On his website, Neil Gaiman pulls off the difficult accomplishment of making me want to read Alan Moore's Lost Girls in a longer version of an essay published in Publisher's Weekly.
It's not that Moore hasn't written great stuff. I swooned over what he did with Swamp Thing back in the '80s and I agree with Time magazine that Watchmen was one of the best novels of the '80s (I'm not sure I'd go as far as "one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century," but give me a late night and the right lubrication and I might make either side of that argument). And I admired From Hell, thinking it too discomfiting to actually love (perhaps its truest mark of artistic success).
But, like all great men, Moore can be hard to take sometimes and never more so than in his fascination for the kinkiness of the properly buttoned-up Victorians, which is why I was pretty sure that Lost Girls, which promised to dwell almost entirely on those kinks, didn't seem all that alluring. Gaiman is convincing, however, and perhaps Moore—who is undeniably intelligent—has something penetrating (no pun intended) to say about his own obsessions.
Of course, there's also the fact that Gaiman could "talk the rear end off an elephant," to use my father's favorite turn of phrase. Now I have to at least look at Lost Girls—curse you Neil Gaiman!
