Neonomicon Paperback – Illustrated, November 1, 2011

Neonomicon is a graphic novel. I don’t read many graphic novels –I make up my own pictures in my mind to match the words in non-graphic fiction. But I loved comic books when I was a kid and I am aware and appreciative of what a well crafted graphic novel can do. Like this one., Which is excellent. It’s exceedingly well scripted. (Plot and dialogue in a graphic novel are constrained –constricted may be better- by the limit on pages and the large amount of space taken up in the pictures.) The illustrations are superb, realistic, heavy on line but not ignoring shading and contour, and the coloring, dark but bursting into explosions of color in the more psychedelic interludes, is equally effective. Moore wrote story and dialogue, Burrows illustrated, someone named Juanmar colored the drawings. They all deserve praise.The story is a modernization of Lovecraft’s Chulthu mythos. An FBI agent is staking out a neighborhood where a series of brutal ghastly murders have taken place. The killer had no history of violence and only speaks now in a jumble of alien words. He’s hopelessly psychotic. But there are two other recent mass murders and in both cases, killers with same past record –no history of violence—and the same present behavior. There is no apparent connection among the three. The FBI agent is an expert in anomaly theory. He looks for anomalies and tries to fit them into patterns. The only connection seems to be a mysterious drug called aklo and a possible dealer, a man named Johnny Carcosa who hangs out at the Club Zothique. The band there is the Ulthar Cats. They’re beyond punk or Goth, singing songs that starts in freeform descriptions of violence and swerve part way through a (very long) song into a string of alien names which we know (because we’ve read Lovecraft) but the agent doesn’t are names of entities in the Chulthu myth. No one knows how old Johnny is and he wears a veil over the front of his face, covering it from the bridge of his nose down. The agent digs deeper, finds that a similar string of killings and mutilations occurred in the same place in the 1920s. (Think Lovecraft’s time.) He makes contact with Johnny Carcosa and arranges to buy some aklo. Soon, the agent is locked in a cell. He’s killed several people and he too speaks an alien tongue. A new team of agents is sent in to investigate, man and woman, and the story accelerates in tempo and in horror. It ends in an explosion of color and horrific images, with a dire fate in store for all of us.It’s a good recreation of Lovecraft’s twisted world, with one addition. The sexuality that is hinted at but never allowed to enter Lovecraft’s asexual tales is explicit, in text and drawings, in this disturbing story. It works and it’s not intruded gratuitously but if you’re squeamish about such things, you may want to take a pass on this book.

This work brilliantly continued the mythos canon, reinterpreting the trational material in moderncontext while remaining true to the spirit of HPL's original work. It unites various themes that in HPL's writings were often separate story chains.Alan Moore illustrates some of the Pan dimensional concepts that form the framework of the Lovecraft cosmology with great skill in Neonomicon.The catalysing effect that the Ur syntax has upon human consciousness connecting it to its primordial & multidimensional unity has precedent as can be seen in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," "Dreams in the Witch house," & a number of ither stories in which the "magic" of the mythos is likened to an advanced alien physics that mankind can only begin to grasp through superstition & pseudo religious devotion. Moore presents the language as a multidimensional construct just as the Old ones themself are, & conjectures to what effect this would have upon a human, which only perceive themselves as singular disconnected beings, but, as is shown in the prison scene towards the end of Neonomicon, & as well in the canonical Silver key work, each individual is in actuality an aspect of a higher being projected through diverse lenses of temporal curves, & spatial angles.This multidimensionsality furthermore exists "beyond space & time," or to use a more modern term: within "spherical time," in which all events occur simultaneously, but the finite perception only is what divides it into experential moments that can be more easily focused upon & lived as singular points. Moore explains this higher dimesional perception as the "Plateau of Leng," not a location, but as an unfolding of consciousness from finite to more lamniscatesque fullness.Utilizing an avatar of Nylarthotep as the catalysing agent reveals Moore to be a true mythos fan. The crawling chaos being the force which on the 3rd dimensional plane insinuates the corrupting presence of the Old Ones into the static dream of the material realm keeping the lloigor from realizing its greater nature.The erotic horror is a more modern graphic representation of the understated Victorian sexual themes found in many of HPL's works, such as Shub-Niggurath which as a progenitor-genetrix that accomplished its spawning through, among others, humans.The revelation at the end is an excellent interpretation of how spherical time is misunderstood by the human, or "glaaki" state of finiteness, in the higher dimensional perception the mythos can be understood through a dream logic which relies upon a more amorphic state not so strictly defined as the rationality required by the physical body whose urges & frail dependence Victorian society loathed.The Victorian influence of hatred of the physical body is also shown in how the female protagonist is treated by the cultists, meat to be used for indulgence of base desires & ultimately disposed of when done with. Moreover it serves to shock the reader through horrifying visual imagery to make the reader vulnerable to the revelation presented in the culminating scene.Neonomicon connected various mythos story themes well, & masterfully explained concepts left vague in the original writings without losing the horrific mood.

The Courtyard: When federal agent Aldo Sax goes deep undercover to find a mysterious drug called Aklo, he gets snared in net of Lovecraftian craziness with Johnny Carcosa at the center.Aside from being peppered with racial slurs, I thought this was a pretty good tale. Aldo Sax encounters cosmic horrors and goes off the rails. Moore seeded the text with plenty of Lovecraftian references, like The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Horror at Red Hook, Zothique (actually a Clark Ashton Smith), and Randolph Carter.I like the direction Moore is going with this one.The Neonomicon: After visiting Aldo Sax at the sanitarium, Agents Lamper and Brears pick up where he left off and head to Salem.There was some sick stuff in this, much more extreme than Lovecraft but still true to the spirit of the mythos. I had a feeling things would go the way they did with Brears. This one was definitely not for the squeamish.Moore's take on the Cthulhu mythos in Neonomicon makes me anxious to read his next Lovecraftian offering, Providence.