To Hell and Back

I finished Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell's deeply impressive From Hell this evening, after a deliberate effort to spin my first reading out for as long as possible. The final chapters were particularly strong, and it was refreshing to get some distance away from the murders. But then I suppose anything set outside that room in Chapter 10 in which poor Marie Kelly is carved up would come as a relief. I don't think I want to go in there again; not soon anyway.

Gull's trip through time in Chapter 13 had great hallucinatory power, and the connection with Blake touched upon genius. The treatment of the Montague Druitt story turned out to be affecting in a way I could never have predicted. Moore got inside the names, the places and events and made them true through deliberate fiction-making The whole thing just works!.