It’s hard to believe that anyone wouldn’t have encountered an Alan Moore work at this point. He’s essentially the crazy wizard grandpa to the comics industry, and his most popular graphic novels, Watchmen and V Vendetta, have become successful movies and tv shows. Personally, he’ll always have a place in my heart as one of the co-creators of the comic book character John Constantine (also with his own movie).
Illuminations is a collection of short stories from Moore, some republished and some previously unseen, and as a collection, it’s are quintessential Moore. We get long, beautiful, flowery descriptions, some weird sexual fixations, and some behind-the-scenes ragging on the comics industry.
While the stories shift in tone and setting, the overarching theme of the collected works is identity. How can we know ourselves? How else could one be? Is our appearance to others our total selves or is there more lurking beneath the surface?
While some of the stories are more compelling than others, I was left thinking about many of the characters after closing the book, which is a mark of great fiction, in my opinion. And as a lover of the short story genre, I appreciate the variation that Moore presents in this collection. While expanding on the same essential concept, he finds many ways to frame and explore identity from many different angles, leaving the reader to ask deeper questions about what one can know about even one’s own self.
This was my first Alan More long-form fiction, and it left me excited to try some of his other works. His Jerusalem trilogy is already waiting on the shelf.