of darkness, and they were far more frequently constructed as forces of darkness rather than Lovecraft's conception of the uber-dangerous Great Old Ones as being beyond concerns of good and evil, which were ultimately just human constructions anyway.

Derleth's primary 'tic' -- italicizing final paragraphs -- is in full bloom here, and the selection of stories is a bit Innsmouth-heavy for my tastes, but the whole thing is worth reading if you've run out of Lovecraft to read or re-read. I think the best story is the short and evocative "The Fisherman of Falcon Point", which reads as much like a dark fairy-tale as it does a story set in the world of Cthulhu and Dagon and all those other crawly super-beings itching to return to Earth and turn us all into either dinner or experimental subjects. Recommended.


The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons: Simmons, a regular columnist at ESPN.com, assesses pretty much every aspect of the National Basketball Association one could want. And then some. The book is meandering, digressive, and laden with footnotes -- all in all, a messy joy to read, rife with pop culture and porn references sprinkled amidst the assessments of the 96 greatest NBA players ever, the best teams ever, the biggest MVP voting screw-ups, the size of Dennis Johnson's Johnson and why the fallaway jumper is the preferred shot of superstars who never quite break through to win an NBA title.

His analysis is thought-provoking and occasionally hilarious, especially when he's taking shots at Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady, or singing the praises of Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Kevin McHale. Highly recommended for people with at least some knowledge of basketball, pop culture, and pornography.