(To be featured on a future episode of Reading in Bed, the Book Review Podcast)
Blurb:
Leepus lives in Inglund.
He likes to think he does some good there.
But everything's relative.
Leepus: DIZZY fires its eponymous loose-cannon into a wild landscape of dystopian wonders and dark intrigue whose inhabitants enjoy bleak humour, habitual scatologuy and occasional savage violence.
Spiked with psychotropics in a charity poka game, Leepus wobbles home to his fortified water-tower to find carnage on his doorstep. Before he can get his head straight he's overtaken by full-tilt mayhem.
Strengths / Weakness:
I first became aware of Jamie Delano’s work a long time ago with the cult comic from DC / Vertigo: John Constantine: Hellblazer which he was a perfect fit to write about a jaded, barbed working class magician.
Since then, he has also wrote Batman: Man-Bat, An extended run on Animal Man and Captain Britain alongside some series he has created such as Outlaw Nation, 2020 Vision and World without End to name but a few. All Fantastic. All Weird. All incredibly wrote.
Leepus: DIZZY is something else altogether and after finishing I am still not 100% sure what to make off it.
Originally published in 2014, Leepus: DIZZY is a dizzying mindf&&k of language described by Stuart Moore as ““Trippy, thought-provoking, and well worth your time.”
The book begans with “BludKlash coming on.
At one end of the dripping underpass – four silent Burkababes with horror dogs on chains. A cohort of Hateboyz at the other looking for frontation.
Caught out in the killzone. Heed the need to fade.
One veiled sister giggles weird – slips leash from playful puppy. The dog fast and loose. Boncing muscle. Snot foestoons. A shrunk-down snorting bull.
Sidestep swift. Veronica into shadow”
Well, it’s not exactly the most accesible start to a book but knowing what Delano has done in previous work, it’s not a surprise.
But is it any good? Well, it’s not Hellblazer for me by any stretch of thought although the sense of menace is still there and the mysteries and the tragedy that haunted John also.
Leepus is his own man of course – a old fashioned detective in a post apoclayptic alternative world which certainly made me think of William Gibson definitely but also Welsh’s Trainspotting with a directness that I found most accessible when reading it out from the book.
Of course, like with Welsh’s Trainspotting trying to do this on a bus or train is a problem owning to the bad language which nearly resulted in me getting kicked off and wisely sticking to reading it at home.
Did I enjoy it? I am not sure I did in hindsight as the book didn’t get much more accessible after that and I have to be honest pulled a bit of a slog to get through.
I wanted to enjoy it, I really, really did but I couldn’t get to grips with it atall and sadly ended up dropping it with 100 pages to go.
6/10
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