bookblogging

[cerusee]

Novels/prose books:

Christie, Agatha: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
(sadly, I guessed in thirty pages in. By my generation, the stuff you need to think of the possibilities required to guess this one are pretty common. But it's really good anyway, and unlike And Then There Were None, I think this one doesn't cheat).


Graphic novels:

Rodionoff, Hans with Keith Giffen, authors, Enrique Breccia, artist: Lovecraft
(a strikingly illustrated blithering mess of a story).

Weir, Christina and Nunzio DeFilippis, authors., Christopher Mitten, artist: Past Lies: An Amy Devlin Mystery
(I like the art. I did think of manga, not because it's stylistically manga-influenced in any way, but because it possesses a quality I see in manga more often than American comics art, which is great use of the clarity black and white line art can have. There's plenty of grey, but Mitten knows how to use it without fucking up. I guess the simplest way to describe the art is, "easy on the eyes and very effective at conveying the narrative." You learn not to take that for granted in comics, after a while... The plot is nothing special, but readable; I liked Amy Devlin a lot and would happily read more books with her as the protagonist, especially if they were graphic novels with art by Mitten).


Manga:

Ito, Junji: Uzumaki vols 1-2
(still creepy as fuck).

Koike, Kazuo, author, and Kazuo Kamimura, artist: Lady Snow Blood vol. 1
(oh wow, that 1970s manga art, how I dig it. It's a visual feast and great comic art. It's a visual feast of naked women stabbing things and having sex--no, let me make that, "being had sex with"--and blood sprays, frequently all at the same time, but damn, it's stylish. The story is...eh, a revenge plot. I don't really care. It's just there to provide an excuse for fantastic art containing all the elements the creators really liked to use, i.e. naked women being had sex with and killing things and blood spatters. Those elements are not particularly appealing to me, but good 1970s manga art is).

Comments

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

Is the Lovecraft book about Lovecraft or Lovecraftian themes?

I've looked at the Lady Snow Blood books and after reading your review, I realize I should read them more thoroughly. I was a bit put off by the hyper-violence, but if the art is great, it definitely bears a look.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Both! Which is part of why it's a mess. The premise as described by John Carpenter in the introduction is, "What if all that weird shit Lovecraft talks about in his stories was real?" So the Necronomicon is a real book that warps li'l Lovecraft, his pets get raped and torn apart by wolf-demons, women turn into toothy octopi from the waist down and eat penises in the middle of sex, that sort of thing, and Arkham, Massachusetts, alternates between being a fantasy setting invented by Lovecraft's grandfather for the horrible stories he tells li'l Lovecraft (further warping him) and a real setting. In the denouement, Lovecraft is trying to rescue his mother, who's been driven insane by the Necronomicon, from an insane asylum, and confronts a demon who looks exactly like Lovecraft and upsets the premise of Lovecraftian nightmares-as-truth by reciting Lovecraft's actual biography (both parents went insane and were institutionalized, Lovecraft also insane, his wife sane enough to divorce him and move to Ohio) in an attempt to unsettle Lovecraft.

It was a dumb move on the part of the authors. It doesn't feel ambiguous about what's supposed to be real, but as if they couldn't actually make up their minds which story they wanted to tell (Lovecraft sane and saving the world from evil demons, or Lovecraft insane and tormented by imaginary demons), so they just kept switching back and forth in different chapters.


I am still fairly sensitive to violence, and it's not the selling point for me, although I think with this genre, it IS supposed to be the selling point, and they don't expect you to read it if you don't enjoy hyper-violence. I had to stop reading Eden: It's an Endless World because of the lovingly rendered depictions of people's spinal cords hanging out of their severed torsos three seconds after they'd stepped on a land mine, but Lady Snow Blood is much less interested in making you feel the shock and horror of violent death, and therefore I can disassociate enough appreciate the art when reading Eden left me shaking and in tears.

Making people feel the shock and horror of violent death with your art is more socially worthwhile than creating stylized revenge fantasies with naked women, but since I already feel a great deal of shock and horror over reading about actual violent death in the news, I'm not inclined to seek it out in my fiction.

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

Re: the Lovecraft: ...

...

I'm still trying to come up with something more profound than the ellipsis for that. Just, wow. I mean, I've heard a bit of Lovecraft's life story, and as racist as he was, I'm not sure he deserves the sort of comic book treatment you describe above.

Gurgh.

(Note to self: do not pick up Eden.) <--I, too, do not care for hanging spinal cords.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I don't feel strongly about Lovecraft, but bad writing annoys me.

Eden is a very good series, as a lot of people will be happy to tell you, with details. But I can't read it; it hurts too much.