While watching the TV series Lucifer on TV as I got the Season one DVD. I thought it is time to talk about books on Lucifer.

I like books about Lucifer. The freedom fighter, the character that respect freedom.

Yes. I like Neil Gaiman Sandman version of Lucifer. 

The Master and Margarita is one of the best book I read.

I also like Palanuik version of the devil being the bad guy.

Lucifer fight the dictator and want freedom. As a freedom fighter version, Lucifer is an activist and wonderful. 

It is the dictator, mass murdering god character is the really bad guy. 

THE SANDMAN: OVERTURE written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by J. H. Williams III and Dave Stewart, is both the first and last story of Dream of the Endless. The story is set before the first part of the Sandman saga, THE SANDMAN: PRELUDES AND NOCTURNES, and explains the series of events that lead to that book’s beginning.

I don’t often review comics, but as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga is one of my favourites when I came across the deluxe hardcover edition, which is a bind-up of the six original issues, I couldn’t resist. This book is as beautiful, and complex, and alive as I have come to expect from all the bind-ups of the Sandman Saga.

OVERTURE is a beautifully crafted book. The illustrations are brilliantly rendered, and Williams and Stewart really bring Gaiman’s world alive on the page. There are some exquisite pieces; there are some beautiful illustrations by Williams, and some sublime colours by Stewart.

OVERTURE is Gaiman at his best. The story is brilliantly crafted, and it keeps you turning the page desperate to know what happens next. Dream of the Endless is one of my favourite characters written by Gaiman, and I think OVERTURE is both a brilliant beginning and ending to his story. The plot itself is beautifully complex and well thought.

If you are a fan of Gaiman’s writing, then you will surely enjoy this. OVERTURE is both an introduction and a conclusion to a brilliant, complex, very real world. Don’t be afraid to give it a try if you’ve never read comics before, if you’re a Gaiman fan then you won’t be disappointed. If you’ve never read any of Gaiman’s work before then this series is a good place to start.

Originally posted on The Flutterby Room.

This is the fourth book by Neil Gaiman I read and I'm seeing a pattern in his books more and more. Which is good, because it's the first book of his I'm reviewing*.

The Graveyard Book starts with a very evocative first scene, of the murder by the man Jack of an unsuspecting family. The description gave me goosebumps of pleasure, and it was a murder scene, for a children's story, for heaven's sake.

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

 

 

"The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of night-time mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door."

 

The story is not about the man Jack, though, it is about the baby who escaped death by luck (I feel a urge to snort at the déjà-vu of this) and by some sense of adventure that involved stairs and a dirty nappy. Somehow the baby finds his way to a graveyard, with a murderer on his trail as soon as the man Jack realises his target has gone taking a midnight stroll.

In the graveyard, the baby boy meets ghosts. Long story short, they take a liking to the toddler, and there's a debate all night long  between the ghost community to decide if they are going to keep him or not, while to Mrs Owens, the honorable dead lady who found him, it's already quite clear that she's going to be a mother, and Mr Owens a father, to the living baby.

Then there's Silas. Mysterious, taciturn, composed Silas, who is not a ghost and is able to leave the graveyard, and to trick a man Jack. 

He did not expect what he actually heard, a voice, silky, smooth, saying :

'Can I help you ?'

The man Jack was tall. This man was taller. The man Jack wore dark clothes. This man's clothes were darker. People who noticed the man Jack when he went about his business - and he did not like to be noticed - were troubled, or made uncomfortable, or found themselves unaccountably scared. The man Jack looked at the stranger, and it was the man Jack who was troubled.

If the Owenses are to be the baby's surrogate parents, Silas is going to be his guardian.

And so it is that Nobody 'Bod' Owens' strange life begins.

The development in this one is slow. Following the prologue, my assumption was that we'd meet Bod all grown up into his teens, same as he looks on the cover. Wrong. The summary doesn't hint at this detail, so I thought I should make it clear to anyone expecting a fast pace. You get it, but not till the last third of the book.

The same thing happened for me with Stardust and had me wrong-footed. This time on the contrary, I was familiar enough with the idea that it might happen to enjoy my read anyway.

So what happens instead ? We share Bod's life from childhood to his fifteens, with experiences that don't always look like they contribute to the plot at first, while they actually do, as you discover later on. See, the boy isn't allowed to leave the graveyard, for there are bad things out there, bad things like his family's murderer, who would be able to find him if he ventured out. Being the only living person in a place full of the dead and of Silas (who is neither dead nor living, and not that much of an exuberant man anyway) can be quite lonely for a little boy, so Bod basically asks questions, tries to make friends, and occasionnaly gets in trouble.

Meanwhile, time is ticking, and a man Jack is getting impatient.

Here's for the plot. Let's keep it there and have a look at some good and bad points instead.

The setting is both good and bad to me. Good, because of the originality of making the graveyard the core of a children's story and because I happen to like the creepy factor (I'm a Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline type of person, I like creepy elements delivering a mildly happy message. Mindless gore on the other hand ? Not my thing). Bad, because there isn't enough creepiness for my taste. The ghosts are relatively harmless busybodies, when they're not doing some haunting, and more often than not their mood-swings could do with a therapist.

This leads me to two other good points : Firstly, some of the characters. This is mostly subjective on my part, but I find some characters hold more depht than others. I particularly like Silas, the witch Liza Hempstock, Scarlett, and Jay Frost. Frost's stumbling and stammering is fun to read and something I can relate with. Silas...hnn, Silas, he's a good example of an authority figure who is both stern and friendly. I love Silas.

Secondly, the haunting hobbies, which, and this is the good part, are not solely limited to the ghosts. Thanks to his rather peculiar status, Bod gets to learn the Fade, the Fear, and whatnot. They are as much fun as they sound, and they get in handy (see the getting in trouble part).

I actually quite like Bod in the last part of the book, when he sounds less like a child throwing a tantrum and more like a groying boy - teen, whatever - who is starting to use his brain and even shows a nasty streak,but it's toward baddies and they're no better themselves, so that evens things out.

But. There's a but, yes. See...the backstory is very sloppy. Too sloppy, and I expected more from an established author like Neil Gaiman. I don't know how to say this without spoilers. Okay, so side-characters get up to a battle/hunt/something against the baddies which feels like it's somehow very important and should be the moment when the hero normally save the day but, nope. They do all the work, may or may be an organization of Good Guys fighting the Bad Guys since way too many centuries for it to be decent anymore, may or may not die in the process, but we don't know what actually happens because what little we glimpse of the action is screened off. And we don't know who half these guys are. It involves a winged Assyrian-mummy carrying a pig around somehow. I don't know, okay.

It being a kids' book doesn't excuse the huge plot hole. Mr. Gaiman knows this, Coraline is an all-around quite decent story in that regard. So, why does this happen here ? I don't know. But that's why I can say that I appreciated the book despite the slow pace, but that it isn't a great story, not for me.

So, creative, whimsy story, some good character development, some less good characther development, slow-paced, could be scarier, sloppy backstory.

One last thing : Poets are crap at giving advice. If a poet advises you do something, keep calm and do the opposite.

* Little white lie : I reviewed Stardust on GR a few months ago when I'd just discovered you could do this, and back then I wasn't sure how to review at all. I gave my opinion on the book, but there were several things I could have analysed or pointed out that I did not.

Honest disclaimer? Skottie Young's art is the only reason I bought this. He's the only reason I'm giving this book stars.

This is a short quick read that doesn't quite seem to know its target market. Certainly, it's packaged like a children's book, with Skottie Young's wonderful illustrations and many fantastical situations that the protagonist finds himself in. Yet sometimes, the characters would make comments that would be completely lost on children, Gaiman's little nudge-nudge wink-wink to the older audiences he probably knew would buy the book because his name was on the cover.

Which isn't bad in of itself, but the treatment was slapdash. Adventure Time does a better job with its smooth and completely natural injections of adult humor. I wonder if Gaiman tested this story with actual children.

Still the story was solid enough. You can't quite go wrong with time travelling dinosaurs.

More often than I would have liked -- the whimsicality of the plot seemed too forced. I don't mean to be cynical, but even a child would have scoffed at some of the things that happened here. I've read children's books to children and the experience taught me that we tend to underestimate how rational they can be about certain things.

I don't understand why this book fell flat -- Neil Gaiman did such a splendid job with Coraline at not talking down to his audience. Why couldn't he have done the same with Fortunately, the Milk?

Thank god Skottie Young continuously saved the day with his art. Most of the time I spent drinking up every line and stroke of his drawings and the magnificently comic way he illustrates the most fanciful of creatures. If anything, I hope this book at least opens up plenty of projects for him in the future, because the world needs more Skottie Young.