Lucifer: Volume 4

[sawyl]

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...