Booklist Review

As Paradise Lost makes plain, Lucifer's expulsion from heaven didn't end the war of good and evil, which gives comics writer Harris license to envision a nearly full eruption of it in 1938 in his first graphic novel, here reprinted a decade after its original publication. The conflict's leading human agents are twentieth-century British novelist Charles Williams for God and notorious occultist Aleister Crowley for Satan, with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and older occultist Arthur E. Waite also involved. Both Williams and Crowley move mystically through time as they converge on a gateway to heaven that the Knights Templar spirited from the Holy Land to Rennes-le-Chateau, France. Readers of The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Crowley devotees will recognize that French village, and they, along with those who have never heard of it before, including the huge fandoms of Lewis and Tolkien, will probably greatly enjoy Harris' outre concoction, which he helpfully annotates in a 14-page appendix. Gaydos' black-and-white artwork, while crying out for color when its smaller details look like clumps of straw, is handsome and appropriate.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2014 Booklist