This is the third and final volume in Dwight MacPherson's take on Edgar Allan Poe in dream, Terra Somnium as he calls it; and it's very much the third of a single story. Neither of the first two books feel self-contained because they don't really find a good stopping point. If you're interested in this, you really need to read the entire thing through in three volumes. Starting anywhere but book one will leave you utterly confused because it won't make any sense at all. Stopping after the first volume will leave you wanting more.

And that's fine but it's also really problematic because the three books are certainly not equal in stature. As I've already covered in my reviews of the first two, Volume 1 is sumptuous. The story is intriguing, recounting Poe's increasingly strange journeys appropriately through dream logic. The artwork, drawn by Argentinian artist Luis Czerniawski, is breathtakingly good and meets the need of the story perfectly. I liked what MacPherson did with this trilogy, but my abiding takeaway is to check out more of Czerniawski's work. And, unfortunately, he doesn't draw much of the rest.

Volume 2 is faster-paced still, losing a little coherence in the process, but the art is notably drawn with less detail. It always had a cartoony style in the way Czerniawski drew heads, but it didn't feel like a cartoon until the second book. As he handed over to Pablo Fernandez, that escalates and the result is much less worthy. It devolves from sumptuous to merely worthy. In Volume 3, Fernandez is replaced in turn by Steven Legge, a colorist on the second book, and that cartoon-feel dominates. Now, this is just a routine comic book, with story and art to match. It's a real shame.

At least it's consistent, nobody involved handing over to someone else partway through this time. That makes it a little less jarring than the second volume, even though there are points where it also changes text size from page to page, as if they were created at different sizes but some were crushed down awkwardly to fit a consistent format in this graphic novel. In my previous review, I'd compared that to reading a regular novel only for it to suddenly change to large print on page 74, and that still feels like a fair assessment. This is large print for a long while, then it suddenly isn't and then it is again. Less jarring doesn't mean not jarring.

Storywise, this is the weakest of the three volumes too, because it all feels rushed. Ultimately, it's still a battle between Edgar Allan Poe—yes, the famous pioneer of horror and detective stories—and the Nightmare King, but the fronts change here.

It begins with the Poe of the waking world dying in a hospital and the Poe in the dreamlands sitting in the new Temple of the Maghi, formerly the Nightmare King's castle and temporarily the House of Infinite Doors; talking to assembled guests led by Odin the All-Father, who remains stubbornly unnamed, unlike his kids and pretty much everyone else. Poe talks about his vision. Odin explains that he must complete three tasks and obtain three keys, after which he can escape Terra Somnia.

And so off goes Poe on his quest, accompanied by Odin's daughter Artemis—yes, I know that blurs mythologies but this follows dream logic—and his usual entourage: Irving the talking rat, Terence the fiddler crab and Bloodclaw the raven. Meanwhile, the Nightmare King isn't done and he visits the Red Masque to promise him the soul of the Dream Child, which we now know is Poe. In return, he's given the Red King's armies and they face off against everyone the Maghi have called to the fight, including a whole bunch of characters we met in the first two books who make brief returns here.

Frankly, that epic battle doesn't remotely have the space to do it justice, so it almost becomes just background noise in between the sections with Poe. There are some nicely drawn frames but it's a blur, something that happens over there while our attention is over here. And our attention is on Edgar Allan Poe seeking the three keys he needs. I won't talk too much about them here because I'll end up spoiling the book, but two are very similar and the third is very different.

The two have Poe face off against a giant opponent, first Typhos, the father of all monsters, in the Coliseum of Thanatos and then Gyges in the realm of Anubis, in confrontations where the price for a key is one life. They give Legge plenty of opportunity to draw memorable key frames and he does to a degree, but it always feels comic book rather than graphic novel, if that makes any sense, as if it would be fine to read in a 32-page comic book that cost a dime but feels a little lacking in a book-sized graphic novel that costs fifteen bucks in digital form and thirty in print. I missed Czerniawski the most at these points, because I know from volume one what he could have done here.

The third takes a completely different approach and is what the trilogy has been building up to all along. Sure, it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it quick but it's a fair way to provide explanation, justification and summarisation all at the same time. After all, we already knew that Poe would escape, given the real life backdrop. The first volume tells us that we're in 1848, with Poe suffering from grief at the loss of his beloved wife and cousin, Virginia Clemm. We know that he doesn't die until 1849, so this was always going to be an attempt to explore that grief with the eventual result his return to sanity in time for him to die himself. The underlying message is that he'll be remembered through his work, which, of course, he has been, as one of the most abiding 19th century cultural icons.

All in all, I liked 'The Imaginary Voyages of Edgar Allan Poe' but I adored Volume 1 and descended from adoration to mere liking substantially through Volumes 2 and 3. I'm sure the first book isn't perfect but it feels that way, the only bad thing about it being that it ends. I can throw out dozens of ways in which the other two books could be improved, so much so that maybe I should dream an alternate universe where MacPherson was able to publish this over six volumes rather than three, with artist Czerniawski and colorist Andrea Messi his collaborators throughout and each of them able to dedicate all the time they need to produce work of the quality they did to start out. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Dwight L. MacPherson click here
For more titles by Steven Legge click here