Illuminations: Stories

by Alan Moore

From New York Times bestselling author Alan Moore–one of the most influential writers in the history of comics–nine incredibles stories that take us to the fantastical underside of reality.

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover–and in some cases even make and unmake–the various uncharted parts of existence.

In "Hypothetical Lizard," two concubines in a brothel of fantastical specialists fall in love with tragic ramifications. In "Not Even Legend," a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In "Illuminations," a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella "What We Can Know About Thunderman," which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry's major players over the last seventy-five years, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business.

From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that–a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror, Collections, Anthologies

456 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2022

About the author

Alan Moore is an English writer most famous for his influential work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs "workings" (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.

As a comics writer, Moore is notable for being one of the first writers to apply literary and formalist sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium. As well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes, he brings a wide range of influences to his work, from the literary–authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson and Iain Sinclair; New Wave science fiction writers such as Michael Moorcock; horror writers such as Clive Barker; to the cinematic–filmmakers such as Nicolas Roeg. Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby and Bryan Talbot.

Reviews

[Rosh ~catching up slowly~ · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a Nutshell: This anthology will find its niche audience. But it wasn’t for me. Too longwinded and slow-paced.

I grabbed this from NetGalley mainly for the author (‘Watchmen’ is almost like a master class for adult comic lovers), and partly for the concept. The first story, “A Hypothetical Lizard” mostly met my expectations. From there, it was a slide downhill. The stories were too meandering and verbose to present a submersive experience.

To add to the fact, I go in for anthologies with certain length expectations as I read the stories whenever I can squeeze a few minutes out of my schedule. With 9 stories spread over 464 pages, the tales were more novella length than short fiction. I especially wasn’t prepared for a 200+ page “novella” (‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’) to be included herein; that’s like reading a whole book by itself! It threw my reading schedule for a toss.

On the pro side, the vocabulary is outstanding! The bizarre creativity of the author shows up in glimpses.

This might have clicked differently with me had I picked it up in a different mindspace. But the current read did nothing for my spirit.

I did rate the stories individually as I always do, but except for the first story – a 4 star, none of the others reached satisfying ratings. These ratings ranged from 1 star to 3 stars.

2 stars, rounding up from my average rating for each of the stories.


My thanks to Bloomsbury USA and NetGalley for the DRC of “Illuminations: Stories”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.



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[Brittanica Bold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Question for you: what was the first graphic novel or comic book you read?

Mine, fortunately or unfortunately depending on the way you look at it, was Watchmen. I remember sitting in my high school boyfriend’s bedroom, perusing his bookshelf, when something about that bloody smiley face just called to me. Jumping from that to V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it was established: I was a complete and total Moore Whore.

That’s why I completely freaked out when I got my newest ARC from the man, the mystical, the legend!

*My review below is based on the first 7 books in this collection

Hypothetical Lizard (46 pages) – 4 stars
Alan Moore has a way of weaving medical horrors grounded in Sci-Fi into everyday life in a way that is disturbing and completely unforgettable.

In Hypothetical Lizard, we meet our FMC, Som-Som, who is a Whore of Sorcerers at the House Without Clocks, which is basically a brothel dealing with exceptional requests. Som-Som was brought to the brothel and sold by her mother before having undergone a procedure where the connection between the two hemispheres of her brain were severed. A mask was placed over half her face, and a thick glove was installed on her hand. All of this acted to destroy the connections between her ability to intake things and output others in response (her thoughts and actions do not matchup). Essentially, she can see and hear, but any response is a non sequitur. This makes her perfect to be the Whore of Sorcerers, who apparently can’t be trusted to keep their mouths’ quiet during the act…

While this background is given, the story really focuses on Som-Som’s transexual friend Rawra Chin and her abusive partner Foral Yatt. We watch Rawra go from this courageous individual who leaves the House Without Clocks seeking (and finding) success, only to come back for love and be reminded of why no one can be trusted, especially with a smile like his.

Side note: I just read Moore’s Fashion Beast and I definitely got the feeling these were written around the same time in his career. If you enjoyed the overall feel of that one, you’ll love this one!

Not Even Legend (15 pages) – 3 stars
This short was obviously more current than the last, given there was the reference to COVID, but also because of Moore’s more modern style of writing. While this story still had his elements of sci-fi and general what-the-fuck-is-going-on -ness, it was definitely less chaotic and intellectual than his normal writing style. I loved the ideas of what was happening in this story (different alien lifeforms and whatnot), but I’m not sure I loved it as a Moore story. I also felt this should have been much longer. I would read more of this though, as I feel it has potential (uuugggghhhhh and now I just feel pretentious saying that about Alan Fucking Moore! Who SAYS that!?!?)

Location, Location, Location (35 pages) - 5 stars
Jesus is inheriting the family business and it’s fantastic! I loved this one the most given it was quick, it was cerebral, and it brought that beautiful sexual undertone that Moore has to the surface, complete with a cinnamon-roll Jez.

This one had me feeling all kinds of things (I should mention that my sexual awakening came from the hands of Alan Moore in the form of Black Dossier, because, you know, I’m not a big enough nerd as it is…). I loved the ending, where, if I’m interpreting correctly, she was led into the Garden of Eden hungry. I do not know why this spelled out the perfect set up for reverse harem Jesus-Devil-Angie scenario, but now I, someone who does not like sharing, need this devil’s threeway in my life!!!

Cold Reading (17 pages) – 5 stars
An “opportunistic” medium gets more than he bargained for in this ghastly tale!
This was witty, character-driven, and a sure start to a horror novel that I would push everything in my life away to read.

Moore’s ability to take common, reality-based fears and turn them into something disconcerting is one of my favorite talents of his. For real though, what’s scarier than something that could happen? Ghosts, aliens, and unknowns? Something about these subjects gets me a little more on the edge of my seat than the definite non-realities of zombies, vampires, etc. And, boy, does he craft them well.
Also, his ability to develop a character and his/her traits within minutes of reading is so good and probably the reason I refuse to like stories with characters reminiscent of cardboard. I’ve been spoiled as a Moore Whore, thus I have standards…

The Improbably Complex High-Energy State (37 pages) – 5 stars
I found this story to be peak Moore: full of scientific processes that tickle your cerebral cortex while normalizing sex.

The best way to describe this one is the evolution of a being, starting from nothing and eventually falling into the normal pitfalls of arrogance, judgment, and yearning for omnipotence. Definitely not lite reading, but definitely interesting.

Illuminations (17 pages) – 2 stars
The titular short left a lot to be desired for me. I can’t even fully articulate what the hell this was about, other than a man having a mid-life crisis and never coming back from it. This draaaagged hardcore for me.

What We Can Know About Thunderman (241 pages) – 4 stars
This story, which takes up a majority of the total page count, shows an interesting set of interconnected lives belonging to persons in the comic industry.

I liked the shifting of timelines and perspectives in this. It definitely had a very Pulp Fiction feel to me, which is always a plus.

It had death, murder, pornography, Americana, and pop culture. This definitely also had Moore’s feelings towards movies never being able to live up to the comic books they try to recreate expressed, which was cool to see.

Overall, I feel I would have enjoyed this better if I had any idea who these people were supposed to represent or knew more about the comic book industry itself, but it was still a fun, easy read.

Final (Average) Rating: 4 stars!

Thank you to NetGalley, Bloomsbury Publishing, and Alan Moore for this book in exchange for my honest review!

[Kevin Halter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illumination by Alan Moore is a short story collection that spans multiple years, genres and themes.
As with most story collections I found that I liked some of the stories but found others not as enjoyable. I found Not Even Legend, and What We Can Know About Thunderman to be two of the better stories while Hypothetical Lizard was a little bizarre and long for my tastes.
One of the things apparent in the book though is Alan Moore's skill with words and a turn of phrase. I may not always enjoy what he writes but he writes it really well.
If you are familiar with Alan Moore's writing and enjoy it, this book will be a treat, if you've never read his work before or are only familiar with his super hero work this book will be an eye opener.
Thank you to #NetGalley, #BloomsburyPublishing, and Alan Moore for the ARC of #Illuminations.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Moore presents enigmatic, enchanted, and superbly-crafted tales. The style is surreal and slippery, yet elegant. These stories strain against invisible resistance, creating incredible atmospheric tension. The first story in particular, pours out a languorous sensuousness almost too excruciating to bear. It is impossible, however, to lean into that languid mood, because something dangerous and tightly coiled lies below the surface, waiting. 

In addition to an often dangerous undercurrent, another theme is the notion that no one can be trusted. Some plots are sardonic dissections of pretense, exposés of the subterfuge hiding behind the social contract. Those include the most genuine humor. Honestly, stories of the paranormal and supernatural activities are not usually this funny.

The rest lean more towards psychological horror: an autopsy of the failed experiment of human existence. The tone is not always bleak, but it is always incisive. Moving to the strange and hypnotic, roughly half the collection is concerned with the unreliable definers of history, the dangers of grudges, and the perils of tightly-held nostalgia. 

There is even an absolutely perfect parody of self-important literature, especially outlandishly bad poetry, a thing to treasure and behold in its impenetrable glory.

Finally, it is clear that no one but Alan Moore could have proffered such demonstrably vertiginous offerings. This collection is a mind-reeling triumph.

Thank you to Bloomsbury and #NetGalley for providing an uncorrected digital galley for early review.

[Fabiano]

“Illuminations” di Alan Moore è una raccolta di nove racconti che spazia e si muove tra vari generi del Fantastico. Le storie ripercorrono quarant’anni di carriera del rinomato scrittore e fumettista, autore di opere cult quali “V per Vendetta”, “Watchmen” e tante altre.

Devo ammettere che non è stata una lettura facile e inizialmente ho faticato. La penna di Alan Moore non è una penna dai tratti semplici, è densa, difficile ed enigmatica. Veniamo trasportati all’interno di una narrazione surreale, talvolta bizzarra e ipnotica, che alterna momenti cupi, momenti struggenti e momenti di umorismo. Alcune storie lasciano frastornati e l’interpretazione è spesso astratta e soggettiva, come se l’autore volesse metterci alla prova chiedendo uno sforzo emotivo e riflessivo in più. Credo che la forza e la potenza di questa antologia sia insita proprio in questo aspetto, Alan Moore è un elegante indovino, un abile illusionista e noi l’ignaro pubblico che tenta in tutti i modi di svelarne i segreti.

Non voglio parlarvi dei racconti nello specifico, se vi ho instillato un briciolo di curiosità preferisco che siate voi a esplorarli, a scoprirli, a viverli.

Con raffinatezza Alan Moore racconta la società americana, i supereroi, l’amore, le paure e la realtà che diventa fantasia, meravigliosa e inquietante. “Illuminations” è una lettura profonda che non lascia indifferenti.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. Alan Moore is one of my favourite writers. I loved both Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem but this was just not as interesting. It felt like Alan was trying so hard with the language he had lost his spirit. The words were all impeccably chosen. But the stories so far removed from human experience as to have any emotional depth or reality. It was an odd mixture of comedy and horror. Superficially it was fine. But it just felt quite superficial. Which knowing how well Alan can write emotional truth and social commentary was quite disappointing. The times when Alan did go into more real topics, the disappointing holiday trip, the excitement of comic shopping as a kid, the stories held up.

[Albert Marsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't like the lizard brothel, liked the cryptid time traveller, didn't like most of the rest, but really liked What We Can Know About Thunderman.

[Darren Shan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very mixed bag. A few memorable stories lift it (I especially liked the one in which part of the tale moved in reverse), while some of the lesser tales drag it down. The worst for me was the supposedly brilliant beat poem with annotations - I had to skim through that, as for me it was a hard slog with zero reward, and felt it didn’t belong here. At the other end of the scale, the very long Thunderman centerpiece is a fascinating, darkly hilarious look at the comics industry, although it could and probably should have been presented by itself as a standalone book.

[fonz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Aunque tuviera entre sus manos los materiales más excelsos para construir una maravillosa historia (que tampoco, no hay en uno sólo de estos relatos rastro de belleza o verdad, salvo cierto ingenio y todo lo que deriva de éste, artificio, ironía y superficialidad) la jodería con la prosa más sobreescrita, insufrible y pagada de sí misma que he leído en años. Lo he tenido que dejar en la cruel sátira de la industria del cómic de superheroes (y venga la burra al trigo...) porque aunque soy una persona morbosa y cotilla, su pesadísima forma de narrar, su cansino afán de ajustar cuentas con el género y sus alusiones veladas, seudónimos, y oscuras referencias a escabrosas anécdotas, cansa y aburre ya a las piedras.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a mixed bag, but a mostly solid collection of stories, I can say that even the installments that didn't really ring with me were still addictively written and I didn't find my interest waning throughout this book.

HYPOTHETICAL LIZARD - Five stars - I'd read this one before a couple times in graphic novel form, but the prose version is much more riveting and expands on what was already one of my favourite stories. We deal with the nature of duality in this one, as well as how our illusions affect our realities.

NOT EVEN LEGEND - Four stars - I had a good time with this one, especially once I figured out the twist in the storytelling. I always enjoy when Moore plays with the concept of linear storytelling, and he pulls it off wonderfully with this one.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION - Three stars - I didn't love this one. It felt a little obvious to me, and while the sex scene was kind of fun in a blasphemous way, it actually took away from the story for me because it felt a little hammed in there. Still very readable, but I just didn't connect with it. Some good laughs for sure, but it's not one I'll be rushing to revisit.

COLD READING - Two Stars - Again, fun story, but nothing special and the twist was again super-obvious from the get-go. Good October mood story, but nothing to tell your friends about and the Illuminations collections would have been just as good without its inclusion.

THE IMPROBABLY COMPLEX HIGH ENERGY STATE - Five stars and thensome! - I think I have a new favourite short story. I love, love, loved this one. This is Moore at his most fun and creative, taking an emerging universe and spilling his special kind of magic all over it. My only problem with this story is that I've been working on a similar story of my own including using a lot of the same verbiage and imagery, so I've had to put mine down for a while so that the influence of this story doesn't take over. Moore, of course, takes his somewhere completely different and far more inventive than I was going to with mine, but it's close enough that I need some space now because The Improbably Complex High Energy State is a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. Welcome to the creation of life in the universe as imagined by Alan Moore - I don't think you'll be disappointed.

ILLUMINATIONS - Five Stars - Alan Moore does nostalgia and its impact on our future selves really well. I don't want to say anything else about this one because it's just a really nicely told story about how the past affects the present, and how the present impacts how we see the past. Really nicely done.

WHAT WE CAN KNOW ABOUT THUNDERMAN - Five stars - First of all, this is not a short story. This is a novel, and it's a great one! What a ride! Moore basically deconstructs the history of the comic book industry and the pseudonominous major players in that game, shines a bright and unforgiving light, as well as makes a strong commentary about America and the not always positive influence of costumed characters.

AMERICAN LIGHT: AN APPRECIATION - Four stars - I'm a sucker for the Beat generation, having gone through an obsessive phase about them way back in high school, so this was a nice revisit to those times, and Alan really gets to flex his poetic muscles here in a powerful way. He brings to light a lot of the things that eventually turned me off of the Beats, and the structure of this one is just really fun.

AND AT THE LAST, JUST TO BE DONE WITH SILENCE - Four stars - The character voices in this one are both so strongly defined that even without a descriptive narrative to support the action, everything is clearly illuminated and easy to follow and sink into. I have to look up some of the names dropped to get the proper historical context, but even without having that this was a great story to read and could easily fit in with one of the stories in Voice of the Fire, or it at least felt like a nice revisiting with the mood of that collection.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I hadn’t read a short story compilation in a long time, and I got this book for a $1.25.

I’d forgotten the pleasure of dipping into a story, trying to ascertain wth is going on and departing with the prospect of a new story in the offing. For so long my commitment to stories had to be 400 or 500 pages and this was a nice change.

There are several small stories that are interesting,: the moment before the Big Bang, the moments at the end of time, a meta fiction exegesis on a fake poem with almost gnomic references to the beat writers with footnotes.

The near novel length story is Moore’s poison pen, love letter, cri de coeur, swan song? To the comic industry and its superhero angelism.

Moore writes in a tight lapidary style that’s erudite and parochial…and I’m just not sure what he’s doing with this story…profane, vulgar, sardonic…his take on the comic book art form and its attendants is dulled by his attempt to Roman a clef the whole thing—Superman is thunder man. A whole chapter details the history of Superman on film…

Shrug, it’s amusing but tiring like if kavalier and klay was written by someone with an axe to grind, sharpen, and ultimately impale in comics decaying carcass.

[Will Hines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does anyone hate the comics industry as much as Alan Moore?

This is a 450 page collection of 9 stories. But 1 of the stories is a 200 page novella called “What We Can Know About Thunderman” which is a fictionalized history of American Comics with dozens of real people and fictional characters replaced with analogues. It’s funny, moving, horrifying and relentlessly cruel and angry. I was impressed and exhausted.

The other 8 stories are different combinations of: beautiful, intelligent, horrifying and sad.

He’s a genius. Brilliant, evocative and funny.

But why is every entity in his stories either evil or sadly trapped? Is Alan Moore permanently sad / angry / vengeful?

Also, can the guy write a short sentence?

My favorite story is the first one: “Hypothetical Lizard” which describes a mesmerizing standoff of two prostitutes in a fantastical brothel, as seen by a third mute (sort of) other prostitute. It’s captivating and heartbreaking.

[Dan Cassino · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into “Illuminations” with some trepidation. I like Moore’s work, but his long form writing recently has left me cold. I found “Jerusalem,” in particular, to be a slog: rather than a 1200 page book, it felt like a pretty good 400 page fantasy adventure, an ok 400 page book about the evolution of a town, and another 400 pages of largely unreadable self-indulgence, full of made up languages and the author inserting friends and acquaintances into the narrative.
But: his shorter work has remained really sharp. I don’t think I’ve read better 8 page comics than what he did in “Cinema Purgatorio” only a few years ago so I had some hope for this volume of short stories. And it’s.. mostly fine. Like most short story collections, there are some that are better than others, but at least you know the bad ones will be over with quickly. It’s dragged down by the inclusion of what amounts to a full novel that’s by far the worst thing in the volume, and takes up more than half of it.
The new material is much worse than the older stories being reprinted here: the best are creative and weird and interesting; the new stories are never quite as weird as you want them to be.

“Hypothetical Lizard” feels very old school sci-fi/fantasy, like if Jack Vance got real horny all of a sudden. It’s full of deeply weird, but well thought out devices, all in service of a fairly simple revenge plot (which is also very Jack Vance). Weird and haunting. For me, the best story in the volume, by a long shot. A great opening, but it’s all downhill from here.
Weird [X]
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“Not Even Legend” is one big idea - the weirdest creatures living among us wouldn’t be werewolves and vampires and sea monsters, but those that we can’t even conceptualize- and one narrative trick that invites a re-read. The trick is telegraphed, and is more clever show-offy than new, but it’s a short story: a big idea and a clever trick is enough to carry it.
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“Location, Location, Location,” is a comedic story about the last lawyer left alive after the end of days from Revelation showing Jesus around a new house. The only thing that makes it recognizably Alan Moore-y is the scaffolding of local history, which is by far the most interesting part of the story.
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“Cold Reading,” which is, somehow, not an EC comics story from 1955, but very well could be. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes me wish Moore hadn’t retired from comics.
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“The Improbably Complex High Energy State,” another comedic story, this time about Boltzmann brains forming in the femtoseconds after the Big Bang. Like some of the other stories, pretty clear where it’s going, and like other ones, probably hornier than it needs to be.
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“Illuminations,” is probably the most literary story in the book (though I wouldn’t say the best). Amid a midlife crisis, a man goes back to the seaside resort he frequented as a child. Like cold reading, this could have been an EC comics story, or one of the maudlin episodes of the Twilight Zone. I like the fusion of that old school EC sensibility with a literary tone
Weird [X]
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“What we can know about Thunderman” takes up about half of the volume. It’s a lightly fictionalized account of the US comic book industry from the 50s to the present, full of very thinly veiled versions of characters and their creators. I’ve read enough histories of comics to know that many of the people involved, especially in the early days, were somewhere between unpleasant and criminal, that they cheated creators (few more than the cheated Alan Moore), that the whole business model was a fly by night that somehow became an institution. There are two ways to read this story: in one, this is a vicious parody of the excesses described by Wertham. The people in the industry, perhaps because of exposure to its products, are all sexually stunted, often veering into violence. The second is as a bitter screed by a creator intent on taking revenge on those who took advantage of him by turning everyone in the industry, whether they deserve it or not, into grotesque caricatures. Do Bob Kane and Stan Lee and Jim Shooter deserve that? Perhaps. Does Roy Thomas? Probably not.
If I want a history of the seedy underbelly of comics, there are better, more engaging ones. If I want fictionalized gossip about the industry, Howard Chaykin’s been doing a great job of it. Regardless of Moore’s intent here, it comes off as bitter, repetitive and unpleasant. About the time characters were swimming through porn and discarded tissue like Scrooge McDuck in the money bin, I was thoroughly disgusted. The few moments of true weirdness are welcome, but too little, too late, And worse: a brilliant writer spends decades in an industry, and this Mad Magazine level satire is the best he can muster?

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“American Light: An Appreciation.” A beat poem, heavily annotated in what seems like a knowing nod to Nabokov and Joyce. There’s a lot of local history brought in through the annotations, and it’s clear that Moore likes that part, but your enjoyment of the rest will hinge on your tolerance for beat poems. Mine is fairly low.

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“And, at the last, just to be done with silence.” A dialogue between two lost souls on the road, which comes to resemble Godot. It took me a few pages to get into it, but it winds up having a nice rhythm, and building to a clever ending.

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[Whitney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Real Rating: 1.5, rounded down because the more I thought about it, the madder I got.

I originally gave this 2 stars, because whatever I thought of the rest of the collection, I thought the ghost story was pretty good, the hidden creature one had a cool idea, and that the first story was decent and well-written, even if it wasn't really my speed. But then I realized that the stories I was okay with were reprints, and the stories that I despised with all of my heart were the ones written for this collection. Soooo....1 Star.

I have no doubts about Alan Moore's ability to tell a story. In particular, he (usually) specializes in telling pulpier stories in a literary way, with a tendency to lean into pulpy worldbuilding. But dear lord, I have never actually been concerned with an author's headspace until this book. And I read a lot of messed-up stuff. It's just so...miserable, pointlessly angry, and sexed up for literally no reason. And worst of all....it was bad. Normally, I would just leave it at that. I'd decide that this book wasn't for me, maybe I shouldn't be reading this sort of thing while I'm already in a bad headspace, and go find some mind-bleach.

But I'm mad, because I was excited for this book. So I'm going to get specific.

First off, I used to think that Stephen King's It was the best example of "Editor's exist for a reason." They tell you when something is too much, they force you to pick words carefully, and they help pare down your stories so that you tell the story you want to tell. I no longer think that It is the poster child for that sentiment. It's this book. So many points and statements were weighted down in purple prose. What we can say about Thunderman is one of the worst examples I've ever seen of this. Ever. I genuinely don't think I'll ever come across a worse example, and I have my entire reading life ahead of me.

Second, I get it. You read Pale Fire and thought, "Hey, maybe I can do that too." I'm here to tell you, you cannot. Telling a story through a poem and a poem's footnotes requires a keen sense of balance...which this story did not have, and I would know. I have a medical condition that makes it very hard to walk properly or balance at all. I have a very hard time getting up the stairs as a twenty-some year old without resorting to all fours--and I have better balance than An American Light .

I get that a lot of this stuff was experimental. I get that "edgelord with a thesaurus" is a vibe that other people might like. But I read a lot of experimental stuff that doesn't make me feel gross. I read a lot of books by angry little men that doesn't make me wonder if the book ever saw an editor.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rec. by: Name recognition
Rec. for: Gaffers and gammers, shacklers and barley-bumps (see: https://www.northantslive.news/news/h...)

Bereft of foreword or introduction, we are thrust into Alan Moore's Illuminations with no explanation or apology. These stories are what they are, and you'll take 'em as they come—although, if you are willing to cheat, to skip ahead to the Acknowledgements at the end, you will get a little more context. But that's very much after the fact of the stories themselves.

Illuminations is an extraordinarily uneven and self-indulgent collection, and I will admit that I almost gave up on it as soon as I'd started. But (as I've often noted elsewhere) perseverance is rewarded...

The first story, and the oldest by far, is "Hypothetical Lizard" (1987), a twisted tale set in a little-explored corner of the Liavek shared world series, in which a mother sells her daughter to an exotic bordello, whereupon the child's operated on to make sure she can be no more than a mute witness to the transgressions in which she and her fellow whores must take part. Volition is irrelevant—Som-Som cannot betray any of the secrets her clients might divulge. There is mutilation and anger—and a return to someone changed. Moore's prose remains compelling, even in this early example, but "Hypothetical Lizard" (and yes, the title means something) was a rocky start to the book.

"Not Even Legend" (2020) is much, much newer, and much lighter in tone—well, at least as light as a pandemic-inspired story about beings so hidden that there aren't even legends about 'em can be.

"Location, Location, Location" (2019). A well turned-out estate agent has one final property to show—as the Revelation of St. John the Divine plays out in the background. I've got to admit, I laughed along with Moore at this one.

"Cold Reading" (2009). Ricky Sullivan just gives his clients what they want—a little comfort on a cold night. It's not that bad a business, really...

"The Improbably Complex High Energy State" (2019). In the beginning was... a surprisingly horny act of quantum entanglement (heh). "The beast with two brains" (p.149) indeed. Though it takes quite awhile to get going... much like the universe itself, I suppose. Patience is required, but rewarded—after all, this story only lasts for a femtosecond.

"Illuminations" (2021). I still remember the helium balloons—one green, one yellow—that my sister and I got for a dime apiece at the end of one visit to Camden Park, the "Sign of the Happy Clown" (which still exists, by the way), back when we were kids in the 1970s. But... you can't go home again. Nor can you go back through the same seaside carnival ride you took when you were twelve. Not even if there are balloons.


The longest and most inventive story in Illuminations, by far, is "What We Can Know About Thunderman" (2021)—it's 240 pages long (a short novel, really), during which Moore "lanced {a} boil" (his metaphor, not mine), unleashing his thoughts about (and anger at) the comics industry in great and sometimes only thinly-disguised detail. The persistently British word choices and syntax (e.g., "different to" and "drink problem") were only sometimes at odds with the thoroughly American characters and setting.

The "Supper Club of Infinite Earths," for example, turns out to be just another boys' club... not exactly a healthy environment, in more ways than one:

He masticated furiously{...}
—p.178

The mortality of comic-book creators, in contrast to their creations, is a recurring theme.

In comics, dying was always conditional—there'd been so many tragic ends for Thunderman in the last nearly eighty years, American had brought out two successful Greatest Deaths collections.
—p.212

Meanwhile, on or near the moon, the three Apollo astronauts were dealing with an unanticipated side effect of their historic mission. With no atmosphere to shelter them from the torrential radiation pouring from the sun, all three were inadvertently exposed to an amount that changed their body chemistry. Neil Armstrong found he now had the ability to turn himself into a sentient liquid, while Buzz Aldrin could control and generate magnetic fields. The least irradiated of the three men, Michael Collins, paradoxically was the most drastically affected and became a hideous magma-monster, with tremendous strength and a big heart. Laying one bulky glove atop another, the three swore a solemn oath and, as the Ultranauts, returned to Earth and solved all of the planet's problems. Thwarted in their evil plans for an apocalyptic race-war, Charlie Manson and his Family were locked up in energy-prisons on the moon's dark side forever. War, disease, hatred and hunger were abolished, so that 1969 became known as the year when everything just kept getting better. Worsley Porlock married the blonde girl from Seventh Heaven, and everyone on Earth thereafter led fantastic lives, at least until Cosmax arrived from space in 2025 and ate the world.
—p.249

Frankly, this one inspired bit of invention redeems the whole damned thing, at least for me: Moore comes up with the most perfect name possible for a movie about corporate vampires being hunted by the CIA:
Stakeholders (p.387). And now I want to see the film!


In "American Light: An Appreciation,", Moore's copious footnotes explain the references for a poem that he himself wrote... which I do think seems a bit like a comedian earnestly explaining the joke he's just told to an uncomprehending audience. Get it? Get it? Aah, but the Beat goes on, and the local color (even if Moore might spell it "colour") of San Francisco's many lights does make for pretty good verse, after all.

And then, the end. "And, At the Last, Just to be Done with Silence." At first this seemed to me like an outtake from Jerusalem, tho' in sooth it's nothing like, this dialogue between two men fresh from the murder of Thomas à Becket...


I think I mentioned above that the Acknowledgements at the end contain details about the stories as well as some kind words (from an often unkind source) about the people who helped Alan Moore create this really rather worthwhile collection... so don't skip that bit, mate. Not everything in this showcase is quite as shiny as I'd have liked it to be, but Illuminations does contain some very pretty lights.

[Alex Sarll]

Generally heralded as Alan Moore's first short story collection, which is true up to a point, and we'll come to the caveat later. So I've taken my time with it; when someone takes 40 years writing before they get a collection out, binging it would be as foolish as gulping a new Ted Chiang book. One piece I've read before, Cold Reading, which featured in Dodgem Logic, the underground magazine that must surely rank among the most rewarding displacement activities in human history; it remains a nicely chilly Christmas ghost story for non-believers. Another I sort of have, the opening Hypothetical Lizard, in that I have the comics adaptation, but I remembered little past the premise from that, so can only assume it didn't do full justice to the story as collected here, which is an ingenious, poisonous thing, its prose bolstering the horror of the premise, as when a key character wrings her hands: "They looked like crabs mating after having been kept too long in the dark." Its tale of the House Without Clocks, a fantastical brothel in a sorcerous city, would have been right at home in Telguuth, the decadent fantasy world Moore's old mucker Steve 'No Relation' Moore crafted in homage to Clark Ashton Smith.

Not Even Legend picks up on an idea Moore has been exploring from his early Future Shocks right through to Jerusalem, this time as part of a puzzle box narrative taking that old mainstay of amateur investigators getting too close to the truth, and then twisting it through all sorts of interesting spaces. It's slight, but it's the slight work of a genius. The title story has a similar sort of engine but to very different effect, a melancholy sort of ghost story in which a man hoping against hope to recapture the happiness he felt on childhood holidays learns that you can never go back, even when it turns out that you can.

Location, Location, Location sees the Biblical apocalypse through the eyes of a Bedford estate agent, after it turns out that Joanna Southcott and the Panacea Society were right all along. Or very nearly right, which is much funnier; even in the grimmest stories here, there are always little details to remind the attentive reader that Moore has forever had much more of a sense of humour than his reputation admits. I'm always a little uneasy with stories which bring Jesus back; after all, making him nice is just as partial a reading as the viciousness usually enacted in his name, and you can't really decry all the people who've put words in his mouth by doing likewise yourself. But the embarrassing if well-meaning version here does better at squaring the circle than most. The story is also fascinated by the problem of putting the ineffable into words, in which it forms a neat pair to its successor, The Improbably Complex High-Energy State; they also match in so far as they're set at opposite ends of time. Improbably Complex also feels a little like that Green Lantern issue where Moore tried to work out what a Green Lantern might be called among a species with no concept of sight; a bit like showing Neal Stephenson how you do the origin of consciousness out of chaos without producing something as tiresome as Fall; and a lot like a Douglas Adams backstory bit run amok, which is to say, plain showing off. That's not a complaint, but I was rather dispirited by the direction it took thereafter, where even within that first, unknowable femtosecond of our universe's existence, operating at a time-scale far faster than we could ever hope to notice or process, existence goes downhill almost immediately, the first contact between minds anticipating many of the ways subsequent consciousnesses would make a bloody mess of everything. Is hierarchy really so ingrained in the structure of everything, not just in the stupid mammals on one particular marginal planet? I really hope not.

And there we come to the asterisk, in that Illuminations does contain eight short stories, but more than half of its page-count is What We Can Know About Thunderman, allegedly a novella. 'Novella' is a term whose definition has become increasingly elastic of late – I always thought Gatsby was one of the key contenders for the Great American Novel, but apparently by the new definitions it's a Great American Novella. Still, I would have thought that once we hit 240 pages, we were firmly in novel territory, unless the new definition is any fictional work shorter than Alan Moore's previous novel, the mammoth Jerusalem. More vexing than the label, though, is the theme: an extended hatchet job on the US comics industry. Now, by this point anyone who's been paying attention knows Moore's feelings on the subject, and yet we're still in this situation where people who haven't, or are placating their editors and the curse that is SEO, or just feel like poking the wizard, feel obliged to bring it up in every damn interview, and through a combination of irritation and playing his part, Moore will obligingly trot out a quote about how superheroes are fascists for bedwetters, or something along those lines, and so the dance continues. But a whole bloody novel of it? Yes, anyone who read 1963, or the backmatter in the last LoEG, knows that Moore has a nicely savage line in Stan Lee pastiche, and the secret history of Hollywood in Cinema Purgatorio* showed that to some extent he can turn media muckraking into art – but that was one story in an anthology, not a whole damn novel. The method is to some extent the same one comics have been using for decades, where if you want to use characters whose rights are elsewhere, you change the name and a couple of details, and then go wild; Moore did it himself with Watchmen and Supreme. The difference here is that as well as characters getting aliases – so Thunderman is Superman, the National Guard is Captain America, and so forth – so do publishers, and creators, and editors, and the gangsters who financed the companies. Which means that Moore can tell every outrageous comics anecdote, really stick the boot in, and get away with it. Not least because he's amped up just enough of what is on the record that he has cover beyond the changed names for what isn't. So, for instance, his stand-in for Maxwell Gaines, founder of what would later become the notorious horror publisher EC (here SP), doesn't die in a boating accident; he's felled by a chunk of frozen piss. And his son's disastrous performance at the Senate hearings which would lead to the imposition of the Comics Code is here pushed from merely disastrous to hilariously catastrophic. So it goes throughout; any detail of comics history, including their multimedia afterlife, which shows them in a bad light gets turned up to 11. Riverdale is even more bizarrely dark compared to its innocent four-colour originals; the CGI/facial hair SNAFU in the Justice League film is repeatedly, brilliantly compared to Monkey Christ; Robin Askwith** takes over as the lead in Superman IV. Often this is very funny, but at other times I could definitely sympathise with Marvel's Tom Brevoort who, yes, is a company man (albeit by no means an uncritical one), so was never likely to be a huge fan of a novel about how anyone working for Marvel is by definition a fuck-up, but still wasn't altogether wrong when he described What We Can Know as "mean-spirited and pointless". Moore has turned his undoubted talents to creating a hall of mirrors which makes everything look ugly and sure, that's part of what satire is, at least in this splenetic mode. And yes, much of the history of comics is ugly, not least the way early creators were swindled out of their creations. And granted, even the standard history of the ugly early days now comes with a bit of an awkward context given the author turned out to be a nonce***, at which point you do start to wonder whether there might just be a systemic problem. Having accepted all of which it almost feels like, if you say, hang on, did the CIA really mandate Marvel's move into superheroes, and was that in its turn really responsible for Trump, then you've fallen into Moore's trap, revealed yourself as another fanboy addict making excuses. But it is noticeable the bits he's had to leave out to make everything quite this ghastly. American comics here are far more incestuous, with no mention of any influx of overseas talent like, you know, Alan Moore. There's no path out to successful creator-owned work, certainly no big films or TV shows based on properties the creators still own, such as The Walking Dead. Not even any films of recent corporate characters, so no Deadpool either. And sure, when you're creating a fictional world, even one whose close connections to our own is key to the point of the exercise, you're allowed to cheat. But for a man who's complained about how heavily comics is still influenced by a bad mood he was in during the eighties, it would surely be healthy for all concerned if he could maybe move on from being in a bad mood about comics to quite this extent. And yet, for all that, I can't altogether regret that he did write it, or that I read it, because scenes like the excavation of the porn-stuffed flat of a deceased comics lifer made me laugh like a madman. Without wanting to spoil details, like the Aylett-esque titles of the jazz mags, which work so perfectly in context, the only way I can put it is that this was the scabrous hilarity I expected as a kid from the covers of Tom Sharpe novels, before I was old enough to read Tom Sharpe novels and learn quite what a mirth desert lay within.

Finally, two shorter pieces. American Light – An Appreciation is the story where I most feel like I might be missing something. If I'm not, then it's pretty much a Pale Fire riff, except minus much of a smoking gun beyond 'the Beats were dicks', which I'm not sure is that controversial nowadays. True, some of the chapter and verse is new to me, but mainly because I was never sufficiently into the Beats to finish On The Road, let alone read up on their sins****. But even what initially looks like the annotator being on the comically wrong track, deducing a reference to Egyptian myth from "up and at 'em", is soon justified by the poem's many subsequent, explicit references to Egyptian myth. Then, to play us out: And, At The Last, Just To Be Done With Silence. Which reads like someone asked Flann O'Brien to write a piece recalling Beckett, and he wasn't sure whether they meant Samuel or Thomas but just decided to go with it.

*The League and the far less highly regarded Cinema Purgatorio, incidentally, are among the few works from Moore's vast back catalogue to appear in Illuminations' savagely pruned By The Same Author list, which omits anything where he doesn't retain the rights, and even a couple like Neonomicon where I'm pretty sure he does.
**Anyone in comics, and most of the stars of comics adaptations, gets renamed and reworked. A lot of the supporting cast get swapped around, so it's Malcolm McDowell not Terence Stamp as not-Zod, Bogarde not Hackman as the Luthor analogue and so forth. And then other people are just themselves, though this one amused me too much to mind.
***I was surprised that this was one of the very few sore spots Moore refrained from poking here – the other glaring one was Steve Ditko's increasingly loopy politics.
****Of course, given the state of Communism at the time, I think the others falling out with Kerouac over his opposition to it reflects at least as badly on them as him. But his taking that as far as supporting McCarthy? Even less appealing than his prose and his general air of fuckboy self-importance.

[Rusha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Conceptually lush but the execution is a bit wobbly. Although Moore’s imagination is insanely fertile — there’s hints of Gaiman and even Borges here — almost every story in this collection is overwritten. Moore’s fondness for endlessly calling back, for shoehorning in quips and zingers that do not advance the story in any way, disrupted the flow of the narrative for me. That said, the Thunderman novella is a knockout — a spot on commentary about the way capitalism has corrupted publishing, smoothing culture into soulless, meaningless simulacra.

This was an enjoyable collection; I just wish that Moore had been more willing to kill his darlings and had submitted to more rigorous editing.

[Justin Benavidez · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.25/Strong 3*

I’m a fan of Alan Moore’s work in comics—I wrote my high school AP English thesis (lol) on his graphic novel Watchmen and have since read From Hell, most of his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1 run, and V for Vendetta has been on my bookshelf for an embarrassingly long period of time. His political opinions have generally aligned with mine, and I respect his slow & clearly painful extraction from the comics industry—it always seemed like Moore had ideas that were too big for the childish, superhero-filled worlds of DC & Marvel. Illuminations is my first journey into Moore’s prose and it’s… about what you’d expect.

There are some absolute bangers here. The collection starts out with a string of stories that are, in my opinion, the best of the bunch. “Hypothetical Lizard,” Moore’s self-described “first serious attempt at short prose fiction” written in the ‘80s, is gorgeous in both its language and its imagery. It’s easy to see why Moore’s work translates so well to comics—he spends far more time than your average author describing the geometry of his spaces, the material makeup of his environments, and the lighting of his characters. Thematically I’m not sure if I *got* what was going on beyond the interesting dynamics of a toxic relationship between two concubines, but I was thoroughly entertained.

“Not Even Legend,” written in 2020, might be my favorite in the collection. Its nonlinear conceit draws parallels with the Dr. Manhattan chapter of Watchmen, and it features a lot of Moore’s dry humor, a recurring theme in this collection. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it has a touch of that unknowable, Lovecraftian magical realism that Moore loves. It’s also the first mention of the Covid lockdowns in this collection, another recurring theme. Like the collection itself, the Covid references are a mixed bag—its mention in “Not Even Legend” is more of a distraction, but it works better in later stories.

Moore’s visual storytelling is again highlighted in “Location, Location, Location,” a story about a real estate agent who is the last survivor of the Biblical rapture. She is, hilariously, tasked with showing a property to the literal Jesus Christ. As this is happening, terrible apocalyptic scenes of multi-headed monsters descending from the heavens are depicted in glorious detail—you could absolutely imagine a two-page spread with this imagery in one of Moore’s graphic novels. At first I thought this story was an allegory for Covid, but it was written in 2019 and thus seems to be a bit more focused on Brexit (we have really been going through it this decade, huh?) Another highlight.

“Cold Reading” is a cute little rationalist horror story that I won’t get too deep into, but “The Improbably Complex High-Energy State” is where shit starts to really go off the rails. The first few pages reminded me a lot of the first chapter of Diaspora, in that it describes the emergence of a being from nothingness. Instead of reading like an instruction manual, like Egan’s book, this reads like the ramblings of a physicist who took three too many tabs of acid. It is brain melting, difficult to get through, but pretty entertaining. The narrative eventually settles into the formation of a little civilization of disembodied brains, led by a self-centered and horny king. Society—of course, because this is Alan Moore—eventually devolves into orgies, infighting, and Trump-like posturing by the authoritarian leader of the bunch before everything collapses. A fun one.

There’s a brief foray into the dangers of nostalgia in the titular short story before the real elephant in the room—“What We Can Know About Thunderman.” This is really a ~200 page novel, collected here presumably because its subject matter is too niche and its tone too dark and cynical to be successful as a standalone product. It’s been described as an “exorcism” and a “lanced boil” by Moore himself, and I’d agree with him. It’s essentially a scathing history/takedown of the comics industry, based on real life events. There are stand-ins for DC, Marvel, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko—Thunderman’s creation in the early ‘30s, when he was originally envisioned as a villainous character, is exactly the same as Superman’s. It is incredibly effective in that I can’t see myself engaging with superhero media the same ever again. Moore draws a direct line between the rise of superheroes in pop culture, their status as a uniquely American product, and the insurrection on January 6th. As persuasive as it is, it definitely wasn’t an easy or even enjoyable read. No one comes out of the story unscathed, even the most sympathetic characters, and it is deeply, soul-wrenchingly sad to read Moore in such a state of disillusionment over a medium that he clearly loved. And if you’re not at all into comics, this will probably be a little too inside baseball for you.

After “Thunderman,” the rest of the collection feels like an afterthought. “American Light: An Appreciation,” is more inside baseball, but this time Moore’s targets are the Beat scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s in San Francisco and academic literary analysis. As someone who has literally never read a beat poet, this was *extremely* difficult to get through (especially after the ordeal that was “Thunderman”), and worse, I wasn’t sure what Moore’s point was. It’s easily the worst thing here, and I took a deep sigh of relief when it was over. “And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence” is a fitting ending, an overwhelmingly bleak death march with a hint of Moore’s gallows humor.

So yeah, this collection is heavily frontloaded, and your mileage may vary based on your interest in comic books. I think I would’ve much enjoyed a shorter collection with maybe half of the stories. But if you’re a big fan of Moore’s, like me, and enjoy his cynical humor about everything from sex to modern politics, it’s a worthwhile read.

[Sarah Hamann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book and I thought I was going to. The first few short stories held my attention completely... then I got to Thunderman... I just cant even... it's not a short story at all... it takes up more than half the book... maybe it's because I have a toddler and I've been working 10-12 hour days so I haven't had enough dedicated reading time, but I just couldn't get into it. I don't like to be the spoiler person so I won't go into detail...

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. I mean, I got pretty far. About two thirds in. But it was a slog. The first few stories are pretty good, if a bit sleazy in parts. Unnecessarily so.

There’s no doubt Moore is a good writer. I like his graphic novels a lot. But, the main story in this is just so niche, so navel gazing and so, so boring, I couldn’t be bothered. He’s only writing for himself here. I advise you not to put yourselves through it.

[Ric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alan Moore’s comics are second to none, but this collection of short stories just didn’t do it for me. Most of them were just so slow that they didn’t grab my attention at all. Which makes it a bit worse because there’s only so much time to do so in a short story. Well written of course, just not for me.

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sigh. DNF.

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Please read my complete review here. A sample:

Well, this is a strange book. Billed as a collection of "stories," Illuminations is, rather, as Neil Gaiman concedes on his back cover blurb, "a sort of camouflage, or frame" for What We Can Know About Thunderman—which, at 240 pages of a 450-page book, is not a story or even a novella but a full-length novel. Gaiman describes it as "a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four-color funnies."

With that in mind, I will be focusing in what follows on Thunderman. As for the rest of the book, it opens with "Hypothetical Lizard." Formerly "A Hypothetical Lizard"—note the article—this is Moore's first published piece of long-form fictional prose, initially printed in 1988 as part of an anthology set in a fantasy world shared among a number of speculative-fiction writers. Ahead of its time in its sociopolitical concerns, it narrates the slow sexual doom of two prostitutes—one of them transgender, one with a severed corpus callusum—in a fantastical brothel catering to magicians. I read it once before and confess I didn't reread it in Illuminations; perhaps illustrating Moore's limits, Anthony Johnston's mid-2000s comics adaptation, which I prefer to the story proper, mutes its ornate verbosity and clarifies its central conflict. The rest of the stories in Illuminations, written more recently, are mostly fantastical inventions in the vein of Bradbury, Ellison, Gaiman—there is a rationalist twist on the ghost story, a time paradox tale about a paranormal society, a comic apocalypse with a vaping Jesus, a fictive Beat poem with fictive annotations à la Pale Fire, and more—and I'm sure I'll pay them all the attention they deserve someday; but today, with controversy raging over Moore's bitter farewell to comic books and his claim that the superhero genre is inherently a fascist one, I would like to examine What We Can Know About Thunderman in detail.

Superhero fandoms of both the political right and the political left now enjoy a rare moment of unity in summarily rejecting Moore's fascism thesis, while observers point out that Moore has been claiming this for years—since, in fact, his earliest works in the genre, Miracleman and Watchmen. Writer Zack Budryk virally Tweets, for example,

Every couple years Alan Moore, a man whose best-known work is about how superheroes are fascist, pops his head up to confirm that's something he believes, and people conclude he went crazy in his old age

Like saying Romeo and Juliet warns against immoderate eros or Fight Club censures masculinity, this clever argument only persuades if the best way to read a work of art is to discard its dominant affect as so much tinsel and regard only its overt rhetorical self-justification as its sole legitimate meaning. But as I hope I have shown exhaustively in my past writings on Moore, his greatest graphic novels in and out of the superhero genre can hardly get their narratives started without Moore's investiture of generative man-gods, fascist perverts, and misogynist murderers with visionary authority, no matter what bien-pensant self-congratulation he blathers to the credulous readers of the Guardian. In the course of pursuing an only superficial anti-fascist polemic, Moore's superheroes are more fascist than anything you'd have found in the same period in the average Marvel or DC Comic.

This ambiguity need not trouble us, either. Only pop-culture fandoms insist that their objects of aesthetic interest must possess political and ethical rectitude. High culture in modernity understands its role differently—as a repository for all that enlightenment represses. But Moore, from the depths of the English working class, has always aimed his ambition at the attainment of high culture. His punishment for this desire, should he achieve it, will be to leave behind, down in the Marvel Bullpen, the merely conflicted liberalisms of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for the much more exalted slopes of Parnassus, where figures as troubling (and as obsessed with heroism) as Blake, Nietzsche, and Yeats will tell him what Walter Benjamin long ago told us all: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

Is this knowledge, however, included in What We Can Know About Thunderman? Insufficiently, as I will show.

Read more...

[Stuart Yellop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Moore is the most influential writer of comics in the Western world. During the 1980s, his work changed the ways in which comic-books were written. Although remembered for such work as 'Watchmen' and 'V for Vendetta', this period also produced 'The Ballad of Halo Jones' and 'Swamp Thing', perhaps the best evidence of his approach. He's never regarded comics as inferior, applying the same literary tropes to drawn panels as he would to traditional prose.

For this reason, it's delightful and surprising that, in the twilight of his life, Alan Moore has forsaken comic books in favour of novels and short stories. 'Illuminations' is a collection that should vindicate his long-term fans and impress readers who have yet to discover him. These stories illustrate - indeed, illuminate - what critics have been slow to recognise: the man's a genius, maligned by the intelligentsia, distracted by his chosen media and ignoring his prowess.

Most of the stories are new. Only one is ancient. 'Hypothetical Lizard', written in 1987, might be the finest surrealist fantasy I've read. Often, Alan Moore uses surrealism to comic effect, such as in 'The Improbably Complex High-Energy State', which condenses and condemns the entirety of human existence in the first femtosecond after the Big Bang. He even manages to sneak in a novella, 'What We Can Know About Thunderman', a snide criticism of our superhero-saturated culture.

Writers often talk about 'finding their voice'. Ideally, they should write how they speak. Alan Moore talks long, low, and slow. Thus, the prose in this collection reflects his idiolect. (I defy anyone to skim it.) Readers who gamble with this anthology will win if they give it the attention it demands. Every line in these stories contains a multitude of references, tropes, and neologisms that must be contemplated to be appreciated. Doing otherwise would be to waste both time and titanic talent.

Indeed, this depth of complexity might be the anthology's undoing. Alan Moore is brilliant, but, like most geniuses, struggles to remember most people aren't. More than once, a story in this collection slows its pace, groaning under the weight of intricacy, and the reader might even pause to translate what is written into plain English. (Of course, this could just be me 😆.) Fortunately, this isn't fatal, and the reader can still enjoy the range of fiction offered.

In conclusion, 'Illuminations' is an engrossing, diverse, beautiful anthology, giving readers a gamut of stories that reveals the breadth and the depth of the author's interests and abilities. It's a slow, simmering read, but worth every second of your time.

[Isabella Mariano · Rating 3 out of 5]

o leitor desatento que não se engane ao ver minhas três estrelas. "iluminações" é uma obra incrível fruto da mente brilhante de alan moore. são nove contos, em que visivelmente o autor se permite a experimentação - tanto de narrativas, quanto de gênero da escrita. há contos que são somente diálogos, há contos em formato de ensaio. há narrativas de suspense, algumas com tom de investigação, outras simplesmente psicodélicas e surrealistas.

dentro de um mesmo conto, também é possível esbarrar em diferentes formatos, como entrevista, resenhas, notícias de jornal. tudo saído da mente insana de moore.

"nem mesmo lenda", "local, local, local", "leitura a frio" são 5 estrelas pra mim. os outros variam entre 3/3,5/4... não sei dizer.

"o que se pode saber a respeito do homem-trovão" é o destaque da coletânea pra mim - mesmo que o livro receba o título de outro conto. é o maior conto, mais de 200 páginas, em que moore faz uma grande sátira da história da indústria das HQs, mencionando o caso dos direitos autorais de superman, a polêmica com a indigesta revista MAD e toda a moralidade envolvida, a consolidação de DC x Marvel como donas do mercado (ali chamadas de American x Massive). é um retrato da assimilação por parte da indústria cultural, enquanto ferramenta a serviço de algo, da "cena" dos quadrinhos. vi ali também uma sátira a si mesmo, e uma piada com tudo e com todos - como é hábito do moore.

dou 3 estrelas porque é um pouco cansativo pro cérebro lidar com tanta coisa assim em uma mesma coletânea. diferentes narrativas, universos, formatos, muitos hiperlinks com a história e a gente precisa acessar o que se tem na bagagem. cognição pesada, sabe?

complexo, mas não menos incrível. é um passeio pela mente e pelo experimentalismo de alan moore.

[Arun Divakar · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a weirdly wonderful collection of short stories ! Alan Moore takes different genres and different approaches to storytelling and weaves together a collection, each of which is different from the next. There is a story rooted in fantasy, one which is a creature feature, a paranormal visitation tale, small town horror, a scathingly honest tale of superhero comics in America ( which is also the pièce de resistance of the collection), a fictional critique of a beat poem and a story that I could not really classify into anything. The wordplay is brilliant, and Moore is as good a writer of fictional prose as he is with comic books.

‘What we can know about Thunderman’ is a no-holds barred story about the history and background of superhero comics in America with a thinly veiled caricature of Superman as the locus. All the harshness, thanklessness, pettiness and stupidity comes roaring out in this story. The story touches upon the one question that I have always wondered about : why is America obsessed with superheroes ? Moore tries to answer this question through the oddball characters in his story. It is exaggerated but touches some really interesting points on how the industry might have operated in its earlier days. This is an almost 200-page novella but well worth the time if you are someone who loves to read about the world of American comics. The fantasy tale ‘Hypothetical Lizard’ was also a good one.

Altogether a fascinating collection.

[Shaxx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Je mi líto, ale tady jsme se já a Moore nesešli na stejné vlně. Oceňuju experimentální styl psaní, to, jak byla každá povídka unikátní, ale na rovinu, tahle povídková sbírka mě ke konci totálně unudila. Nejvíc se mi líbila povídka, jejíž název nese samotná kniha - Iluminace. Skvělý mix melancholie, nostalgie, to vše s příchutí krize středního věku až po hororové zakončení. Líbily se mi i Ani v legendách a šel i kratičký Dar shůry, kde nicméně byla pointa velmi průhledná a překvapení se na konci nekonalo. Hypotetická ještěrka byla zajímavá, ale v polovině ten příběh nabral jakousi hořkou pachuť, která mi nebyla po chuti a táhla se až do konce. Prvotřídní lokalita byla napsána s lehkým humorem, který pro mě fungoval tak napůl. A zbytek povídek, z těch už jsem jen chytla knižní krizi. Jsem ráda, že jsem nepodlehla líbivé obálce a nekoupila si bezhlavě limitku, vypůjčit z knihovny naprosto stačilo.

[Peter Tillman]

Chance check-out from the new-books shelf at the library. Fantasy shorts (and one novella, I think), about half are reprints and half originals. I tried four and didn't finish any. I'd never heard of Moore, nor previously read any of his stuff. Based on this, he's not for me! Too bad. He writes well but nothing clicked. Life is too short to press on, with stories I don't care for. Left unrated, since I finished nothing.

[Jordi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only for initiated.

[Priyashini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illuminations marks my first ever Alan Moore read. His stories are highly imaginative and very creative. I enjoyed some more than others and would definitely look out for more of his work.