Strike a blow! What Sam Houston knew, Muhammad Ali knew. And it’s that same strange mix of insight and endurance, of arrogance and urgency that presents itself in rededication of Lucifer.
It’s a hidden gem, easily discarded because like the Dreaming or House of Mystery (which would follow on much, much later), Lucifer spins out from the absolutely, groundbreakingly phenomenal Sandman.
But Lucifer treads a very different path. While Sandman is really a grand operatic drama conspiring around the question of whether or not Morpheus orchestrated his own death at the hands of the Kindly Ones, Lucifer thrusts its readers into glaring spotlight of action-by-inaction.
Lucifer is about patience and waiting and planning and influence and directing the course of events almost imperceptibly. Just like Sam Houston’s savage insight to give a ragtag bunch of farmers a fighting chance by drawing the “Napoleon of the West’s” much superior army into a pursuit that would see them spread out and their numbers effectively neutralized. Which echoes in Muhammad Ali’s long game in the Rumble in the Jungle that would see him spend almost the entire fight on the ropes (literally on the ropes), tiring out Foreman beyond belief and giving him the chance to floor Foreman with just one blow.
But how could scale this kind of immense drama? Very easily in the hands of a writer as accomplished as Mike Carey. Carey plants that drama into almost every line, using the literary device of the zeugma. “The queen took tea before she took the prisoners’ heads”. It’s that almost perpetual swing between the literal and the metaphorical that connects Carey’s writing with Houston’s insight and Ali’s.
Please enjoy our exclusive preview of Lucifer: Book One.
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