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. 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. Location, Location, Location é daquelas histórias que também faz sorrir, um imaginar de um apocalipse bíblico, com um jesus a tomar conta do jardim do pai que por acaso fica numa cidadezinha inglesa, e toda a humanidade a ser arrebatada para os céus, exceto uma jovem advogada, porque mesmo no fim dos tempos, faz jeito ter atenção aos pormenores legais. Le sigue "Not Even Legend" mientras que si altamente imaginativo considero que se hubiera beneficiado de ser más extenso.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. While this story still had his elements of sci-fi and general what-the-fuck-is-going-on -ness, it was definitely less chaotic and intellectual than his normal writing style. The structure of this story reminds me of Nabokov’s brilliant Pale Fire, which has a similar structure, only where the critic is insane, and perhaps a murderer, and the footnotes can be read for a suspense plot. If I'm not, then it's pretty much a Pale Fire riff, except minus much of a smoking gun beyond 'the Beats were dicks', which I'm not sure is that controversial nowadays. Another I sort of have, the opening Hypothetical Lizard, in that I have the comics adaptation, but I remembered little past the premise from that, so can only assume it didn't do full justice to the story as collected here, which is an ingenious, poisonous thing, its prose bolstering the horror of the premise, as when a key character wrings her hands: "They looked like crabs mating after having been kept too long in the dark.Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. 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. I was surprised that this was one of the very few sore spots Moore refrained from poking here – the other glaring one was Steve Ditko's increasingly loopy politics. And his son's disastrous performance at the Senate hearings which would lead to the imposition of the Comics Code is here pushed from merely disastrous to hilariously catastrophic.

Nothing chases the audience away like the feeling of doing homework, and this really made me want the book to end.I do not know why this spelled out the perfect set up for reverse harem Jesus-Devil-Angie scenario, but now I, someone who does not like sharing, need this devil’s threeway in my life! It kind of made me forget that I was reading in the first place - one of those rare rides of dissolving into the words of a book. If Moore just wanted to give us an education on the Beat scene in San Francisco, it’s a halfway clever, if a bit didactic, way of doing it. The only thing that makes it recognizably Alan Moore-y is the scaffolding of local history, which is by far the most interesting part of the story.

There is a narrative that reveals itself in these footnotes, but it’s entirely too insubstantial to justify itself. The people in the industry, perhaps because of exposure to its products, are all sexually stunted, often veering into violence. Hypothetical Lizard” feels very old school sci-fi/fantasy, like if Jack Vance got real horny all of a sudden.True, some of the chapter and verse is new to me, but mainly because I was never sufficiently into the Beats to finish On The Road, let alone read up on their sins****. I'd decide that this book wasn't for me, maybe I shouldn't be reading this sort of thing while I'm already in a bad headspace, and go find some mind-bleach. Not Even Legend picks up on an idea Moore has been exploring from his early Future Shocks right through to Jerusalem, this time as part of a puzzle box narrative taking that old mainstay of amateur investigators getting too close to the truth, and then twisting it through all sorts of interesting spaces. My favorite story is the first one: “Hypothetical Lizard” which describes a mesmerizing standoff of two prostitutes in a fantastical brothel, as seen by a third mute (sort of) other prostitute. 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.