2 out of 5

I’ll save my oft-repeated (within these reviews…) recap of my take on Grant Morrison’s comic writing career to talk about their prose writing: back when I was a giant GM fanboy (around when Grant did their Vertigo trio of Seaguy, We-3, and Vimanarama), I discovered they had a collection of short stories called “Lovely Biscuits,” and was fortunate enough to be gifted a copy.

Being a short story writer m’self, I was encouraged by Grant not having other full length novels to their name, i.e. maybe some of us just prefer the short format. I was also, of course, looking forward to consuming more work by a favorite writer, but I do believe I tempered my expectations: I was never the type to rose-tint-glasses my way through fandom, and I firstly knew there was stuff Grant had written I wasn’t keen on, and secondly recognized that “Biscuits” was an early effort, so I guessed it would be an amusing curio at best, otherwise it’d likely have been talked about more frequently. Even with this mindset in tow, though, I found the collection to be a very difficult read – indulgent, wordy, and overly-descriptive in a way that didn’t actually help me to visualize or be immersed in what was happening. I’m happy, as a collector, to have the thing on my shelf, but I was also adding it to a mental list of things I’d never reread.

With Supergods, Grant’s nonfiction coverage of their hero comics career, I found it to be a good middleground: there’s waffling and bloat, but the book is written to be accessible, and that pays off – it’s an interesting and informative read.

Next in the thin trickle of prose (though I’m certain I’m missing some examples), Grant took over as editor on Heavy Metal, and some years later, had some text short story additions to a few Ahoy books. This helped craft a clearer picture of what was and wasn’t working for me: the HM editorials were near impossible to choke down, just endless smarm and smirking; the Ahoy shorts had some latter-era Morrisson issues (juggling the difficult balance of writing what interests versus writing what the audience expects, or purposefully trying to counter the latter), but were generally amusing.

Later still: Substack. The initial posts I devoured, but as Grant has, I’d guess, gotten a better feel for the platform and their readers, things got more lavish and loquacious, and I dropped off.

In summary: the comic page suits Grant because it is somewhat self-limiting – page count, overall length, and sometimes even the content in terms of censorship or working with others’ IPs. The same seems true for their prose – that a more confining agenda produces, to me, more palatable work. Remove those borders, and, well, Grant doesn’t necessarily seem the best at imposing their own, especially with encouragement from a pretty robust fanbase.

Which is how we end up with their first full-length fiction novel, Luda, and what – again, to me – is a pretty impenetrable dose of overly-referential, smirking and smarmy text. Things are further obfuscated by Grant being Grant and wanting to layer the narrative as stories within stories, and (maybe?) leading things further astray as the book toys with autobiographical influence – though that’s truly just a guess – and makes it impossible to suss out if this is about character, or the story the character is trying to tell, and it winds up not feeling like it’s about either.

One caveat up front: the novel focuses on drag queen Luci Labang’s recounting of a late-career performance in a pantomime production of Aladdin, and the problems that arise – personally, in the play – when she undertakes ingenue Luda as a protege. Luci’s “face” is mostly on for the entire narrative, and Grant stays true to a type of over-the-top tone and the bawdy humor that I’d say is generally found in drag performances… and which I really don’t enjoy. To be a little more clear, it’s the very pun-heavy, sexualized, snippy and gregarious chatter that I’m probably most associating with Drag Race or Dragula, but that I’ve also seen in the few drag shows I’ve attended. And I hope I can convince that it’s not the sex or puns or snippiness separately I don’t / can’t appreciate, it’s just this very particular combo – think John Waters, or Rocky Horror. That style has never much been my bag, and reading a whole book in that format is always going to be distancing.

But then adding to that are the aforementioned issues: Grant loves language, but wields it in an odd way in their prose, referencing hyper-specific cultural concepts and loan-words that are cool if you know ’em, but don’t really add to ones lexicon, i.e. it’s the fancy-pantsed equivalent of someone whose jokes are all just references to other jokes – the joke is not really funny, and not even “creative” so much as evidence of good memory or research. (I don’t mean to open this comparison up, but Alan Moore also got into this habit in his later works, both novels and specifically LXG.) And Morrison’s penchant for telegraphing as a way of emphasizing the cyclical nature of narrative is conceptually doubled-down on (that is – made even more obvious) by framing the whole book as Luci’s retelling of the play she’s in, which has a lot of identity swapping, and audience participation, and, like, familiarity with the story as a way of playing around with it. So she / Grant kinda tells us up front that Luda foretells bad things, and the bad things happen in a very minimized fashion, and by the time we get around to delving into some Whys, I felt like it had mostly already been explained.

These are tricks that Grant better obfuscates in comic form; here, the bluster that hides the telegraphing is represented as too much text, while also printing most of the forthcoming plot details pretty plainly on the page. Like, I can appreciate the metaness, but I didn’t feel like there was anything else besides that – the characters want to be real but are representatives of story concepts; the story of Luci and Luda keeps wanting to happen, but is halved by recounting a play. …All of this with that over-the-top tone.

I do think the writing style gets much better about 3/4ths of the way through, chilling on the faux loquaciousness and allowing for more linearity as we get closer to the end state we’ve already been promised as pretty tragic. I suppose this could also be purposeful, as our narrator is willing to narrate with less artifice as we go along, but it could also be Grant warming up finally, and getting more comfortable with their voice.

But, for me, it was too much of a chore to get there. Certain scenes worked throughout, and it’s not as though I never chuckled at a particularly cutting barb, but Luda just didn’t provide these positives consistently enough, and as a whole, I had trouble finding meaning beyond the presentation: the intentionally overwroughtness of it, almost definitively style over substance.