Fell, Vol. 1: “Feral City” by Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Ben Templesmith

You can thank my local crack dealer for this one. Well, not really a crack dealer, he sells comics. Comics have become my new little addiction and it can give me the same zone out brainspace I usually can only achieve with stupid movies or sci-fi television. Anyway, I was in the local comic store when I spotted Fell issue 8 and picked it up. I was standing there, all bummed that I had missed out on the early issue of this series when the comic store guy hands me this volume of the first eight stories all so sweetly bound in a hardcopy edition. That guy is so evil.

Fell is about Detective Richard Fell who has been transferred to the bad side of the river for reasons that have yet to be determined. Snowtown is the demon child of urban decay. It is a city in fear; crime is so rampant that the police force has little effect to stamp it out. Most crimes go unreported and the ones that do, go mostly unsolved. Criminals are not afraid of the police as they are understaffed, burned out, and generally insane in some fashion. It is sort of like Gotham City but without the superheroes to get in the way. The only monsters in this story are the human ones. Fell is a good detective who can talk a bomber out of blowing up a building or get a confession out of someone who knows that they don’t have any evidence to convict. He uses logic to create order out of a world that only knows chaos. It all your favourite crime dramas and film noirs and urban decay stories all rolled up into one.

The art in this series deserves a paragraph all of its own. I could spend hours just absorbing the artwork of Ben Templesmith. There no smooth lines or perfect glossy finishes in this book. The lines have a frenetic energy that tell you that this is not a simple, colouring inside the lines, type of world. It is dirty, it is messy, and very human in its lowest form. The boy has talent.

All I can say is that I think this is the best series I’ve read since Sandman sucked me into this medium. It is the type that wants you to tell all your friends about it and make them read it just so that you can have someone to share it with. It is the type that makes you want to devour each chapter but also, you force yourself to enjoy it slowly because you know that once you finish the eighth chapter, you won’t have anymore until they print volume two. There better be a second volume.

A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli

Guest review by Red Bonney

It's a dark, wet, rancid book. It's about the dangers of certain people reproducing when they clearly should have been yanked out of the gene pool by the life guard. It's a good book. Reading it was like being sucked down into a gator infested swamp: you get that sinking feeling, but you know you'll be eaten before you drown, and all around you is the earthy smell of the bog. There was a story line, I'm sure of it. I think it was hidden between the random bouts of underage, extra-marital sex, that may or may not have been the hallucinatory dreams of our reluctant hero, Thomas. There was lots of writing on walls and on skin and some of it made sense. Most of it did not.

Thomas has three brothers in one. Sebastian, Jonah and Cole are conjoined triplets, joined at the cranium. They also have a sister, but she was nearly completely absorbed by Thomas when they were still in the womb. This goes back to the theory that some people shouldn't reproduce, namely, the entire list of characters in the book. It was difficult to find a normal character, and I would have to say it was Thomas, though he turned out to be a sex fiend with a penchant for younger partners. The Reverend Bibbler would be next, but his name alone strikes him off the
normal list.

So, Thomas was the reluctant hero, as I said, and very reluctant. He was the town's magnate, so to speak, the wealthiest man in town, who owns the mill that makes the town live. He lives in the most haunted house with his brothers and their care giver, Dodi, who is also their lover and was installed by the local conjure woman, Velma Coots, to keep an eye on them. Velma, I believe, should have gotten more page time. That's another moral hidden in these pages, always listen to the local conjure woman, she knows what she's talking about.

In a nutshell, this book was a lot like real life in that there were a lot of unexplained and unexplainable events, a lot of questions and not enough answers. Conversely, it was nothing at all like real life, with the ghosts and all-consuming evil threatening on the horizon. I can't tell you what the book was really about, it's a mystery and a horror and a romance (a sick, twisted, fucked up romance, but a romance nonetheless) and nothing was explicit.

I hope you are as confused as I am about this book now. You should read it and tell me what it was about.