I'm still enjoying Richard Moore's 'Boneyard' series, but it's clear relatively quickly that the third volume is the weakest thus far. The good news is that it does pick up nicely in its second half and it serves as a capable conclusion to at least one of the plot strands set up in the previous entry. I'm happy to keep on into the fourth volume, but I do wonder how the series will progress because it has potential to go horribly wrong or wonderfully right.

For those diving in here, the series is centered on a young man named Michael Paris who travels to the town of Raven's Hollow to claim and then sell an inheritance from his grandfather. It turns out to be a cemetery that's populated not only by buried corpses but by a bevy of supernatural beings who make his life, shall we say, interesting. Most prominent among them is Abbey, a vampire with whom he shares a clear mutual attraction.

Of course, these books pit Paris against a succession of challenges and the latest, in book two, is a visit from the IRS, who want a cool half a million bucks in back taxes that his grandfather managed to avoid paying. Moore sets up a couple of potential solutions to that problem. One is that Glump, a professionally obnoxious demon, wants to create a swimsuit edition featuring the scantily clad monsters of the cemetery, which we're well aware he aims to subvert into a grand scheme of world domination. Another is focused on a new arrival, Roxanne Allen, who may be able to help but who obviously has an agenda all her own to which nobody is yet privy.

Neither of those plot strands are resolved in book two but one of them wraps up here with a good level of success. The biggest problem this one has is that it takes far too long to get going, because it's happier to dive into the former strand than the latter. That means that we start out with a trip to the beach for these myriad monsters and a whole bunch of enjoyable but thoroughly expected humour which fails to move anything forward, except to solidify a running joke around how close Moore can get to Paris and Abbey connecting romantically before he has the plot ruthlessly steal their special moment away from them.

After all, none of these characters are particularly deep. That's not to say that they're not gaining depth as the series adds up, but some of them haven't had much of a shot yet and so are reduced to pretty basic jokes. There are a couple of stone gargoyles, for instance, Boris and Leon, who are generally tasked with guarding the cemetery gates. They come along for the ride and try surfing, which goes exactly as you might expect. Moore doesn't labour the point—that joke is done in two panels—but that's it for the gargoyles. Right now, Abbey has ninety percent of the depth, with a little reserved for Nessie, who's still got a one track mind, and maybe Glump.

With that beginning out of the way, we get all twenty-two pages of Glump's swimsuit special. It's not fair to suggest that it's just cheesecake pictures of the monsters, mostly Abbey and Nessie, of course, because other characters feature too and there's Glump's whole world domination thing majestically shoehorned in, but really it absolutely is mostly cheesecake pictures. I pointed out in my review of volume two that Moore draws erotica comics and, while 'Boneyard' is not that, with nothing inappropriate ever happening, that knowledge is obvious in the way he draws his female characters. Of course, a swimsuit special is all about titillation, so he's the perfect artist to bring in, but it also means that we're halfway into the book before the real story can get moving.

Eventually, of course, it does, and we learn what Roxanne is up to. I can't really go into this much because there isn't a lot of foreshadowing to build up to it. Suffice it to say that she isn't who she says she is—which really shouldn't surprise, given that the mayor of Raven's Hollow turned out in the first book to be the Devil himself—and she has a history with one of the regular characters. It shouldn't count as a spoiler either to state that she fails in her goals but survives the book, as the majority of characters here are effectively immortal, even if they're tough enough to make it past a brutal fight scene, so she may or may not be back in a future volume.

To my thinking, this second half that focuses on Roxanne as the enemy is far better than the first half, which is safe and expected and comfortable. The point is that both halves are enjoyable with these lovable monsters—even someone as professionally unlovable as Glump—characters that we feel happy to just hang out with. However, simply hanging out with them doesn't constitute great literature and, while this never has delusions of grandeur, the second half is quite obviously much more substantial than the first, where hanging out is all we really do.

And that's why I'm wondering about how this series will grow. I'm still enjoying it, so I'm going to dive into volume four next month, but, with the plot strands set into motion in the second volume wrapped up, it's open as to what Moore will do next. It would be the easiest thing in the world for him to turn this into a comic book soap opera, like 'Dark Shadows' but with more humour and far more sexy poses. I'd still read it and I'd enjoy it, but it wouldn't have any real worth. It needs the storytelling that shows up in the second half of this book to find that. Hopefully that's the turn at this fork that Moore will take. I guess I'll find out next month with volume four! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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