Currently halfway through the first novel in Blake Crouch's series. It's Twin Peaks (and Blue Velvet, a perfect white picket fence with a severed ear at its base) crashing into The Lottery overcome by another wave filled with your every agoraphobic fear fed by that small town out in the middle of nowhere.

 

Road trip. You are forced to stop in this...town? for gas, the only business for miles seems to be the gas station-combo-momandpop diner. The next exits with any recognizable franchises are either miles ahead or behind. The lady behind the counter seems nice enough, and the now-silent customer-companions are watching you with only curiosity...but it suddenly deeply bothers you that it is only you and them for miles and miles, only you, and them, and the humming fluorescent lamps over the slices of the pie of the day...the humming and the blinking...hum and blink and stare...

 

Series order:

1. Pines
2. Wayward
3. The Last Town

The best volume so far. It helps that the art's improved, but I think the big thing is that the trajectory of the story has finally settled. Narratively, it might have been a mistake to plop a huge flashback in the middle of the series, instead of just starting there and working our way forward. Nice cliffhanger at the end.

I have to say this, though: I am so glad that I am getting these through the library. If I had paid $25 for a trade that collects just four issues, I would have been less than pleased. Sure, there's a lot of extras, but those extras could have just as easily been packaged with slightly larger trades.

So little here. Some of it was very compelling, particularly the section about Spike and Fred/Illyria. And Wesley. I would've loved more of that. I would've loved ANY of Angel. I felt pretty cheated that he wasn't present in this book at all.

Some of the artwork is gorgeous, and some of it is kinda hideous. What in the world have they done to Kate? She looks AWFUL. I can't stand to see her in here, and I liked her character in the series.

Overall, my feeling is let down, but I'm hoping it gets a little bit better as it goes.

Volume two dosn't pick up where the first volume left off. Instead, it goes back in the chronology to cover what happened right after the show ended. You know, events that volume one completely skipped over. I'm not complaining about seeing this, since it's the number one reason I picked up After the Fall in the first place. But it would have been nice if this storyline hadn't been inserted in the middle of the ongoing storyline from volume one. It's also irritatingly short, only three issues. I get that this is the complete plotline, but they could've included a few more issues to make the collection a satisfactory length.

So enough griping. The format here is a series of short stories, focused on the individual experiences of almost everybody but Angel the night LA went to hell. Most of the stories are pretty good, though the art varies wildly. It's nice to see what happened here, but I can't help but think that this might have worked better, and possibly been more satisfying, if this had been the first few issues in the series.

VERY well-written, often sad, sometimes grostesque. MM is a fascinating guy, no doubt. (And yes, I'm a fan of his music, I saw him at Ozzfest years ago and it was EPIC. Born entertainer, that's for damn sure.)