Somnopolis

Immediately after finishing Jeff Noon’s Falling Out Of Cars, I started on this novel by the brothers Strugatsky. You may have heard their names mentioned in relation to Avatar lately, as some wags have suggested James Cameron ripped off a sequence of novels titled the Noon Universe by the two Soviet era sf authors.

Leaving aside the surname of the previous book’s other making for a neat piece of synchronicity with the Strugatsky’s work, I was also struck that both books are not so much post-apocalypse as much as transapocalyptic – the catastrophes at the centre of both novels are ongoing and humankind has adapted.

Roadside Picnic introduces us to a group of characters who live and work in the town of Harmont, the site of an inexplicable alien ‘Visitation’. The location itself is subject to many strange phenomena, including possible changes to the laws of physics, freak gravitational pressures and the rumoured existence of mutants. Called by locals and the professionals scientists alike The Zone, it is only one of several such places dotting the surface of the Earth. It is theorised that the various Zones resemble the scaring left by bullets striking the edge of a revolving globe.

‘Red’ Schuhart is a Stalker, an illegal smuggler of people and artifacts to and from the Zone. The novel drops in on him at various points of his life detailing his career as one of a dwindling number of old hands willing to risk their lives entering the strange site of the Visitation. Dogged by regrets as to the risks he has run, the danger he has placed clients who have entrusted their lives to him and the potential effects of exposure to any future offspring, Schuhart is a guilt-wracked figure. He is pushed onwards by the need to make a living from his work as a Stalker despite the risks, and also excited by his undeniable talent at surviving the excesses of the Zone.

A rival Stalker known as Buzzard (named for his habit of exiting the Zone alone, with his companions dead or lost) is rumoured to possess an alien artifact known as the Golden Sphere. This eventual McGuffin serves as the object that takes Schuhart on ‘one last job’, in the finest tradition of novels based around criminal activities. The sphere itself is rumoured to grant the wishes of whomever possesses it, which could easily have led to a cop-out ending (”I wish none of this ever happened…”), but thankfully does not. The Strugatskys are aware of the balance that needs to be maintained between the vagueness required for describing the unknowable (the Zone itself being mundane in appearance, but filled with hidden dangers) and an emotional connection to the lives of those affected by these events.

Falling Out Of Cars had its magick mirror and Roadside Picnic its alien artifact that grants wishes. Both serve to motivate the protagonists to keep moving, despite their world becoming too strange to comprehend.  The central mystery of the Visitation remains unclear to the very end, but the Strugatskys hint at a possible cause in the title of the story.

For, as one scientist at the Harmont Research Institute suggests, what if the Zone itself is meaningless? Not the site for an invasion of Earth, or even a staging area for negotiations with a benevolent race that seeks to make humans accustomed to their existence. What if the aliens were merely passing through, like a family on a daytrip on their way to the countryside, who stopped at the side of the road for a picnic and then left plastic wrappers, tin cans, oil leakage and gum in their wake to the confusion of the native animals that eventually came to investigate?

What if life itself is equally unknowable, without meaning or purpose and human civilization has no grand destiny awaiting in the stars, but instead needs to simply look after itself, raise families and strong communities that can withstand the quotidien tragedies and difficulties that make up living?

The Strugatskys’ novel was of course most famously adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, profoundly moving much like his other sf picture Solaris. Tarkovsky largely abandons the text of Roadside Picnic, focusing instead on the nature of the Zone and the relationship of the Stalker to it. He guides two men, each with a hidden agenda, to the heart of the Zone where there is said to be a room that can grant a man’s most deeply held wish. Stripping out most of the novel’s content allows Tarkovsky to concentrate on what he feels is most striking about the novel, using long, unbroken takes to suggest the strangeness of the landscape in the Zone. The three men are unnamed, the Stalker addressing them by their professional roles. They joke, confide and argue just to remind each other why they are risking their lives, or even to hide from what their life to date has amounted to. It’s a strangely beautiful and striking film, that teases with hints of the paranormal, achieving a sense of wonder in a slow, creeping shot of  a pool stagnant water.

No motion-captured, CGI blue people required.

Dylan Dog is the kind of guy I would like to have a beer with. He lists nightmare investigator as his profession. Dawn of the Dead is his idea of a romantic movie. His best friend is a Groucho Marx impersonator who believes he is Groucho! He also lives in a strange alternate London that enjoys a certain Continental atmosphere, where one can order a coffee and croissant in a local bar.

The character was created for the best-selling eponymous Italian comic book series by Tiziano Sclavi and bears an uncanny resemblance to Rupert Everett. Dylan Dog is a horror tale with a difference. Sourcing a bewildering array of material, such as Italian giallo pictures, Romero’s zombie films, even American horror comic anthologies, it wines and dines post-modern tropes years before Grant Morrison’s seminal Animal Man book. Characters frequently resemble movie actors, with Vincent Price and Mickey Rourke also making appearances. An elderly dwarf calls attention to Dylan’s resemblance to Everett, which he politely responds to. Then she suddenly insists he looks nothing like the English actor. I was reminded of the cute moment in Hard Day’s Night between John Lennon and the confused lady backstage.

In keeping with Dylan Dog’s job title, the mood of the book is often dreamlike, with sudden lurches into graphic violence and then relief courtesy of casual absurdity. Groucho, renamed Felix for the Dark Horse English language translation, tends to spout off inane jokes even when surrounded by marauding hordes of the undead. Dylan has a habit of falling head over heels in love at a moment’s notice, risking everything for his latest inamorata, but often complaining of his inability to commit to one woman. Hints are liberally dropped that an oedipal conflict is the cause of his romance problems, but our hero seems happy enough falling in love over and over again. Dylan and Groucho exist in a state of constant poverty. They rarely actually get paid for their work, as more often than not ‘the horror’, manages to find them. A former police officer, Dylan’s one-time superior inspector Bloch is a sympathetic ally who will intercede on his behalf when the law gets involved. Most, however, view the nightmare detective as a fraud and charlatan. It’s the buffoonery involved in the stories that I enjoy most. Groucho is just as likely to quote Camus as make a bad joke. Dylan Dog thankfully neatly avoids pretentiousness by refusing to take itself seriously in any way.

One storyline named Morgana has a beautiful woman arrive in London suffering from amnesia. She feels compelled to seek Dylan Dog out, but almost always just misses him and has no idea who she is looking for. Complaining constantly of extreme hunger she orders food which she does not eat, or pay for. She is also subjected to repeated nightmarish visions of London in ruins, filled with shuffling zombies, which she casually dismisses with a smile each time as just another dream. When they finally meet, Dylan himself drawn to her by some strange compulsion and they travel together in skips and starts as we do in dreams, arriving at a destination moments after having decided to go. Morgana leads Dylan back to her hometown of Undead in Scotland (which I’m fairly sure is not on the map), which also just happens to be the site of a previous adventure of his, Dawn of the Living Dead, were he defeated the devilish Xabaras. Turns out Morgana is yet another of the fiend’s ghouls and possibly a relative of Dylan’s. Xabaras also makes frequent mention of our hero’s absent father. The hints start to drop like anvils. What’s interesting is Xabaras implies Morgana’s resurrection is due to Dylan having been attracted to her after a brief glimpse in the previous adventure. Sure enough, turn back the pages to Dawn of the Living Dead in the Dark Horse collection and there she is, one of the lumbering zombies that pursue Dylan at the conclusion of the adventure.

Morgana is one of the most post-modern of Scalvi’s storylines, an entire plot designed to accuse the reader of being attracted to a panel of art featuring a naked female zombie. Dylan encounters a troubled comic book writer, standing in for Scalvi himself, who is the author of his own series. The author reacts with horror when he sees Morgana in London and later is shown changing the ending to the climactic confrontation between Dylan and Xabaras. Once he has finished with the issue, we see the comic book writer put down his pen and leave his studio, to a London in ruins filled with zombies.

I am not sure if Scalvi found inspiration in Lamberto Bava’s Demons, which is a film about cinema patrons being victimized by the film itself that they are watching, somehow acting as a gateway to evil forces. Morgana is po-mo, but not po-faced, as it has fun with its own version of ‘the medium is the message’. The writer figure is trapped within the same nightmare that he has created. Whether or not Bava is an influence, cinema continues to be a source of material for Scalvi, with Memoirs From The Invisible World riffing on slasher films and Zed seemingly a tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with Dylan encountering a man who sells his services as a guide to a strange, otherworldly realm that lies on the other side of a wall in central London.

It seems that cinema is quite fond of Dylan Dog too, with the upcoming adaptation by Kevin Munroe Dead of Night soon to be released with Brandon Routh in the lead role. Dellamorte Dellamore directed by Michele Soavi will for a while longer at least be considered the definitive cinema version of Scalvi’s character though. Starring Rupert Everett, who apparently was unaware he had been transformed into a comic book character, it tells the tragic story of Francesco Dellamorte, an Italian doppelganger of Dylan Dog’s, who even wears the same clothes. Assigned the ignoble duty of working in the local graveyard, he has also taken it upon himself to eliminate the revenants of the recently deceased, muttering half-heartedly ‘it’s what they pay me to do’. Released to little fanfare in the US as Cemetary Man, Dellamorte Dellamore is one of my favourite films, a true cult classic, which like Scalvi’s other work also borrows from cinematic sources such as George Romero, Dario Argento, and Fellini’s Toby Dammit. When I read that it was related to a comic book series, with the amusing insight that Rupert Everett had been unwittingly cast as the hero, it inspired me to hunt down the original Dylan Dog books.

Which are now lovingly presented for English-speaking readers by Dark Horse in a phone-book sized collected edition, so you have absolutely no excuse not to read them. Dylan Dog – a different kind of horror comic. Just as likely to make you laugh out loud as give you the creeps.