The Unwritten, Volume 3

Dead Man's Knock
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross
additional finishes by Ryan Kelly (#17)

It's not at all shocking to discover that Wilson Taylor once belonged to the power-hungry cabal he would eventually contrive to undo.  He's callous and utilitarian and sometimes brutal even as he defends an honorable idealism: freedom from the hegemony of story, or rather, freedom to tell the stories we choose.  A shadowy presence at the edges of The Unwritten for many of its early issues, frequently spoken of but never appearing—like Harry Lime in The Third Man, presumed dead if under mysterious circumstances, a commanding personality even when long absent—when Taylor finally does appear, he's just as cold, willing to murder Chadron for the slight chance Ambrosio may once again use him as a doorway into the world.  He freely admits, with no discernible guilt, that he stole Tom away from his real mother and fabricated a myth to take her place so that he could shape his son into a savior.  If he's calculating with his son, he's inhumane with Lizzie/Jane, experimenting on an orphan to create a bridge between real and literary worlds, then brainwashing her into believing herself a Dickens character destined to aid Tommy in his quest.  He and Callendar may angle for different ends, but they're cut from similar cloth.

Volumes 1 and 2 of The Unwritten are immersed in the intellectual possibilities of Carey's meta-literary premise.  The mechanisms by which stories work in the world, by which they shape the way we understand it, are well articulated, particularly in the two-part "Jud Süss," but Volume 3 gives the concept an emotional resonance and more meaningful stakes.  By the time Tom finally realizes the real implications behind his father's revolution, so do we.

"That most times, the truth is like a close-up conjuring trick.  You can look straight at something and think you're seeing the truth of it.  But really, you're seeing what someone else wants you to see.  So fuck the truth.  We don't know where it is, and we probably won't know it when we see it.  She just chose the story she needs right now.  The story that keeps her standing.  That's probably all any of us get to do."  (Dead Man's Knock: 131 [The Unwritten #17: 31])

Unlike the earlier volumes, which are rich with surprises but play far less on expectation, Dead Man's Knock pulls off a very clever sleight of hand on both its characters—even the cunning and suspicious Pullman—and its readers.  The double-deception of the false Tommy Taylor book and its last-minute replacement by a real Tommy Taylor book were both well earned.  Nevertheless, the finest single issue in the collection is "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," which borrows, at least superficially, the structure of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.  Even now, I'm not entirely convinced how the issue should be read.  Though I perhaps prefer a sequential reading, one which ignores the "instructions," since its juxtapositions and time-skips are suggestive the way they are, the more traditional participation in the issue's chosen structure is also effective.  In the end, its strongest commendation is that it sustains both readings.

Also, we finally discover who Pauly Bruckner is and what he did to deserve being transformed into a talking rabbit in a waistcoat.

Collects The Unwritten #13-18:  "Dead Man's Knock: Monsters," "Dead Man's Knock: Atrocities," "Dead Man's Knock: Bloodletting," "Dead Man's Knock: Conversations," "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," and "MIX"

ISBN:  978-1401230463