Rather a lethargic couple of weeks on the whole, irritated by a nagging anxiety and restlessness that makes it impossible to just slump and relax. Though I was almost tempted to leave it all behind and accept my gas station attendant's latest invitation to accompany him on vacation to Turkey, I have instead been self-medicating with books and movies (and tonight, a trip to the ballet). Therefore you must make do with my adorable reviews instead of reading a Byronic travelogue of the Eastern lands. (Or a Bironic travelogue. Clearly it would have been brilliant.)

In the vein of "things read in an attempt to get backstory after seeing mystifying and/or unfinished film versions," we have Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and Enki Bilal's The Nikopol Trilogy.

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Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, Book One: Prodigal Son, by Dean Koontz. Oh yes, and also by Kevin Anderson.

Dear Mr. Koontz,

I took out Frankenstein: Prodigal Son from the library as an audiobook because I wanted to know the full story behind USA's TV movie but was afraid I would throw out the paperback in frustration. This turned out to be a good decision.

In the introduction to your book, you complained about the changes everyone made to your script which prompted you, and later Martin Scorsese, to take your names off the TV project. Here is some news: your book isn't all that great -- or different.

There was so much you could have done with the Frankenstein myth. You set it up perfectly: Frankenstein's first monster, Deucalion, leaves his comfy retreat in Tibet in 2000-something when he finds out that good old Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein (your favorite nickname for him), is alive and well and building a mutant army in New Orleans; meanwhile, a pair of young but hard-boiled detectives tracks down an organ-harvesting serial killer, and Victor's creations are starting to go Wrong. Yet you resisted ingenuity, pretending to be revolutionary in your interpretation when really your sometimes-reversal of film canon actually came closer to Shelley's original story, and instead introduced multiple characters with identical goals, lacked faith in your readers to the point where you had to explain three times the few obvious references you attempted, and repeated yourself in various other ways over the course of the 97 three-page chapters that make up this first of four volumes.

On top of which, your stupid book ended exactly where the movie ended, so I still don't know what happens next! I shall lampoon you and your book on my blog in revenge.

Bitterly,
A reader who is still going to pick up the second book when it comes in.

P.S. I know that I was expecting more from your book than was fair, considering your intended audience. But that doesn't make it okay.

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The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal: "The Carnival of Immortals" (1980), "The Woman Trap" (1987), "Cold Equator" (1992)

I picked up Nikopol Wednesday evening from the library in all its shiny Special Order glory and read it straight through. The art is beautiful, though the people and places it depicts are not. I can't comment on the writing, since it's a translation from the French and not very lyrical -- even the Baudelaire quotes sound stunted, though that may be because I'm used to the translation from the movie. It's tough even to comment on the story because it came from a different culture, and was first written 25 years ago at that. That said, the intertwining stories and the savaged world they're set in were intriguing, all the more so for the considerable amount Bilal left out.

Nikopol, Jill, John, the slimy Senator and the Egyptian pantheon are all there, but the rest of the film's characters are replaced by a different cast, including Nikopol's son of the same name, a failed Italian filmmaker and a striped telepathic cat; instead of a "Fifth Element" New York, events are set against a post-nuclear Europe and Africa ruled by fascist dictators in clown makeup and sinister genetics/drug cartels, respectively, where a society of men, aliens and mutants is neatly split into corrupt privilege and diseased poverty. Men commit acts of terrorism by detonating extraterrestrial eggs; African wildlife flee their polluted homes by train.

In the first book, Horus possesses Nikopol to avenge himself against Anubis by way of joining a blood-shedding hockey team and then assassinating Paris' dictator and seizing control. In the second book, Jill kills a series of men and pops pills to lose her memory; her alien-boyfriend John returns from the dead to cure her, and Nikopol and Horus whisk her away to sunbathe in Cairo. In the third book -- the only graphic novel to win Lire Magazine's Book of the Year award in France -- Nikopol Jr. tracks his long-lost father to Equator City, where Jill has birthed a mutant god-baby and Horus completes his plan by making Nikopol Sr. (who by this point has spent so much time with the god he speaks half in hieroglyphics) a world champion chess-boxer. Thanks to a political conspiracy and mistaken identity, Nikopol Jr. then gets sent into space and the floating pyramid crashes into the city. The gods head off to resurrect Cheops/Khufu.

It was all very enjoyable in a brain-twisting kind of way. I think anyone with interests in sci fi, graphic novels and/or political science* would appreciate it. If it weren't for the fact that Bilal wrote and directed "Immortal" himself, I'd have said the film was a terrible adaptation. As it stands, they're both good for different reasons.

*For instance, like Jasper Fforde did in The Eyre Affair, Bilal sneaks in clever references to unlikely alliances, such as (working from memory here) the Czechoserbians and Muslo-Christians.

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Saw "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" at our local indie theater last night. Good stuff. Have run out of steam, however, so it shall have to remain at that. Suffice it to say that our indie theater rocks, and will be showing "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" and "Tsotsi" soon.

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And finally, ladyjaida of Shoebox Project fame posted an original piece of fiction today which I highly recommend you check out. If I'm not mistaken, she wrote it in a weekend. More evidence that we are witnessing the birth of a literary great.