BOOK REVIEW - Bone

Bone:

The Complete Cartoon Epic in 1 volume

Cartoon Books Publishing

Jeff Smith

Bone is a sprawling comedic fantasy comic with many darker elements. It was serialized from 1991 - 2004, but also came out as a single (and fairly inexpensive) volume soon after the final installment was released. From the initial description, Bone seemed like a kind of book I would dislike - I'm not a fantasy fan in the least, I usually don't like comics or graphic novels (with a few notable exceptions), and a dark, comic fantasy sounded exactly like something I'd want to avoid.

But when it made a lot of peoples "best books of the decade" list, and even more "top 10 graphic novels of all time", I thought it'd be worth a look. It opens on three very cartoony cousins fleeing from Boneville after "Phoney" Bone pulled a big scam and gets them run out of town. They get separated and lost in the desert, and end up in different locations around a forest with very normal-looking humans and animals. Sure the animals talk, but the new locale is far more mundane-seeming than the Bone cousins.

The story progresses a bit slowly at first, but is still highly engrossing from the get-go. After a comedic race, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. It took me a little while to get to this point, but once it I did my free time was completely devoted to reading Bone. The highly stylized characters, and the fact that EVERY character provides comedic relief to the dark script, makes it a very quick, very entertaining read. The plot draws heavily from the other fantasy plots, but there are enough twists to make it fresh.

Alright, screw it. I can analyze this book to death. The point is, it's good. It's fairly cheap for being almost 1400 pages, and it's a quick read. Took me 3 days. It's basically Jeff Smith's life work, and it shows. Bone is extremely well done, and you should read it if it at all sounds interesting to you.

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BOOK REVIEW - The Devil in the White City

I figured I should read it before they make the movie -

The Devil in the White City:
Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
2003, Crown Publishers
By Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City is the non-fiction historical story of the creators and forces behind the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett (a.k.a. Dr. H. H. Holmes). The book is written in an engaging, narrator-based manner that makes it seem like a novel based upon these characters (and Larson does take the time to build each person as a character rather than a static member of the past).

The book is broken up into several sections based on the timelines they encapsulate, but there are only two clear stylistic sections. The first (and the majority of the writing) and is a split-story that follows the development, building, and running of the World’s Fair, while also coving the simultaneous exploits and acts of Mudgett. Larson excels here at capturing the personas of the people he writes about, transforming this historical work into a character-driving drama that travels along several threads at the same time. I was struck how closely this section mirrored the style and tone of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006), and Larson’s similar ability to tie together these seemingly disparate stories about people who never actually meet (except for a one bloody exception involving some of the smaller ‘cast’ members).

The second major stylistic area occurs after the World Fair, as a detective trying to track down the evidence necessary to convict Mudgett as the monstrous killer he was. This section flows like a Dragnet-esque detective novel, and succeeds in driving home how completely foreign the nature of these crimes were to the 1890’s mindset, a time when Jack the Ripper was the only true serial killer the public had encountered.

Overall the book is an excellent and fairly quick read - it is easily in my top 10 of the last decade. With a film to come out next year, if you haven’t read (or listened to the audio version), it should definitely be on your list from this winter.

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