The Crow by J. O'Barr.
Title: The Crow.
Author: J. O'Barr.
Genre: Fiction, graphic novel, fantasy, crime, romance, death, poetry.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1989.
Summary: Murdered along with his fiancé on Halloween eve by a vicious street gang, Eric Draven returns from the dead and, led by a crow, seeks vengeance on the killers who wronged him.
My rating: 9/10.
♥ “Pain? I know pain at the molecular level. It pulls at my atoms, sings to me in an alphabet of fear. I am the boiling man come to break the bones of your sins, meat puppet.”
♥ “Mr. Jones?”
“Y...yes, sir?”
“Are there spots in the leopard’s eyes, also?”
♥ Still, so still, in the city tonight, twelve o’clock tick-tock, when all that is good slinks away like a beaten dog and the black black shadows are alive with the dead, twisted poetry in broken english, flesh and blood and staring faces…
So grey and despairing, strong as steel but collapsed inside, The Crow laughs under a street light, a voodoo smile of one who lived and died and sill yet lives…
He makes his way home where he can be shapeless in the dark and paint his face in the colours of joy…
Tonight, hell sends an angel bearing gifts…
♥ There is a man playing a violin. And the strings are the nerves in his own arm. A twisted soul - the mortar, despair - the bricks, to build a temple to sadness. He ties a spent shell in his hair. “Number one,” he says.
♥ “Around the sun we go,
The moon goes round the Earth,
We do not die of death
We die of vertigo!”
♥ In the city, where angels fear to hover and devils come to croon, the sex of the night lets down her black narcotic hair under a yellow opium moon. Here a shadow of a shadow, an earthbound ghost shivers, not from October chill, but in erotic pain. He says to his dead lover, “We should never have come here, with flesh so soft and hearts so unwise, but like tigers in tall tall grass, like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, we sucked in our fear and we came here.” Now all the atrocities are replayed, like a late late show. “We came here but we never should have stayed. Though we had inertia and radius and depth, we took the last train with velocity and passed our own deaths.”
So, The Crow spirals down through a collapsed dream and the only sound he makes is like a concave scream.
♥ Eric screams and screams and pounds his head against the wall until phantom fire trucks race across his vision. All he wants is pain. Pain and hate. Yes, hate. But never fear. Fear is for the enemy. Fear and bullets.
♥ “Put your gun away… Bullets don’t stop me… Knives don’t hurt me… Look… Look at me! I am pilot error, I am fetal distress, I am the random chromosome… I am total and complete madness… I am fear.
♥ IRONY
The tides of sin draw tighter and brighter,
The hours become heavier and weighted,
And the shadows smile, dark and wild.
This is when hope and desire collapse,
The arc of the dream descends into despair,
When innocent lovers dance
Like angels on fire.
This is when the night comes down,
A hammer on an anvil,
And the only absolution accepted
Is a legacy of brutality.
A single note rings on and on and on.
DESPAIR
Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles long
Coiled, one thousand miles deep
Eyes like candy, it has eyes like candy
Hard and blue, but soft as kittens feet
Out of sight or in the element of light
It could be a devil, it could be an angel
With spiders inside a vision from hell
Its spine is a vertical scream
Slow as concrete, blurred as a dream
It spins round and down on an axis of atrocity
Fueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,
Its soul - a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain
Killing time killing time
And praying for rain
One thousand miles deep
♥ “We do not recognize our souls until they are in pain. The divine is no less paradoxical than the vicious.”
♥ Behold the night, offering the key that opens wide her gates of horn to the emanations of delivered souls. This society… Absolved, consecrated, sanctified, possessed of the devil… Like a flood of black crows in the fibers of his internal tree submerged him in a last smell and, taking his place, killed him.