Book Review | The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?

What if you're like Mikey, who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school—again. 

And what if there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life? Even if your best friend might just be the God of mountain lions...

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In the suggestive sentence attached to the first chapter of The Rest of Us Just Live Here, "the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate." (p.9)

The world is ending again, evidently. But never mind the Messenger—the impending apocalypse its presence heralds is not the point of Patrick Ness' latest revelation. There are indeed dark times ahead for the friends of indie kid Finn—this Immortals nonsense will lead to any number of melodramatic deaths—but the household heroes of The Rest of Us Just Live Here are safely outside of said circle.

That's not to say their days lack drama, or tragedy, but like you and me, reader, rather than the saviours at the centre of so many Chosen One stories, just living keeps them plenty busy.

We yearn the same, wish the same. We're just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else. And even if there's no one in my family or my circle of friends who's going to be the Chosen One or the Beacon of Peace or whatever the hell it's going to be next time around, I reckon there are a lot more people like me than there are indie kids with unusual names and capital-D Destinies. (p.35)

"Your humble narrator" (p.55) Mikey Mitchell has hit the nail on the head, here, and the notion that normal is not the same as insignificant informs every last aspect of the new novel from the mind behind A Monster Calls.

Comic Book Review | Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight Vol. 1 - The Long Way Home

Some among you may recall that I went cold turkey on comic books for a good long while there. Among the many and various reasons I came back to the fold, with my tail between my legs, yes: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight. Which is to say the continuation of the television series that pretty much made my teenage years.

I adored Buffy all those bygone days ago, and my passion for it, half a lifetime on, remains largely unfettered. I love the series still... though I'll admit I've not dared to rewatch it since its misfiring final season aired in 2003. What if the (arguably) more adult me thinks it ridiculous, in retrospect? What then?

That's an eventuality I needn't fear for the moment, because I have Season Eight to take me back. And what a terrific trip down memory lane it is!

The Long Way Home picks up a year on from the events of season seven of the series in its original iteration. Buffy Summers has raised an army, and having quite exploded Sunnydale and its surrounding area, she and the surviving Scoobies - so Xander with an eye-patch, and Willow and Giles, though they've both AWOL at the outset - have taken up residence in a citadel in Scotland, the better to train their legions of baby slayers in peace and quiet. Or so they hope.

Oh, and Dawn - Buffy's little sister - is a giant. So not so little any longer.

This first collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight, which ran for forty issues between 2007 and 2011, contains two stories, one short and one long; Joss Whedon writes both. The longer of the two stories - that is the titular tale, "The Long Way Home" - serves to demonstrate that here in the Buffyverse, it's business as usual. Familiar old enemies return, if only to be handily dispatched by this older and in many senses wiser ensemble of idiots as Whedon refamiliarises his reader with the way things are.

And that isn't to do a disservice to the way things were. The Long Way Home is very faithful to the television series in that sense. The experience of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is intermittently thrilling and winningly quick-witted: it's fresh, funny, exciting, and good to look at, too... as ever, except now we've the art of Georges Jeanty to thank for that. I should say his pencils are a little too rounded for my tastes - all soft curves with nary an angle in sight - but he does the Scoobies real good, all growed-up as they are now, and frankly that's what matters.

The only issue I'd raised with regards to this fantastic first installment of Buffy the Vampire: Season Eight is that it relies perhaps a little too heavily on the reader. Evidently the author assumes readers will have a detailed knowledge of the littlest things in the Buffyverse as it was, and though I am, as aforementioned, a dyed-in-the-wool devotee of Whedon's wonderful worlds, and this one in particular, it's been a while, and several story points - not to mention one of the little big bads who kicks off in the introductory arc - completely passed me by. So it goes without saying that complete newcomers need not even apply. 

Then again, I have an awful memory, a quick look at the Wikipedia page wouldn't have been such a horrendous hardship, and once I'd gotten back into the swing of things... well, The Long Way Home felt to me a lot like coming home.

Besides the fact that this show I adore is now a comic book I can learn to love all over again, the best thing about Buffy the Vampire: Season Eight is evidenced in the last story of this first collection. In "The Chain" - penciled by Paul Lee, who did fill-ins on Conan - Whedon is belatedly, brilliantly unbound. Able now to focus on characters other than the staples who make up the central cast, he explores the life and times of a potential new to the canon: an impromptu Buffy body double, not long for this world if certain dastardly dark forces have it their way. "The Chain" might be the most impressive single issue of any comic book I've read all year.

With such incredible new avenues for the series to explore, as it surely should, and Whedon in fine form - and moreover seemingly in control of where Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight goes, now that it needn't be about the same old Scoobies year in and year out - The Long Way Home makes for a fantastic start to an alarmingly smart comic book based on an alarmingly smart television series. 

Welcome home, folks!

Karmic Chameleons

So I've got good news, and bad news.

Shall we get the bad juju out of the way first? We shall. That way we can end on a high. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is --- oh, I can hardly bear to say it... it's coming back.

Maybe.

Sadly, if and when it does - and sickeningly there seems to be something of an appetite for some sort of reboot (if not necessarily the one that's been mooted about the interwebs this past fortnight or so) - everyone's favourite vampire slayer will be returning short ANYONE who had ANYTHING to do with the original, touchstone series.

Kristy Swanson - what was Buffy in the dodgy movie, remember her now? - seems to be the only voice in support of this filth. Someone been out of work a little too long, maybe? Well, take a hike, Kristy Swanson! You keep out of this, you hear?

Anyway, io9 had the story originally, cobbled together from a press release issued on November 11th. Apparently Whit Anderson, who if you'll pardon the play on words we know not one whit about - not even an IMDB page, would you believe it - went to Warner Brothers with a unique new take on the Scoobs, and lo, the scent of money pervaded the air. But don't worry! As the sales pitch assures us, "this is not your high school Buffy [but] she'll be just as witty, tough, and sexy and we all remember her to be."

Mmm. Lucky that. That's almost exactly what I remember Buffy being. Good to know those WB folks totally get it, right?

You know, I'd get up in arms about all this, but I have a real hard time believing this is even a real thing. Not to suggest io9's talking hooey or anything, but their headline - "It's really happening" - is true only insofar as some people somewhere have an inkling to reboot Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Things are no further along than that, and I don't expect they'll get much further along. Thank Christ. Though I suppose stranger things have happened...

Moving along. The good news? The good news is the latest development as re: the proposed Locke and Key TV series. Locke and Key, for those who don't already know, is a comic book. Now I like comic books - not too much of a surprise, I hope - and given Joe Hill's involvement, I expect I'd like this comic book very much indeed, except... umm. Let's say I gave up on single issues many a year ago (more like I went cold turkey), and even the cost-to-time-spent ratio of trade paperback collections has gotten hard to reconcile of late, so Locke and Key is - alongside The Walking Dead, Ex Machina and a hundred hundred others - one of those series I've been dying to get my teeth into.

Well, what with the news of the TV series, now I won't have to!

Oh, but I'm only teasing. :)

But the news as per the mooted adaptation of Locke and Key has gone from great to incredible. As if having onboard the showrunners of far and away the best genre series currently on television - why Fringe of course - wasn't significant enough of a class act, add to that the likely involvement of Mark Romanek, director of One Hour Photo and most recently Never Let Me Go (which, damn it all, still hasn't hit theatres here in the UK). Romanek's reportedly set to direct the pilot episode.

If that all doesn't speak highly of this show's massive swag bag of potential, I don't know what finally will.

I'm certainly hyped. You?