(or, the internet hermitage of tyler w. weaver)
Such is my love of the character and penchant for self-inflicted punishment that not only do I now have all issues of the entire 1964 “let’s make The Shadow a blonde no wait black hair is better superhero” Archie series, the last few issues of which were written by Jerry Siegel, but I intend to read them. And maybe write about them.
Still figuring out summer break schedule; expect infrequency and (greater) incoherency.
Better late than never, but I only just stumbled across Mark Evanier’s amazing News From ME blog by way of his “Jack F.A.Q” about Jack Kirby and, as The Fourth World is one of my Kirby obsessions, had to share this bit about where the name originated:
The whole blog is an amazing resource and has been duly added to the RSS reader for daily brainfood.
Current reads; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
After two disappointing releases – WORLD GONE BY and SINCE WE FELL, the former being a forgettable coda to an otherwise unforgettable historical fiction trilogy and the latter a notable though deeply flawed effort at playing outside his usual wheelhouse (I think, at the time, I called it his effort at GONE GIRL – and not in a good way) – Lehane roars back to life with, perhaps, his best work yet, one I will gladly mention in the same breath as MYSTIC RIVER, the masterpiece to which SMALL MERCIES feels like a spiritual successor: after a middling effort at a female protagonist in SINCE WE FELL, Lehane has crafted, in MERCIES's Mary Pat Fennessy, one of his most fascinating protagonists, a "broken and unbreakable" mother on a vengeance-driven suicide run through the mid-70s Southie underbelly ("Marty Butler" standing in for Whitey Bulger) on the eve of the 1974 school desegregation, an uncompromising ripping of the duct-tape bandaid from one of the ugliest, darkest periods in Boston's appalling racist history. A must-read; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.
P.S. While I believe SMALL MERCIES was meant to be a standalone, should Lehane decide to continue the story of Detective Michael "Bobby" Coyne, I'd be beyond thrilled...
