Graveyard Shift

Graveyard Shift (Lana Harvey, Reapers, Inc.) by Angela Roquet  258 pp.

After reading the reviews of this book on Amazon, there are apparently editing issues. These aren't too noticeable when listening to the audio version. I found the book to be fun and enjoyable, in a dark humor kind of way. Lana is a Reaper as in Grim. Grim is actually her boss in Eternity where the reapers do his job by collecting the souls of the dead and ferrying them to the afterlife where their souls are designated, e.g. Heaven, Summerland, Hell, Nirvana, etc. Lana prefers to do the bare minimum her job entails so when a promotion is unexpectedly dumped in her lap she finds herself in battles with demons and more. Angels, Nephilim, Ancient Gods, and the aforementioned Demons all inhabit the world of eternity and not all are friendly. This book is kind of Christopher Moore-ish but not close to his caliber.

Journey into Mystery: Fear Itself

Journey into Mystery vol. 1:  Fear Itself by Keiron Gillen and Douglas Braithewaite; graphic novel; 136 pages

A friend recommended this as a good place to get started in the Marvel universe.  Since I loved Loki in the recent Marvel movies, I thought I'd give it a try.  Unfortunately, I think my friend was overestimating how familiar I am with Marvel, especially with its less mainstream characters, like Thor (I can stumble through a Spiderman or X-Men comic, but I'm lost on Avengers-related stuff).  Here's what I could gather from the rather confusing book:  Loki has died (in a previous arc) and through a convoluted series of events, has been reincarnated as a younger, more innocent version of himself.  At the same time, Odin has gone kind of crazy, and is enslaving the residents of Asgard into a brutal war against The Serpent.  Loki's goals are two-fold in this story:  recover his memories and cunning that he lost when he died, and stop the impending doom that only he sees coming. 

While I like Loki as a character, I got lost in all the side characters that were introduced here.  I also found myself getting frustrated, since my knowledge of Norse mythology is only slightly better than my knowledge of Marvel mythology, and I had trouble telling where Marvel ended and Norse myth began (I may very well be the only one bothered by things like that).  Gillen's art, on the other hand, was AMAZING.  I'd pick up anything else he's done in a heartbeat. 

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, 110 pages

In this thin volume, Eagleman ruminates on what exactly might happen after death. These short (very short, indeed; some are a page and a half long) stories suggest everything from a heaven so painstakingly created to be welcoming to everyone that everyone there believes they're in hell, to an afterlife in which you do all of the things you did while alive but in categorized chunks (six weeks waiting for a green light, 51 days deciding what to wear, three years swallowing food), to an afterlife populated by the gods of long-dead religions. Perhaps my favorite is the one in which God is obsessed with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, since she's the only other being in existence who manages to understand the role of the creator, animating the inanimate.

Eagleman's writing is excellent in that it's both descriptive enough to give a clear snapshot of each afterlife and suggestively vague and concise enough that the reader can create his or her own assumptions about these ideas. These stories are sometimes silly, sometimes poignant, sometimes sad, but always thought-provoking. This is a good book. Read it.

The Iron Khan / Liz Williams

The Iron Khan by Liz Williams (a Detective Inspector Chen novel #5). 327 p.

The Detective Inspector Chen books have a fabulous near-future setting. Chen is a police officer working in Singapore Three, and he is the police liaison with Hell. Chinese hell, as it turns out--there are many hells. At the beginning of the series he's somewhat shunned by his co-workers and his wife Inari (who's a demon living on Earth) is completely isolated except for her badger companion. By this book, however, Chen is a personal friend of the Emperor of Heaven, who asks him to track down a missing object. Zhu Irzh, Chen's demon partner, gets involved with trying to defeat the Iron Khan of the title. Inari has a Celestial friend over to her houseboat, and an arcane typhoon snatches the boat away from Earth, marooning them in the Sea of Night. Eventually all of the threads come together, of course, but this is not the best book in the series. As another review I read commented, it's easy to keep track of what's happening in any given scene, but overall they don't add up to a clear big picture. I felt that Zhu's involvement with the Iron Khan was particularly plot-coupon-y; he can see the Khan because, well, because the plot needed that to get going.

I really really like this series and found this to be a disappointing addition to it. However, I'm grateful that I got to see it at all, as author/publisher conflict meant it almost didn't get published. I see that another volume in the series is supposed to come out, so I hope that'll be up to the previous books' standards.

Check our catalog.

Dante's Divine Comedy

Dante's Divine Comedy adapted by Seymour Chwast  128 pp.

I last read Dante Alighieri's Inferno when I was in high school, thirty-something years ago. I never read the complete Purgatorio or Paradiso although I always planned to. This graphic novel version was a poor substitute. Chwast's simple illustrations and abbreviated text is a mere outline of the original. There is no depth here. It feels as if he used the Cliff's Notes version as his guideline. The original Divine Comedy offers wonderful imagery that could be served well by the graphic novel format in the hands of another artist like Rick Geary or Craig Thompson. This book was a disappointment.

Hellcity: The Whole Damned Thing/ Macon Blair and Joe Flood

Hellcity: The Whole Damned Thing by Macon Blair and Joe Flood. graphic novel, mystery, noir, action, celestial setting 328 pages

Considering that my first little expedition into the world of graphic novels was the Scott Pilgrim series, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I would be intrigued enough by this genre to try again. Naturally, I could keep within my comfort zone and pick up another big-eyed, bright-and-bubbly graphic novel series similar to Scott Pilgrim, but a friend of mine told me that these types of graphic novels make up only about HALF of the genre. Before I could truly judge graphic literature as a whole, I needed to read something of the other GL variety--- something gritty, something violent, something with graphic violence that only a graphic novel could provide. Something like one of Frank Miller's Sin City books. However, if I really wanted to initiate myself as a graphic novel reader, I would need to stray away from the mainstream and read something that HADN'T been made into a movie. That's when Hellcity: The Whole Damned thing crossed the circulation desk.

Being a fan of classic literature like John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Dante Alighieri's "Inferno", it shouldn't be too surprising that stories set in the afterlife would be interesting to me. Hellcity combines classic mythology of Heaven and Hell with elements of the noir mystery genre to form an extremely entertaining mystery of celestial proportions. The book follows the adventures of Bill Tankersly, a private investigator-turned-damned soul condemned to the hellish urban sprawl of Hellcity for taking his own life after a serial killer murders his wife. Hellcity is a lot like any traditional fictional noir urban setting except along with the cliches of overwhelming crime and pollution as well as political corruption, there is a population of demons running the city as well as incessantly torturing the human inhabitants of Hellcity. The narrative opens with another cliche, the leggy and mysterious woman showing up at Tankersly's door with an offer too good to refuse--- a transfer to a less hellish area of hell in exchange for his services. Tankersly is assigned to shadow the Devil himself who is acting extremely strange (he's reading poetry and dressing like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) in a time where Hellcity is on the verge of being overthrown by anarchist groups composed of the damned.

While I don't want to reveal any more of the story than this, I will tell you that Tankersly's quest for redemption is extremely addictive. As someone who prides himself in being able to predict events of stories, there were quite a few points where even I was thrown for a loop. Hellcity's inhabitants are also extremely entertaining and the memorable cast of characters only adds to the already involved story. If you've got a few hours to kill, I'd definitely pick this one up. I'll be damned if it's not totally worth your time...