Steve Niles... Oh what has become of thee? 30 Days Of Night was brilliant...as a comic, not that shite film adaptation. The work with Bernie Wrightson? Fantastic. City Of Dust? Not so much.
City Of Dust: A Phillip Khrome Story is Niles' melding of heady but lumbering sci-fi dystopia and fairytale horros come to life. In the universe of COD all imaginative thought and expression is against the law (think Equilibrium without the sweet ass action sequences). Philip Khrome is a police officer who was deemed a ward of the state after he turned his father in for crimes of thought at the age of 7. Many years later, after Khrome kills a wanted thought-criminal, he responds to a call regarding a brutally beheaded dead body. After a thorough tech-scan, no cause of death can be found. Khrome moves the body (against procedure) and finds an old children's book full of imaginary beasts under the dead man. Thus begins the skepticism by Khrome of the law he was raised on as truth.
There are conspiracies and horrors laid out within the story that would be really interesting if our focus wasn't placed on Khrome so early. He's basically a lifelong believer in this philosophy of non-imagination who's swayed, after YEARS as a police officer, by one murder and one glimpse at an outlawed book. I felt like I was being insulted as a reader by the audacity of the creators to let their stalwart character be so easily swayed. There was little internal conflict within Khrome at all. After the initial imagination spark Khrome goes on a quest to discover the truth behind the lies of thought-crime. Followed by a love interest (also a police officer) who needs no convincing whatsoever and has no personal revelation but does not question Khrome at all and a chief of police that is revealed to be an illegal robot, he sets out to discover what unidentified killer slayed the man with the book.
This was a mess to read, asking readers to take HUGE leaps with the main character that had seemingly dismissable reasoning.
The end of the story seems to point this out to be an ongoing series. That would be fantastic, if they started over and gave the material and reader the thought they deserve.
Tyler
No comments:
Post a Comment