Geek culture is Cthulu crazy. That much has been obvious for years. I've never read H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulu," and yet I know all about the betentacled beast from beyond the stars, simply because he seems to show up everywhere these days. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that legendary comic book writer and professional curmudgeon Alan Moore (obligatory mention of said writer's sour disposition: check!) had penned his own Cthulu chronicle.
Ok, that's not exactly true. "The Courtyard" isn't actually a Cthulu story. Not really. While the creature's presence is surely felt, he is never seen nor really mentioned. The story is not really about him (it?), per se, and more about the darkness of a world where his malignant presence is felt. Also, it's not really written by Moore. It's based off a short story he wrote, but the "sequential adaptation" is penned by writer Antony Johnston. Moore still gets top billing, and his name in the title's letterhead.
"The Courtyard" is part police procedural, part horror story. An FBI agent is investigating a series of brutal murders committed all across the country, by a a disparate group of people with seemingly no similarities or connections between them. The investigation brings him to the city of Red Hook, a strange night club, and a drug called "Aklo." Naturally, this being a Lovecraftian tale of horror and madness, the investigation leads to insanity and murder when our intrepid investigator goes too far down the rabbit hole and exposes his psyche to the unfathomable terror of the dark powers toying with the humans under its control.
As you can expect with pretty much anything anything with Moore's name on it, "The Courtyard" is impeccably crafted. The atmosphere is appropriately dark and oppressive (thank you artist Jacen Burrows!), Moore clearly has something to say about the subject matter, and the combination of him and Johnston clearly communicate it. The protagonist represents pretty much all the nasty undercurrents running through Lovecraft's work: he's tightly wound, racist, and disdainful of modern culture; a small-minded (though incredibly intelligent) man whose forcibly narrow perception is just asking to be used as a bludgeon against its owner by some Elder God of insanity. Moore also convincingly updates Lovecraft's themes, preserving the older author's central concerns but replacing their turn-of-the-last-century setting with one fully embracing the world of today: clubs, drugs, rock n' roll. And this world is fully realized, down to the minutia.
But honestly, that's it. "The Courtyard" is a brilliant technical exercise, to be sure. But there's no blood in it. No passion. It's form over function. Not only do we know exactly where the story is headed the entire time (it's all rather obvious, in a fatalistic way), but none of the revelations or occurrences have any energy or vitality in them. Everything is cold, clinical, and detached, to a fault. The experience of reading "The Courtyard" is one that never truly allows the reader to project any empathy onto the world or the characters. The experience is one of grim passivity. There's never a moment where the reader feels the horror themselves. Cthulu really is absent from the story after all.
Moore and Burrows recently completed a follow-up to "The Courtyard," entitled "Neonomicon." I was tempted to write a review of that comic instead... but honestly, you can just follow the link at the top of the story and learn everything you need to know about what happens in it. (In case you missed it, here it is again).
No comments:
Post a Comment