Book Review – The Devil You Know
Author: Mike Carey
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: June 2008
Many book authors make their way over to comics. It may seem like a sensible idea since it’s just another medium and another way to tell a story. However, with comics you generally only have 22 pages to tell a story, while in a book you can have as many as you want. Authors such as Tad Williams, Jodi Picoult, Brad Meltzer, and Charlie Huston try to bring along the wonderful charm they have as book authors to the comic book medium. Many fail miserably, producing such terrible and tripe fluff that catastrophically nearly kill entire character story arcs. Ultimately things become so bad that fans just want to forget these authors ever wrote comics in the first place (Picoult’s Wonder Woman run is the stuff of legends it’s so bad and Tad Williams Aquaman has prompted the published to stop publishing the comic, and for better or worse, I don’t even want to get into what the DC universe looks like post Meltzer).
However, comic authors rarely make the jump to book authors. It’s a totally different beast and what works for the X-Men may not work for a whole new world with dwindling readers in altogether competitive book market. Some succeed (such as Warren Ellis, Mike Mignolia, and Greg Rucka), while others tragically fail or churn out the lowest of mediocre fare. Mike Carey falls in the group that shouldn’t quit their day job. His comics have always been heavily dialogue driven (his Lucifer comics have Lucifer running a Night Club and talking about feelings most of the time. Doesn’t sound exciting? Well somehow, it truly is). However, what has charm in the comic form may also seem derivative and drawn out in the book form. What usually took Carey a page in comics and roughly 1-minute to read, now takes dozens to hundreds of pages and hours to read. Since books don’t contain paneled art, the author must use his words to describe the setting. This is where Mike Carey really shows his weakness. While his world in The Devil You Know is enjoyable, he tends to explain things slowly and only partly presenting a fractured world view that at times doesn’t seem all that interesting. This is a 500+ page book that could have really been 300 pages.
Here’s the line: Carey’s Felix Castor is an Exorcist living in a world where ghosts can be seen by most people and are generally non-plused about things. However there are times when they get out of hand and people like Felix are called in. For reasons all his own, Felix has got out of the Exorcist game and is trying to lead a normal life. But in the immortal words of Pacino in Godfather 2, “everytime I try to get out, they pull me back in.” Succubi, haunted ghosts, strip joints, zombie’s who are tech savy, and demons who just don’t like music run abound. What’s a regular shlub who’s broke and making ends meat supposed to do? Have sex with a succubus? That’s right!
Mike Carey is quite the eponymous writer. Mainstream wise he is best known for his work on the X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four published by Marvel. However, comic fans know him best for his Eisner nominated Lucifer, Hellblazer and Crossing Midnight, all published by DC. Lucifer is also important because it proved that DC’s Vertigo imprint still had life post Sandman. I chance to go as far as to say that without Lucifer and Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets, Vertigo comics may not even exist anymore. What does this all mean? I just wanted to put his work into context since The Devil You Know may turn you off of following any of his other work. His novel work = poor. His comic work = timeless. An overstatement? Perhaps. But true? Oh yeah.
I should state that I have an unabashed love for Carey’s comic work. He is also a charming and gracious person who took the time to have a smoke with me as we talked books one rainy day in NY. With that said, The Devil You Know is only a decent book at best and a poor book by Mike Carey standards. So I can only recommend this with heavy reservations. The reservations being that if you aren’t a Mike Carey fan, you may enjoy this a lot more than I did. But as for me, I really didn’t care much for this overlong work and am hesitant to enter Felix Castor’s world again with Carey’s upcoming releases. Hmm, but the ending does have me somewhat enticed.
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