Illuminations: Stories

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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. Alan Moore: It was largely that I have started to see the superhero – which is an American phenomenon, we have tried to copy them throughout the rest of the world, but this is pretty much an American phenomenon – and, having become quite disabused with the American superhero industry and having looked at it as an outsider for the last twenty years, I start to see superheroes in a much more sinister light. There was no sign of slaughter, there was no sign of plague. People have said, ‘oh, well, that would have been about the time that the Romans were showing up, perhaps they were terrified by the approach of the Romans.’ No, and even if they had been, they wouldn’t have left their corn querns behind. These were the genuine mysteries that I elected to leave them as mysteries, but I didn’t actually want to say, ‘yes, this is a fantasy, this is a ghost story.’ I’m probably happiest in that uncomfortable territory between what is real and what is fictional, which was an awful lot of what Voice of the Fire turned out to be about. That tissue paper-thin layer between the real world and the unreal world, with the suspicion that sometimes things slip through. That that membrane might be permeable, or semi-permeable. That’s the territory that I most like to actually set my work in, an area of doubt where people can sort of think ‘this all sounds very much researched.’ Steve was my first port of call. I said, “All right, now I’ve decided that I'm a magician, what do I do? How do you do magic? How do you become a magician?” And he said, “The first thing to do is to either choose a god, or let a god choose you, and then use that god, that imaginary being as a guide to the imaginary territory that you’re going to be entering into.” It was sometime after that where Steve happened to show me a book of Roman antiquities, which included, on the front cover, the statue of Glycon. Glycon was the last-created Roman god. And I thought that this was the most beautiful creature that I’d ever seen. There was something absurd about it, and there was also something of incredible majesty and beauty. This snake with long blond hair. I’m still not sure whether I chose the god or whether the god chose me.

Alan Moore is simply a legend and it has been such a pleasure to listen to him talk about his ambitious Long London series as well as discovering the range of his shorter fiction,” said Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Paul Baggaley. “These projects have set Bloomsbury alight.” When we put all the short stories together there wasn't even enough for a collection and so I thought, "I should write four new stories, that should just about round it out." I used the last four stories [in the book] to do a lot of things that I figured hadn't been done in the preceding stories. I was kind of showing off a little bit. I wanted to show people that I do have a bit of range. Returning to the severed head of magic, you might not be the best person to ask, because I know you’re famously offline, but can this new, ubiquitous digital world that we’re seeing – Web 3.0 and all that – interrupt Enlightenment assumptions about reality in favour of more magical ones? Particularly in places where certain physics, certain chemical rules won’t apply anymore?

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Moore’s personal imprecation against comic-book creators as perverted and stunted souls, porn-addled freaks incapable of normal social intercourse, is even more outrageous. What right has Alan Moore of all people to sit in judgment on the abnormal?—a man whose Nazarene hairstyle, diabolical predilections, radical politics, and pornographic literary productions hardly bespeaks the bourgeois way of life Flaubert famously recommended to the artist. A writer who (for example) showed a 15-year-old Dorothy feverishly masturbating through the Kansan tornado and Peter Pan gleefully molesting Wendy’s child brothers in his pornotopic Lost Girls should perhaps hold his tongue before he waxes moralistic over anyone else’s sexual imagination. 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. 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. 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.

The writing is always excellent, words that you don't expect to fit suddenly appearing in dialogue that sounds so apt and perfect it is a wonder that no one ever thought about it before. Bits of magic and magik, a hint of the supernatural, and the sadness of being all too human. Some stories seem too short, but that is probably the selfish reader in me. A few the story about Jesus, and the simple story of a cryptid club, with a strange observer hit me and made me think about alot of things other than the story, And that is a good thing. The long story about comics, might be a little too inside baseball for some people, a lot of history and lore is mentioned in it, about real people and real events, but still even a little Wikipedia should clear that up. A strong collection of stories, that flit and flirt with a lot of different themes and ideas.Do you think that there’s a sterility to mainstream fantasy that you’re getting at in terms of your Tolkien comparison? As in, rather than celebrating this idea of magic, there’s an obfuscation of it, and in its place there’s a sort of fascist bullying. If you’re interested in my bullshit theory as to why this should be, then for my money it probably has something to do with the character’s ontology, ontology being the study of what can be said to exist, as opposed to epistemology, which is the study of what we can know. The only Thunderman that can be said to exist is the perfect and ideal one, who is made of nothing more than lines of paper or acetate, and Essler shorts are the purest and most glorious expressions of this: the true imaginal essence of this fictional character in a moving, speaking, unbounded form. It’s when you materialise Thunderman as a flesh-and-blood human being with pubic hair and a rental agreement that you start to run into trouble. So as Worsley whimpered in his sleep, up there over his head, over the bedroom ceiling and the roof tiles and the TV aerial, up near the moon, was where the Russian space-dog sat above the sky in judgement. It looked down on the United States and had its head on one side like they sometimes do, with eyes of caramel regret, and very likely nobody would ever know what it was thinking, because everything that it was thinking was in Russian, and in Dog. He reminded me of your character from Voice of the Fire’s 'I Travel In Suspenders,' who’s like the most terrifying guy ever.

Let's ask the obvious question... 'What We Can Know About Thunderman' is a satire of the comics industry. How much of it is true? I have had people in the comics industry phone up and express – and these are people who write about or draw these fantastic, invulnerable, fearless characters – and, yes, if you were invulnerable it wouldn’t be quite so difficult to be fearless, would it? But I’ve had them phone me up and sort of say ‘we don’t know how you Brit guys can sleep at night without a gun on the night table.’ To which the answer is ‘we sleep like babies because we’re not surrounded by thousands of jittery, tawed-up Americans.’ And he was saying, ‘yeah, but you could get guns over there, can’t you?’ And I was saying, ‘yeah, you could probably get anything over in anywhere, but we don’t because what would be the point?’ If you’re a criminal and you take guns out for a robbery, that’s going to massively increase your chances of being shot and killed. In fact, with the British police being so unfamiliar with guns, and a bit jittery with them, even if you’re carrying a table leg home from the pub, you’re probably going to get shot by a British police marksman. So, yeah, we don’t do it over here, so we don’t have that constant anxiety that must be at least in the atmosphere over there all the time. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

It definitely does show range. You have everything from a ghost story to a satirical novella about the comics industry, and 'The Improbably Complex High Energy State', which starts off as hard SF before becoming almost a romantic comedy. Not something people maybe expect from Alan Moore... A lot of this would entail the introduction of a universal basic income scheme. Which again is very possible. There are places where they’ve tried it out. It seems to be a very workable thing. And we know that the money’s there. The thing is that amongst conservative thinkers, it is unthinkable that people should get something for nothing, even though that is what their entire careers are often based upon. A lot of my English-based work is centred on Northampton. But yes, I do find an awful lot of haunted resonance in the English landscape. I’d say that it’s a fourth dimensional aspect of the place. If Einstein’s right and we exist in a universe that has at least four dimensions, one of which we perceive as the passage of time, then you have to look at places with the time element. If you're trying to get the scale of a place, you have to consider that fourth dimension as well. And the scale of England geographically is not that great. We’re a relatively small island, sort of bobbing somewhere off Europe. But the actual scale of England, Britain, considered in terms of the history, is kind of enormous. Take Northampton: we had mammoth hunters here, we had Romans, we were the centre of the country in terms of how the Saxons saw things. We had the Normans, but we fell out of favour because of Hereward the Wake, a local terrorist who used to be one of the great English legendary heroes when I was growing up. Alan Moore: I’ve watched the first couple, and frankly, it wasn’t for me. I’m not even really commenting on it, I’m more commenting on my reaction to this stuff, which may be entirely my own, I don’t know. There seems to be a criticism of the fantasy genre in the first story in Illuminations, 'Hypothetical Lizard,' and the way that there always seems to be an undercurrent of sexual dominance in it. Was that intentional?

I’m not interested in being part of a religion. Religion is one of our major problems. If you are going to move to a post-growth world. Well, there are a couple of big hurdles in the way. One of them is the resurgence of populist fascism, which still remains to be dealt with. But there is also established religion, which has always been hand in glove with the state. We keep religion around because it’s handy if we want to stir up hatred against another ethnic group. So that we can have a crusade or a war against terror. It’s mainly a political tool to keep people controlled, preying upon their fear of death. Any kind of magic in an advisory capacity to political leaders would be co-opted. The Third Reich had its occult elements and that doesn’t seem to have been an ideal system. And on top of that, Lovecraft had a cosmological perspective in that he was an avid follower of science magazines. He had kept up with Einstein and appeared to understand Einstein. He did his best. But this led to more fear. Because he actually understood how tiny and insignificant we were in this boundless universe and that the universe was governed, not by God—because Lovecraft was an atheist—but by these blind chaotic forces of physics that did not know that we were here. That didn’t care about us. They weren’t good. They weren’t evil. They would just annihilate us without ever knowing that we’d existed. And these forces became Lovecraft’s pantheon of unpronounceable elder gods. He was kind of giving a shape and a name, even if it was a particularly tentacled shape, to the blind forces of physics that he thought governed human existence. I actually went to one of those camps (well, a crap American remake of one) with my Poppi when I was a kid (along with my brother, my mom, and my Nonna). It rained every day we were there that week in July, apart from the last one. There was a pool that was so deep, you could go down to the basement and see people swimming. One of the days we were there, some of the camp counselors asked for our assistance with a fun “summer Halloween” thing for the little kids (I was 8 at the time). They had my brother dressed up in a gorilla costume. I was painted up to look like a zombie. All things considered, it was the best part of that miserable experience.I'm about halfway through the first book, which is called The Great When. I'm really pleased with that. It's nothing at all like Illuminations or Jerusalem. This first one is set in 1949 so I'm trying to conjure the mindset of that period. It's got an 18-year-old protagonist who knows very little of the world and over the next three or four books, he will grow up and the time period will change. I'm anticipating that there will probably be a different style for each book Most superheroes can be reduced to just a color combination and a chest emblem. I had a strange image that was like something from an old Superboy comic, and I had no idea what it meant. It was an image of a normally dressed person walking in from the left of a kind of an archetypal 1960s comic book panel with a sort of a bland Midwest landscape and, on the other side, a fantastically-costumed superhero, and they're just walking towards each other as if to shake hands. That became the seed for the final scene. It was a really interesting experience writing that story. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Some of the most grotesque scenes I've embellished and in some of them I've flat out lied, but I think that it captures the character of the comics industry and a lot of the most physically appalling things in there are very close to actual reality. It also features a cheerfully blasphemous sex scene – one of many odd erotic encounters in this book that left me uncertain of whether I needed a cold shower or a therapy session. His description of congress between two disembodied brains who are (possibly) the only conscious entities in the universe is even more repulsive than you might expect – but the story itself is a little masterclass in world building.