BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Tintin in Tibet (Tintin #20) (1959) Herge   Dream  Country (Sandman #3) (1990) Neil Gaiman/Kelley Jones/Charles Vess Blade of the Immortal: Volume 1 Blood of a Thousand (1994, Japan) Hiroaki Samura   The Invisibles: Volume 1 You Say You Want a Revolution (1994)  Grant Morrison/Steve Yeowell/Jill Thompson   Batman: Hush Volume 1 (2002) Jeph Loev/Scott Williams    Fables: Vol 1 Legends in Exile (2002)  Bill Willingham/Lan Medina/Steve Leialoha Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics (2004) Paul Gravett A Warning To Parents : Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics is a serious introduction to Manga and includes a few references to and examples of graphic sexual and violent works. It is almost certainly not suitable for children under the age of 15.   Alice in Sunderland (2007) Bryan Talbot   All-Star Superman Volume 1 (2007) Grant Morrison/Frank Quiteley   Batman: Noel (2011)   Lee Bermejo/Jim Lee Herge's Adventures of Tintin are classic 'ligne claire' comic books, representing a C

Salem's Lot (1975)   The Stand (1990 Revision of 1978 Edition) Night Shift (2008 collection of stories from the 1970s) Stephen King     Song of Kali (1985) Carrion Comfort (1989) Dan Simmons    Supping with Panthers (1996) Deliver Us From Evil (1997) Tom Holland Salem's Lot was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006) this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills. He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young

Nethescurial/The Mystics of Muelenberg from Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) Teatro Grottesco (2006) The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (2011) This review is essentially about the later Ligotti of the current century. We hope to return to the earlier Ligotti in a later review but we can set the scene with just two stories from his second major collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Nethescurial , for example, appears to be a very obvious homage to Lovecraft almost to the point of pastiche in terms of structure and mood although it is clearly very much a Ligotti production. It is as if Ligotti decided to see how he could take as many Lovecraftian tropes about ancient cultic lore and the dark occult, refine them to their basics and come up with a definitive layered narrative oozing unease rather than outright horror. Ligotti is at his best not in trying to present something visceral, disgusting or terrible but in presenting som

Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist (1934) Antonin Artaud   Blue of Noon (1935) Georges Bataille   Literature and Evil (1957) Georges Bataille   Bataille, philosopher and 'intellectual', and Artaud, a 'major figure of the French avant-garde' were almost exact contemporaries. I may have more to write about the former in due course but I am afraid that in this review I am somewhat inclined to take my axe to them.  Artaud's dramatic text Heliogabalus is certainly a curiosity - one part flummery, one part insanity and one part genius. It is an account of sorts of the decadent teenage androgynous Emperor Heliogabalus. Blue of Noon is a minor work that I suspect Bataille did not want published and Literature and Evil is a collection of essays on the margins of French intellectual life in the 1950s. Not that the average reader (in which category I include myself) will have an earthly idea what Heliogabalus is all about (given the limits of a modern education) unt