Review Copy Review

First Moon: I got another review copy from Larry, who always sends something fascinating about the time I'm feeling forgotten. This book has taken me awhile to get back to because before I reviewed it I wanted to read it a second time. Mostly because I found a strange dissonance in the way I saw the art. I wanted to make sure it was my perception of the art making the weirdness, not the art itself. I think it is.

This is a complicated story that's actually very simple at its core. It has to do with the Roanoke Colony and werewolves. I loved the Roanoke part of the story, but the modern bits turned me off on the first reading. It wasn't until I finished the book and everything came together that I started to enjoy it as a whole.

The artwork is strange and in a style that I'm not fond of, for the most part. I thought it worked extremely well in some places of the Roanoke story, but there were often bits where the faces were far too exaggerated, and I wasn't sure if there was a story reason for it or if that was just the artist's style. The fight scenes made no sense to me on the first read, only on the second read did I understand what was happening in them. In any case, after my first read-through I thought the Roanoke parts were well-drawn while the rest of the book was not. On my second read-through I dismissed that as being a trick of my perception: I wanted to enjoy the Roanoke part of the story more, so I did. The art is not as uneven as I first thought.

Once I got past my issues with the artwork, (which are entirely a matter of my tastes, I think, and not the skill of the artist) the story is pretty darn good. It's a bit of a horror story about the original Roanoke colonists and the terror they provoked, seen through the lens of a modern descendent of ... but that would be telling. It's a good read, and I enjoyed it greatly on my second pass. As we've seen before with AiT/Planet Lar, there are text pages in the back of the book with more information. This time a wonderful summary of the history of Roanoke Colony and its fate. All told, this is an excellent package, worth checking out.