Abraxas and the Earthman: written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1981-83; collected 2006)

Abraxas and the Earthman: written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1981-83; collected 2006): Writer-artist Rick Veitch's love letter to Moby Dick and space opera packs quite an illustrative wallop, with dazzling visuals and some pretty peculiar interstellar shenanigans.  Also giant space whales, a villainous Alien Ahab named Rottwang, giant astronauts who look like Al Capp's Schmoos, a six-breasted alien catwoman, a talking head, some musings on the bicameral mind, and a lot of other interesting stuff. Really a lot of fun from Veitch's early career. Recommended.

The Great White Space by Basil Copper (1974)

The Great White Space by Basil Copper (1974): The recently deceased 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.

Literary Geography

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2009-2010); The Unwritten: Inside Man: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010):; The Unwritten: Dead Man's Knock: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010); The Unwritten: Leviathan: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010-2011); The Unwritten: On to Genesis: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011); The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011-2012):

Carey and Gross's epic metafantasy pulls out a lead character modelled upon Christopher Milne and Harry Potter and throws the whole of fiction, poetry, myth, legend, and religion at him. Tom Taylor starts the narrative as the bored, drifting son of mysteriously vanished children's literary titan Wilson Taylor. Wilson seemingly modelled the hero of his incredibly popular series of children's books upon his own son, much as A.A. Milne did with Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh.

Well, at least his own son's name and general appearance. And then Wilson vanished, leaving Tom Taylor to make his own way in the world by attending various literary and fantasy conventions as the "real" Tommy Taylor. He signs memorabilia. Sometimes he gets lucky. Mostly he's bored.

But why did Wilson make Tommy memorize an encyclopedic array of knowledge related to "literary geography" -- both the places where works were written and the places where works took place? When Tommy gets kidnapped by an obsessed fan who seems to be an actual vampire modelled upon the literary Tommy Taylor's vampiric nemesis Count Ambrosio, things start to get weird. Especially when he's saved by a young woman named Lizzie Hexam, who knows more about the real Tom Taylor than he does, though less about herself than she's aware of. And all this is just in the first issue of the ongoing series.

The Unwritten is a lot of fun as a narrative, as a metanarrative, and as a fictional meditation on the nature and meaning not just of stories, but of Story itself. And as conspiracies are revealed, the nature of Story assumes geopolitical significance: control a society's narratives about itself and one controls the society.

A complex, funny, and scary piece of work, with lovely art on the stories themselves by Peter Gross and the occasional helper, and by Yuko Shimizu on the gorgeous covers. Highly recommended -- I'd guess there are maybe 20 issues to go before the whole thing wraps up.

From Hell's Heart

Books:

Hunger for Horror ed. Robert & Pamela Crippen Adams & Martin H. Greenberg: The 1970's and 1980's were the Golden Age of genre reprint anthologies, before the bottom starting dropping out on a lot of things in the publishing business (most of them related to short stories). Thanks to his work with Isaac Asimov and others, Martin H. Greenberg has his name on an awful lot of those genre anthologies, primarily in the realms of science fiction, fantasy and horror. This theme anthology collects horror stories that feature food and eating, and it's an enjoyable jaunt from the always acidic Ambrose Bierce to the 1980's. I'm not sure that Michael Bishop's bizarre bit of metafiction about a man who turns into a planet-sized tomato qualifies as horror, but it is pretty funny. Recommended.


Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977): Leiber was a restless giant of genre writing, producing major work in science fiction, fantasy and horror from the 1930's until his death in the early 1990's. His mature prose style managed to be allusive without being overwhelmingly dense, with a narrative tone that foreshadows Neil Gaiman, only tougher minded. He wrote one of the seminal "bridge" works in American fantasy fiction, 1940's "Smoke Ghost", which suggested that an industrial age would spawn its own peculiar new horrors rather than simply regurgitating the ghosts and vampires of the past. Much of his horror fiction worked within that vein which he helped to create, positing modern incarnations of vampires ("The Girl with the Hungry Eyes") and witches (Conjure Wife) that were no longer tired, anachronistic tropes.

This novel manages to gently satirize cosmic Lovecraftian horrors while at the same time seriously investing in the possibility of new horrors that far outstrip the old in malevolence and power. Two books purchased at a used book store in San Francisco turn out to be a seemingly loopy explanation of how cities breed new supernatural horrors called "paramentals" and a lost diary of real-world fantasy writer Clark Ashton Smith. And then things start to get strange for the protagonist, a fantasy writer and recovering alcoholic in his late 40's. My only complaint about this novel is that one wants it to be longer -- it clocks in at under 200 pages, leaving one wishing for more but also impressed at Leiber's brevity in a world dominated by 500-page horror novels. Highest recommendation.


Comic:


Marvel Illustrated Presents Moby Dick, adapted by Roy Thomas and Pascal Alixe: Herman Melville's Moby Dick resists adaptation in movies and comics, partially because of its great length and partially because of its idiosyncratic content -- a number of lengthy chapters explain at great length the nuts and bolts of things like whaling, rope-making and what-have-you, making it one of the most expository novels ever written.

Writer Roy Thomas has been the king of comics adaptation for decades now, beginning with his lengthy run on Conan the Barbarian, so he's a pretty good choice for any literary adaptation that one doesn't want to see diverge too much from the source. He does a nice job here of boiling down the narrative to fit into a 130-page comic, partially (as he notes in the foreword) by throwing out most of the exposition and expanding the length of the final battle with the Great White Whale in relation to the rest of the text. Thomas mainly resticts his writing to selections culled from the novel to supply both dialogue and Ishmael's narration, foregrounding the neo-Shakespearean Gothic of Melville's prose.

Pascal Alixe's art is a bit too cartoony and large-eyed to be wholly successful -- there are times when the characters are way too cute for what's happening to them. However, he effectively renders Moby Dick himself as a sinister, almost impressionistic force seen mainly as a series of inhuman body parts: the sublime and terrifying head, the tail, the harpoon-studded back with a dead man accidentally lashed to it. Recommended.