Legendary graphic novelist Moore (Watchmen) further burnishes his reputation in his first prose collection, which features nine career-spanning tales. The stand-out short novel, "What We Can Know About Thunderman," is a scathing take on the American comic book industry and its impact on popular culture and politics, and will undoubtedly attract the most attention, given Moore's history with the genre. In it, Moore imagines a reality in which thinly disguised versions of characters like Superman have grown so grim that "everybody had decided that comics weren't just for kids, then that they weren't for kids at all"--and now their audience is on the verge of dying off. It gets so bad that comics writer Dan Wheems decides that unless he escapes the industry, he will be reduced to "a quickly understood cartoon, the way it did with everything and everybody." Moore's subversive talent is equally on display in the shorter tales: "Not Even Legend" follows a group of paranormal investigators who eschew ghost hunting to instead study "things that nobody had ever said existed in the first place," while the cynical psychic protagonist of "Cold Reading" justifies his work as a "spiritual sugar pill." The superhero genre's loss is fantastic fiction's gain. (Oct.)

For the first time in his four-decade career, the Hugo Award-winning Moore (Watchmen) publishes a short story collection. The characters range from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to theoretical Boltzmann brains dreaming up the universe at the big bang, and a big novella covers the twisty history of the comics industry. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Famed author Moore, known for comics like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Batman: The Killing Joke, the novel Jerusalem (2016), and much more, is out now with a collection of short fiction, much of it recent and previously unpublished. In "Not Even Legend," a dark, time-traveling creature infiltrates a group of amateur paranormal enthusiasts. In the intensely charming "Location, Location, Location," a realtor named Angie--who happens to be the last person on Earth after the Rapture hit and Apocalypse began--shows a house to Jesus, who likes Killing Eve and encourages her to call him Jez. Readers might be surprised to stumble on a 240-page novella in a collection of short fiction, but the good news is that "What We Can Know about Thunderman" is an epic, darkly humorous spin on the history of comics, full of secrets, riveting feuds, reluctant friendships, and exploitative contracts, portrayed through interviews, chat rooms, recordings, and more. Moore's dark humor and expert twists are on full display in these fictions. Fans of dark fantasy and dark humor will enjoy this collection from one of fantasy's greats.

The first short story collection from the author of several iconic graphic novels and comic-book series. When a comic-book writer switches to prose only, they might have trouble conjuring the fleshed-out descriptions usually provided by pictures. But Moore, creator of such legendary graphic works as Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has never had this problem. His works typically include several picture-light text extracts, and if Moore's debut novel--the sprawling Jerusalem (2016)--is anything to go by, the difficulty is getting him to stop his flow of words. One might hope, then, that the restrictive length of a short story would provide some necessary structure. This collection definitely includes some tight, clever, and vivid entries, including "Not Even Legend," about a cabal of mythological creatures prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that ordinary humans never get a hint of their existence; "Hypothetical Lizard," which chronicles a brothel worker's nasty revenge on his former lover; "Location, Location, Location," concerning a real estate agent officially signing over a house to Jesus after the Rapture; and "And, at the Last, Just To Be Done With Silence," a creepy tale of madness-inducing penance in the late 12th century. The title story, in which a man longs to recapture his youth, and "Cold Reading," which features a successful fake medium who learns the perils of disbelief, have an entertaining if slightly derivative Twilight Zone vibe. But Moore goes off the rails with "What We Can Know About Thunderman," the book's longest work, taking up fully half the pages. It's a self-indulgently savage lampoon of the comic-book industry, wandering over several decades, taking the occasional clever potshot, very occasionally affirming the way that comic books and comic-book conventions can bring lonely nerds together, and frequently veering into the grotesque, petty, and bizarre. The story never has any clear destination other than to suggest that the industry is a cesspool that's impossible to escape in any clean way. The well-informed reader will infer that Moore is still extremely angry at DC for a number of intellectual property issues, remains upset with the way Warner Brothers adapted his works for film, and isn't exactly happy with Marvel, either. A mixed bag with a misshapen boulder in it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.