Lucifer: Volume 4

After a brief pause — oh, alright, three years — I'm rereading Mike Carey's Lucifer. Since I've already mentioned the first three trades, I'm going to resume with the fourth, The Divine Comedy.

Inverting Dante's structure, the volume opens with Paradiso, which finds Lucifer opening the gates of his new cosmos to those who want to leave God's creation on condition that they renounce the habit of worship. Unfortunately, the devil's enemies — the Basanos, the living tarot deck he encountered in Hamburg, and Susanoo, the Japanese god of storms — are maneuvering against him, finally enacting their long ago laid plans.

Struck down in his pride, Purgatorio finds Lucifer helpless and near death, with only the ambivalence of the angel Melios for help. After a cameo appearance from Death of the Endless and some help from Elaine Belloc, Lucifer is able to put enough of himself back together to join forces with the Lilim-in-Exile and drive out the invaders. But this good, which comes coupled with Mazikeen's return, has come at the loss of Elaine.

In addition to the two main story arcs, the volume also contains two short stories. The Writing on the Wall is the touching tale of a young and proud centaur who, after dreaming of Lucifer's defeat at the hands of the Basanos, travels to earth to warn him only to find that a lifetime has passed in Lucifer's cosmos and her home has been lost to her. Living a second life and attempting to correct her mistakes, she finds herself old and uninterested in intervening in present events when her dreams finally become reality.

The second story, Breaking and Entering, follows the fallen cherbim, Gaudium and Spera, as they break into the House of the Sleeper to recover a mummified corpse that grants wishes, in the hope that they might be able to use it to help Elaine. After experiencing various disasters — unbreakable thread breaking, bringing the wrong sort of bird with them, that sort of thing — they're eventually rescued by the archangel Michael, apparently in return for a cup of tea...

Welsh on The Rapture

From Irvine Welsh's review of Liz Jensen's The Rapture in the Guardian Review:

Just in case the fates hadn't handed her enough jeopardy, Gabrielle decides to make a life-changing move from London to the coastal town of Hadport. Her relocation sees her employed at a secure unit for problem teenagers, where she will look after 16-year-old devil child and modern-day Nostradamus, Bethany Krall. Bethany has been incarcerated there since stabbing her Evangelical Christian mother to death with a screwdriver. From the moment I read that revelation, I suspect I liked Bethany much more than I was supposed to, and in a strange way she emerges as the moral centre of this eco-thriller. Her predictions come into sharper focus after a healthy zap of ECT. "Give me the volts!" is her repeated mantra.

I think he's sold me; I'm going to add it to my to-read list. With any luck, I might be able to fit it in sometime in late 2011...