Alan Moore's Neonomicon

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Women in Lovecraft’s fiction are never suggested to have been raped unless the act results in a child. Poe frightens without the contemporary potty mouth and by leaving more of the gruesomeness to the imagination, he's not about Chainsaw Massacre bloodshed, and this tale, and Lovecraft tales in general (I am thinking of Joe Hill's work, too, in Locke and Key, with Gabriel Rodriguez's visually scary artwork).

It's embarrassingly cliche to pit the young outcasts as evil cultists, and is part of why I found Issue 1 so unlikable. Wow, this is a book about a woman who struggles with sex addiction being locked in a room and sexually assaulted by a monster over the course of a week, which solves all her problems. After reading Neonomicon, I began to look back on all the Alan Moore I've read and how much rape as plot device or rape as threat to female character is used. Although I would like to say it left me wanting more of the cosmic horror, sadly, it left me simply glad to close its covers.

Here, following up from The Courtyard, two FBI Agents (one of them a former Sex Addict, something that is brought up again and again but yet I find little to no reason for it to be there, it feels like a simple one-line description of a character, no depth, no 3rd dimension, that's all she ever is) find themselves investigating a Lovecraft-Inspired Sex Cult. Like most of Moore’s recent comics, Neonomicon is him cramming in as many literary references as he can around a weak plot. and the dialogue by the cheerful rapists is rather brilliant: banal, chatty, blasé, even friendly and supportive at times - all of that contributes powerfully to the pure horror of the situation. DIALOGUE: This could be the one place the volume felt lackluster when compared to the masterful writing of Watchmen and excellent dialogue in Swamp Thing, but it is my belief, that Moore’s writing and thus, his more restrained character dialogue is intentionally understated here.

I wouldn’t recommend the book though; besides being ploddingly paced, overly long and dull to read, it leaves an unpleasant taste behind once you’ve read it, akin to walking into a bathroom after someone’s taken an epic shit and getting the smell full on. They’re beyond punk or Goth, singing songs that starts in freeform descriptions of violence and swerve part way through a (very long) song into a string of alien names which we know (because we’ve read Lovecraft) but the agent doesn’t are names of entities in the Chulthu myth. Warning to my friends reading this review: I did "like" this as I thought it was well executed, but. Alan Moore’s Neonomicon is a follow up to his earlier work, The Courtyard, which is included in this trade edition. It’s impressive how Neonomicon continued the Lovecraftian mythos canon in an almost perfect, and nearly meta way, reinterpreting the original works into a modern context while remaining true to the spirit of Lovecraft’s original stories.Moore does manage to score a few points in the end with his own interpretation on Lovecraft’s stories but they don’t make reading the preceding comic feel worth it.