Library Journal Review

A mysterious writer works feverishly inside a gloomy, haunted mansion to create his eldritch masterpiece-an original novel. Amid the flashing lightning, looming butlers, aunts chained in the attic, and deadly dynastic duels, the author can't get around a basic insurmountable problem that prevents him from completing the work: whenever he attempts to write about the realistic life around him, like cursed brides and supernatural forces, he feels that it is dull and hackneyed and thus loses control of his narrative. A furtive idea begins to formulate in the gothic cathedral of his mind as he struggles against all his learned notions about good fiction. Could he, perhaps, write something in a more fanciful setting? Oakley's sterling adaption of this classic Gaiman short story gives vast visual vitality to this lighthearted yet illuminative meditation on why creative storytellers write fantasy and what gives it meaning beyond the charge of mere escapism. The sumptuous, masterly choreographed art portrays convincingly both the midnight world of the author and his fiction. Verdict Gaiman fans will find all the hallmarks of the gifted fantasist brought to life by Oakley, with colorist Nick Filardi and letterist Todd Klein, and will likely stay up late reading this in their own moonlit castles.-Douglas Rednour, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.