| Brothels -- Fiction. |
| Paranormal fiction |
| Older men -- Fiction. |
| Libraries and publishing -- Fiction. |
| Fantasy fiction. |
| Short stories. |
| Bordellos |
| Houses of prostitution |
| Occult fiction |
| Occult stories |
| Occultism -- Fiction |
| Occultism -- Juvenile fiction |
| Paranormal stories |
| Parapsychology -- Fiction |
| Parapsychology -- Juvenile fiction |
| Supernatural -- Fiction |
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Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Bridgewater Public Library | MOORE, A. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Elizabeth Taber Library | MOO | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | SF MOORE | SCIENCE FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | FIC MOORE | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mattapoisett Free Public Library | MOO | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library | FIC MOORE | SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Pembroke Public Library | FIC MOORE, A. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Somerset Public Library | MOORE ALAN | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... West Bridgewater PL | FIC MOORE, ALAN | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE
From New York Times bestselling author Alan Moore-one of the most influential writers in the history of comics-"a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving" (Neil Gaiman) which takes 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 "A 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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Legendary graphic novelist Moore (Watchmen) further burnishes his reputation in his first prose collection, which features nine career-spanning tales. The stand-out short novel, "What We Can Know About Thunderman," is a scathing take on the American comic book industry and its impact on popular culture and politics, and will undoubtedly attract the most attention, given Moore's history with the genre. In it, Moore imagines a reality in which thinly disguised versions of characters like Superman have grown so grim that "everybody had decided that comics weren't just for kids, then that they weren't for kids at all"--and now their audience is on the verge of dying off. It gets so bad that comics writer Dan Wheems decides that unless he escapes the industry, he will be reduced to "a quickly understood cartoon, the way it did with everything and everybody." Moore's subversive talent is equally on display in the shorter tales: "Not Even Legend" follows a group of paranormal investigators who eschew ghost hunting to instead study "things that nobody had ever said existed in the first place," while the cynical psychic protagonist of "Cold Reading" justifies his work as a "spiritual sugar pill." The superhero genre's loss is fantastic fiction's gain. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
This collection of Alan Moore's short fictions contains five stories that have been published elsewhere - mostly in smaller, indie print venues - and four entirely new works. The opening story, Hypothetical Lizard, is a queer surrealist revenge tale written in 1987, while in Cold Reading, originally published in 2010, a real ghost takes revenge on a con artist who performs fake seances. All the others have been written in the past three years: highlights include Not Even Legend, in which a strange creature moving backward through time infiltrates a group of friends who investigate supernatural phenomena; The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, a self-conscious tribute to 1960s new wave science fiction that chronicles the sexual escapades of a Boltzmann brain in the first femtosecond of creation; and American Light: An Appreciation, in which Moore flaunts his ability to capture the essence of American beat poetry and 1980s literary criticism while satirically undermining both. The original novella What We Can Know About Thunderman is the savage heart of the volume - and not just because it takes up more space than all the other stories combined. Moore's Watchmen has been described as a deconstruction of the "silver age" superhero genre, painstakingly exposing its conventions in order to subvert its entire undertaking. What We Can Know About Thunderman may be said to offer a similar deconstruction of the American comics industry itself. As the story begins, four fans turned comics writers chew over industry gossip at a New York diner, and we quickly discover that the fictionalised comics business in which they labour is a thinly veiled allegory for the real industry in which Moore himself first became famous. "Massive" and "American" replace Marvel and DC Comics, respectively, and the story's titular Thunderman is (of course) our very own Superman. The dinner is interrupted by the belated revelation that American's editor-in-chief, Brandon Chuff, has been dead for the entire conversation, despite his smiling presence at the table (somewhat like the real-world comics industry, Moore implies). Chuff's death precipitates the promotion of Worsley Porlock, another fan turned writer, who becomes editor-in-chief at American during the dark years of the Trump administration and the Covid pandemic. Thunderman subsequently explores key moments in Porlock's life, ranging from his early childhood to American Comics' collapse. Alternate chapters explore fictionalised versions of key moments in the history of the comics industry, such as one scene in which publisher Jim Laws (Moore's stand-in for EC Comics editor and publisher William Maxwell Gaines) testifies at the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings into juvenile delinquency. Another scene, set in 1960, suggests that "Satanic" Sam Blatz (Moore's satirical version of Stan Lee) received covert instructions from the CIA to mobilise superhero comics in service of pro-American, pro-corporate cold war propaganda. Although many elements are exuberantly fictionalised - I doubt that any female executives at DC Comics were married to a painting of Augusto Pinochet - part of the story's pleasure lies in Moore's insider knowledge of the industry: there is a sense that there's a kernel of sordid truth within each satirical fictionalisation, as though Moore is airing everyone's dirty laundry for the world to see. What can we uncover, Moore wants us to ask, when we examine the hidden underworld of the American comics industry, zooming in on each detail with the same uncomfortable discernment Watchmen brings to bear on the conventions of silver age comics? Unwaveringly, his argument emerges: the business dehumanises people, drawing them into "an insane alternative reality" akin to the experience of cocaine addiction. Executives exploit working-class creators - such as Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, as well as Moore himself - for the benefit of shareholders and corporate oligarchs. Modern-day creators are largely middle-class former fans who have become brand-oriented content generators feeding a mass cultural addiction to shallow escapist fantasies. And all this, Moore asserts, runs parallel to the rise of populist fascism in the US. If the comics industry is "a metaphorical microcosm for the whole of society", then comics fans and Maga reactionaries both similarly reveal "how blurred the line separating fact from fiction is for many people". Moore drives this point home during a chapter where Porlock watches the 6 January Capitol riot on television, musing that when Trump was elected in 2016, "six of the dozen biggest-grossing movies had been superhero films", and many of the former reality star's followers responded to him as though he was a four-colour superhero figure. "They wanted big dramatic threats and enemies, no matter that they strained all credibility, and also wanted some improbable and memorable character to offer them solutions that were simple, and as unbelievable as the imagined menaces they were pledged to combat." This led inexorably to the events at the Capitol, when Trump's hardcore fans ("fanatics" in the truest sense) revolted against the inconvenient truth of Biden's electoral victory in an effort to "expose troublesome fact as fiction, while establishing pulp picture-story narrative as universal fact". America's "post-truth" departure from factual objectivity, in other words, is a consequence of its near wholesale embrace of the fascist mythology that reality can become whatever one has the will to make of it - a mythology endlessly rearticulated within mainstream corporate superhero fantasies and reactionary political subcultures. Moore has offered variations of this argument elsewhere, but What We Can Know About Thunderman gives a savage, satirical perspective on the American superhero industry - and by extension America itself - unmatched in his previous writing. The collection as a whole demonstrates that although Watchmen may be Moore's best-known work, his storytelling has transcended its origins in the vexed commercial medium he now conscientiously eschews.
Kirkus Review
The first short story collection from the author of several iconic graphic novels and comic-book series. When a comic-book writer switches to prose only, they might have trouble conjuring the fleshed-out descriptions usually provided by pictures. But Moore, creator of such legendary graphic works as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has never had this problem. His works typically include several picture-light text extracts, and if Moore's debut novel--the sprawling Jerusalem (2016)--is anything to go by, the difficulty is getting him to stop his flow of words. One might hope, then, that the restrictive length of a short story would provide some necessary structure. This collection definitely includes some tight, clever, and vivid entries, including "Not Even Legend," about a cabal of mythological creatures prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that ordinary humans never get a hint of their existence; "Hypothetical Lizard," which chronicles a brothel worker's nasty revenge on his former lover; "Location, Location, Location," concerning a real estate agent officially signing over a house to Jesus after the Rapture; and "And, at the Last, Just To Be Done With Silence," a creepy tale of madness-inducing penance in the late 12th century. The title story, in which a man longs to recapture his youth, and "Cold Reading," which features a successful fake medium who learns the perils of disbelief, have an entertaining if slightly derivative Twilight Zone vibe. But Moore goes off the rails with "What We Can Know About Thunderman," the book's longest work, taking up fully half the pages. It's a self-indulgently savage lampoon of the comic-book industry, wandering over several decades, taking the occasional clever potshot, very occasionally affirming the way that comic books and comic-book conventions can bring lonely nerds together, and frequently veering into the grotesque, petty, and bizarre. The story never has any clear destination other than to suggest that the industry is a cesspool that's impossible to escape in any clean way. The well-informed reader will infer that Moore is still extremely angry at DC for a number of intellectual property issues, remains upset with the way Warner Brothers adapted his works for film, and isn't exactly happy with Marvel, either. A mixed bag with a misshapen boulder in it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Famed author Moore, known for comics like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Batman: The Killing Joke, the novel Jerusalem (2016), and much more, is out now with a collection of short fiction, much of it recent and previously unpublished. In "Not Even Legend," a dark, time-traveling creature infiltrates a group of amateur paranormal enthusiasts. In the intensely charming "Location, Location, Location," a realtor named Angie--who happens to be the last person on Earth after the Rapture hit and Apocalypse began--shows a house to Jesus, who likes Killing Eve and encourages her to call him Jez. Readers might be surprised to stumble on a 240-page novella in a collection of short fiction, but the good news is that "What We Can Know about Thunderman" is an epic, darkly humorous spin on the history of comics, full of secrets, riveting feuds, reluctant friendships, and exploitative contracts, portrayed through interviews, chat rooms, recordings, and more. Moore's dark humor and expert twists are on full display in these fictions. Fans of dark fantasy and dark humor will enjoy this collection from one of fantasy's greats.
Library Journal Review
For the first time in his four-decade career, the Hugo Award-winning Moore (Watchmen) publishes a short story collection. The characters range from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to theoretical Boltzmann brains dreaming up the universe at the big bang, and a big novella covers the twisty history of the comics industry. With a 150,000-copy first printing.