Laith
Batman: The Long Halloween thrusts the very best of Batman right in your face: grounded detective noir, a Godfather-esque crime plot, iconic art — all with the tragic origin story well in the rear-view. For the whole class of Batman fans who have never picked up a comic, this is the perfect place to start. Sure, there’s Batman: Year One, which Long Halloween continues, but I can’t bear to watch Martha Wayne’s pearl necklace clatter across Crime Alley for the millionth time, and I’m sure fans of the films and TV shows feel the same.
Long Halloween features a grounded detective-noir plot that blends Batman’s traditional rogues gallery with a Godfather-esque Italian mafia crime story. We join Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and DA Harvey Dent in their quest to capture “Holiday”, a mysterious serial killer whose crimes fall on major holidays and target the Falcone crime family. If you’ve seen Nolan’s The Dark Knight, or particularly the newer Reeves/Pattinson The Batman, you will find the root of so many of their story beats here. The origins of Harvey Dent/Two-Face, the complex relationship between the Falcones and the Waynes, Batman’s identity as a detective — it’s all coming from Long Halloween.
Something I particularly appreciated, as a devoted fan of the animated series, is the art of Tim Sale. Long Halloween is a perfect blend of the iconic gothic/art deco style of the animated series and the high-contrast visuals of classic cinematic noir. Sale’s character designs are nothing short of iconic: the bulky, over-masculine, intimidating silhouette of Batman; the uncomfortable level of detail given to Harvey’s scarred half; the grotesque, disturbing proportions of the Joker’s smile. There are also seemingly endless visual nods to classic Hollywood crime and noir, from The Maltese Falcon to The Godfather; something that tickled the film nerd in me and evokes a distinct 1940s silver-screen atmosphere.
The story continues in Batman: Dark Victory and later Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween (a complete mouthful); the latter a little too rogues-gallery-focused for my taste, but the former an absolutely fantastic sequel. If you want to read a few Batman comics but aren’t sure where to start, this is the perfect entry point to bridge the gap from the films.
Batman: The Long Halloween thrusts the very best of Batman right in your face: grounded detective noir, a Godfather-esque crime plot, iconic art — all with the tragic origin story well in the rear-view. For the whole class of Batman fans who have never picked up a comic, this is the perfect place to start. Sure, there’s Batman: Year One, which Long Halloween continues, but I can’t bear to watch Martha Wayne’s pearl necklace clatter across Crime Alley for the millionth time, and I’m sure fans of the films and TV shows feel the same.
Long Halloween features a grounded detective-noir plot that blends Batman’s traditional rogues gallery with a Godfather-esque Italian mafia crime story. We join Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and DA Harvey Dent in their quest to capture “Holiday”, a mysterious serial killer whose crimes fall on major holidays and target the Falcone crime family. If you’ve seen Nolan’s The Dark Knight, or particularly the newer Reeves/Pattinson The Batman, you will find the root of so many of their story beats here. The origins of Harvey Dent/Two-Face, the complex relationship between the Falcones and the Waynes, Batman’s identity as a detective — it’s all coming from Long Halloween.
Something I particularly appreciated, as a devoted fan of the animated series, is the art of Tim Sale. Long Halloween is a perfect blend of the iconic gothic/art deco style of the animated series and the high-contrast visuals of classic cinematic noir. Sale’s character designs are nothing short of iconic: the bulky, over-masculine, intimidating silhouette of Batman; the uncomfortable level of detail given to Harvey’s scarred half; the grotesque, disturbing proportions of the Joker’s smile. There are also seemingly endless visual nods to classic Hollywood crime and noir, from The Maltese Falcon to The Godfather; something that tickled the film nerd in me and evokes a distinct 1940s silver-screen atmosphere.
The story continues in Batman: Dark Victory and later Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween (a complete mouthful); the latter a little too rogues-gallery-focused for my taste, but the former an absolutely fantastic sequel. If you want to read a few Batman comics but aren’t sure where to start, this is the perfect entry point to bridge the gap from the films.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door slides right into my sweet spot, it’s got three of my favorite things: spies, satire, and strong writing. Equal parts spy thriller and critical reflection on racism and violence directed at Black people in America, this is so much more fun to read than the description on the tin would lead you to believe.
The title alone tells you everything about the book’s sensibility — it’s a triple entendre: a play on the common practice of using Black people as window dressing; “spook” as both spy and a slur for a Black person; and, when you consider that the spectre of Black insurrection has haunted American politics since the country was thirteen colonies, a ghost story. That layered, sardonic intelligence runs through every page.
Spook tells the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first Black agent hired by the CIA; an opportunity engineered not by the success of the civil rights movement but by the political machinations of a Senator seeking to retain the Black vote. Freeman plays the role of someone subservient and simple-minded to get through the selection process, and finds himself installed as a literal display piece: Section Chief of the Top Secret Reproduction Center, a glorified copy boy in a glass office next to the director. His superiors believe him sidelined. They’ve made the fatal mistake of giving him the entire CIA playbook.
Freeman spends five years memorizing everything he can about guerrilla warfare, weaponry, and CIA tactics before resigning and returning to Chicago — ostensibly as a social worker, in reality to recruit and train a local street gang, the Cobras, into a disciplined guerrilla army with cells across the country. The spark comes when riots erupt following the police murder of a Black child on Chicago’s South Side. What follows escalates from urban insurgency to open confrontation with the National Guard and airborne troops, punctuated by some genuinely gleeful set pieces, including the kidnapping of a Guard colonel who is dosed with acid, painted in blackface, and released to be found by his own men, giggling in a fountain.
The book’s moral and emotional weight, however, rests on Freeman’s relationship with Dawson, his oldest friend, a Black police officer and committed integrationist who believes change must come from within the system. Their ideological divide eventually becomes a tragic personal one, and the confrontation between them is where Spook earns its depth. The ending gnaws at you long after the final page, elevating the novel above an anti-white daydream. It asks a question it refuses to answer cleanly: can you dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools without losing yourself?
The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a manual in revolution and a reminder that underestimation is a poison. It’s also, remarkably, a joy to read. I loved it, and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I can find one.
A note on the book’s history: many people assume Spook was banned, but the reality is more insidious. It was iced out of the American publishing scene entirely, finding its initial success only in the UK before becoming an underground classic stateside. The 1973 film adaptation, made with Greenlee’s direct collaboration, fared worse: it was quickly pulled from theaters by authorities who deemed it a risk for inciting riots. The book’s suppression is, in its own way, proof of its power.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door slides right into my sweet spot, it’s got three of my favorite things: spies, satire, and strong writing. Equal parts spy thriller and critical reflection on racism and violence directed at Black people in America, this is so much more fun to read than the description on the tin would lead you to believe.
The title alone tells you everything about the book’s sensibility — it’s a triple entendre: a play on the common practice of using Black people as window dressing; “spook” as both spy and a slur for a Black person; and, when you consider that the spectre of Black insurrection has haunted American politics since the country was thirteen colonies, a ghost story. That layered, sardonic intelligence runs through every page.
Spook tells the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first Black agent hired by the CIA; an opportunity engineered not by the success of the civil rights movement but by the political machinations of a Senator seeking to retain the Black vote. Freeman plays the role of someone subservient and simple-minded to get through the selection process, and finds himself installed as a literal display piece: Section Chief of the Top Secret Reproduction Center, a glorified copy boy in a glass office next to the director. His superiors believe him sidelined. They’ve made the fatal mistake of giving him the entire CIA playbook.
Freeman spends five years memorizing everything he can about guerrilla warfare, weaponry, and CIA tactics before resigning and returning to Chicago — ostensibly as a social worker, in reality to recruit and train a local street gang, the Cobras, into a disciplined guerrilla army with cells across the country. The spark comes when riots erupt following the police murder of a Black child on Chicago’s South Side. What follows escalates from urban insurgency to open confrontation with the National Guard and airborne troops, punctuated by some genuinely gleeful set pieces, including the kidnapping of a Guard colonel who is dosed with acid, painted in blackface, and released to be found by his own men, giggling in a fountain.
The book’s moral and emotional weight, however, rests on Freeman’s relationship with Dawson, his oldest friend, a Black police officer and committed integrationist who believes change must come from within the system. Their ideological divide eventually becomes a tragic personal one, and the confrontation between them is where Spook earns its depth. The ending gnaws at you long after the final page, elevating the novel above an anti-white daydream. It asks a question it refuses to answer cleanly: can you dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools without losing yourself?
The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a manual in revolution and a reminder that underestimation is a poison. It’s also, remarkably, a joy to read. I loved it, and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I can find one.
A note on the book’s history: many people assume Spook was banned, but the reality is more insidious. It was iced out of the American publishing scene entirely, finding its initial success only in the UK before becoming an underground classic stateside. The 1973 film adaptation, made with Greenlee’s direct collaboration, fared worse: it was quickly pulled from theaters by authorities who deemed it a risk for inciting riots. The book’s suppression is, in its own way, proof of its power.
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door slides right into my sweet spot, it’s got three of my favorite things: spies, satire, and strong writing. Equal parts spy thriller and critical reflection on racism and violence directed at Black people in America, this is so much more fun to read than the description on the tin would lead you to believe.
The title alone tells you everything about the book’s sensibility — it’s a triple entendre: a play on the common practice of using Black people as window dressing; “spook” as both spy and a slur for a Black person; and, when you consider that the spectre of Black insurrection has haunted American politics since the country was thirteen colonies, a ghost story. That layered, sardonic intelligence runs through every page.
Spook tells the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first Black agent hired by the CIA; an opportunity engineered not by the success of the civil rights movement but by the political machinations of a Senator seeking to retain the Black vote. Freeman plays the role of someone subservient and simple-minded to get through the selection process, and finds himself installed as a literal display piece: Section Chief of the Top Secret Reproduction Center, a glorified copy boy in a glass office next to the director. His superiors believe him sidelined. They’ve made the fatal mistake of giving him the entire CIA playbook.
Freeman spends five years memorizing everything he can about guerrilla warfare, weaponry, and CIA tactics before resigning and returning to Chicago — ostensibly as a social worker, in reality to recruit and train a local street gang, the Cobras, into a disciplined guerrilla army with cells across the country. The spark comes when riots erupt following the police murder of a Black child on Chicago’s South Side. What follows escalates from urban insurgency to open confrontation with the National Guard and airborne troops, punctuated by some genuinely gleeful set pieces, including the kidnapping of a Guard colonel who is dosed with acid, painted in blackface, and released to be found by his own men, giggling in a fountain.
The book’s moral and emotional weight, however, rests on Freeman’s relationship with Dawson, his oldest friend, a Black police officer and committed integrationist who believes change must come from within the system. Their ideological divide eventually becomes a tragic personal one, and the confrontation between them is where Spook earns its depth. The ending gnaws at you long after the final page, elevating the novel above an anti-white daydream. It asks a question it refuses to answer cleanly: can you dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools without losing yourself?
The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a manual in revolution and a reminder that underestimation is a poison. It’s also, remarkably, a joy to read. I loved it, and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I can find one.
A note on the book’s history: many people assume Spook was banned, but the reality is more insidious. It was iced out of the American publishing scene entirely, finding its initial success only in the UK before becoming an underground classic stateside. The 1973 film adaptation, made with Greenlee’s direct collaboration, fared worse: it was quickly pulled from theaters by authorities who deemed it a risk for inciting riots. The book’s suppression is, in its own way, proof of its power.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door slides right into my sweet spot, it’s got three of my favorite things: spies, satire, and strong writing. Equal parts spy thriller and critical reflection on racism and violence directed at Black people in America, this is so much more fun to read than the description on the tin would lead you to believe.
The title alone tells you everything about the book’s sensibility — it’s a triple entendre: a play on the common practice of using Black people as window dressing; “spook” as both spy and a slur for a Black person; and, when you consider that the spectre of Black insurrection has haunted American politics since the country was thirteen colonies, a ghost story. That layered, sardonic intelligence runs through every page.
Spook tells the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first Black agent hired by the CIA; an opportunity engineered not by the success of the civil rights movement but by the political machinations of a Senator seeking to retain the Black vote. Freeman plays the role of someone subservient and simple-minded to get through the selection process, and finds himself installed as a literal display piece: Section Chief of the Top Secret Reproduction Center, a glorified copy boy in a glass office next to the director. His superiors believe him sidelined. They’ve made the fatal mistake of giving him the entire CIA playbook.
Freeman spends five years memorizing everything he can about guerrilla warfare, weaponry, and CIA tactics before resigning and returning to Chicago — ostensibly as a social worker, in reality to recruit and train a local street gang, the Cobras, into a disciplined guerrilla army with cells across the country. The spark comes when riots erupt following the police murder of a Black child on Chicago’s South Side. What follows escalates from urban insurgency to open confrontation with the National Guard and airborne troops, punctuated by some genuinely gleeful set pieces, including the kidnapping of a Guard colonel who is dosed with acid, painted in blackface, and released to be found by his own men, giggling in a fountain.
The book’s moral and emotional weight, however, rests on Freeman’s relationship with Dawson, his oldest friend, a Black police officer and committed integrationist who believes change must come from within the system. Their ideological divide eventually becomes a tragic personal one, and the confrontation between them is where Spook earns its depth. The ending gnaws at you long after the final page, elevating the novel above an anti-white daydream. It asks a question it refuses to answer cleanly: can you dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools without losing yourself?
The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a manual in revolution and a reminder that underestimation is a poison. It’s also, remarkably, a joy to read. I loved it, and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I can find one.
A note on the book’s history: many people assume Spook was banned, but the reality is more insidious. It was iced out of the American publishing scene entirely, finding its initial success only in the UK before becoming an underground classic stateside. The 1973 film adaptation, made with Greenlee’s direct collaboration, fared worse: it was quickly pulled from theaters by authorities who deemed it a risk for inciting riots. The book’s suppression is, in its own way, proof of its power.
My god does this book sneak up on you. I’ve heard people describe it as a thriller, or a tragedy, but I think they’ve got it wrong — this is horror, plain and simple. Not cheap horror either; this is slow-burn dread buried in technological distrust, the mechanics and foreshadowing ingeniously concealed in all too mundane complaints about modern life: corrosive internet culture, billionaires, mass surveillance. It all builds to a sudden moment that flips your perception of every character on its head and furnishes one of the blackest endings I have ever read.
The real star of this show is Robert Lemoine. He’s so inconspicuous, so little of his interior life revealed to the reader compared to the others, that he just slips under your radar. Sure, he’s a little creepy from the start — the drones, the surveillance — but we are so accustomed to the impression of the ineffective, undeserving billionaire that we write him and his cartoon villainy off as just another obnoxious caricature. Somewhere along the line, though, you begin to realize that he is not an obnoxious caricature, that he did not stumble into money, and that he is instead cut from a more sinister cloth: the high-functioning sociopath. Once you realize he’s the only character actually playing the game, his every prior action becomes laced with sinister intention, and you begin frantically recontextualising everything — characters you’ve spent the whole book rooting against you are now desperately hoping will succeed.
The book follows Mira and Shelley, two leaders of the titular Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that grows crops on vacant land, scrounging and sometimes stealing what they need. Mira identifies an opportunity to bring the group into solvency: a landslide in southern New Zealand has cut off the town of Thorndike, leaving a large farm abandoned. But Lemoine has his eyes on the property too, hoping to buy it for an apocalypse bunker, and when he catches Mira scoping the farm he offers her funding and use of the land.
A significant portion of the book is spent familiarising us with the Birnam Wood cadre: Mira, the charismatic but unappreciative leader; Shelley, a disgruntled functionary who wants to leave but won’t confront Mira about it; and Tony, the self-righteous founder who returns from abroad to find himself alienated from the group. Each is a purposely grating caricature of a self-absorbed, liberal-minded eco-warrior. You’d be forgiven for putting the book down at the midway point — by then you’ll be thoroughly fed up with these unpleasant characters and the heavy-handed social commentary they spew. But that irritation is precisely the point. They are the cover.
The last quarter of the book is blindingly incandescent and impossible to put down, in the vein of Fargo + The Beast in Me — a slow, dreadful burn culminating in an absolutely unhinged finale. My only caveat (and it's a fairly major one) is that it takes a long time to get there; I really had to slog through the first 50–60% of the novel. If you choose to read Birnam Wood, please do not put it down halfway. That’s all I can say.
My god does this book sneak up on you. I’ve heard people describe it as a thriller, or a tragedy, but I think they’ve got it wrong — this is horror, plain and simple. Not cheap horror either; this is slow-burn dread buried in technological distrust, the mechanics and foreshadowing ingeniously concealed in all too mundane complaints about modern life: corrosive internet culture, billionaires, mass surveillance. It all builds to a sudden moment that flips your perception of every character on its head and furnishes one of the blackest endings I have ever read.
The real star of this show is Robert Lemoine. He’s so inconspicuous, so little of his interior life revealed to the reader compared to the others, that he just slips under your radar. Sure, he’s a little creepy from the start — the drones, the surveillance — but we are so accustomed to the impression of the ineffective, undeserving billionaire that we write him and his cartoon villainy off as just another obnoxious caricature. Somewhere along the line, though, you begin to realize that he is not an obnoxious caricature, that he did not stumble into money, and that he is instead cut from a more sinister cloth: the high-functioning sociopath. Once you realize he’s the only character actually playing the game, his every prior action becomes laced with sinister intention, and you begin frantically recontextualising everything — characters you’ve spent the whole book rooting against you are now desperately hoping will succeed.
The book follows Mira and Shelley, two leaders of the titular Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that grows crops on vacant land, scrounging and sometimes stealing what they need. Mira identifies an opportunity to bring the group into solvency: a landslide in southern New Zealand has cut off the town of Thorndike, leaving a large farm abandoned. But Lemoine has his eyes on the property too, hoping to buy it for an apocalypse bunker, and when he catches Mira scoping the farm he offers her funding and use of the land.
A significant portion of the book is spent familiarising us with the Birnam Wood cadre: Mira, the charismatic but unappreciative leader; Shelley, a disgruntled functionary who wants to leave but won’t confront Mira about it; and Tony, the self-righteous founder who returns from abroad to find himself alienated from the group. Each is a purposely grating caricature of a self-absorbed, liberal-minded eco-warrior. You’d be forgiven for putting the book down at the midway point — by then you’ll be thoroughly fed up with these unpleasant characters and the heavy-handed social commentary they spew. But that irritation is precisely the point. They are the cover.
The last quarter of the book is blindingly incandescent and impossible to put down, in the vein of Fargo + The Beast in Me — a slow, dreadful burn culminating in an absolutely unhinged finale. My only caveat (and it's a fairly major one) is that it takes a long time to get there; I really had to slog through the first 50–60% of the novel. If you choose to read Birnam Wood, please do not put it down halfway. That’s all I can say.