This has been an unusual series all the way. It was published in four issues like a comic book, but those issues were books, roughly trade paperback sized with spines, so it's a set of four graphic novels. Later, of course, given that they aren't particular thick, the four were collected into one traditionally-sized graphic novel. When a friend lent them to me to review (thanks, Edward), he suggested that I could just review them en masse rather than individually, but I'm now seeing a good reason for them to be separate.

I didn't remotely see this after the first book and not really after the second. It started to come clear during the third book, which had a clear focus on the theme at hand, and it's completely obvious here in the fourth, enough that it prompted me to actually notice the title page, thus discovering that these four volumes have individual titles. This one, for instance, is 'The Doors of Perception'. If I hadn't returned the other three this past weekend, I'd have been able to see what those are called too.

And that's because John DeMatteis doesn't really have a simple story to tell. Sure, it's all about the senior year in high school of Vincent Carl Santini, but that isn't a destination; it's a journey.

He starts here and he goes there and the series is a line that's drawn between the two. In the great American novel tradition, he's a young man struggling to figure out the meaning of life without really having an idea that he's doing it. He merely knows that things around him don't particularly make sense and he'd kind of like to figure out why. So he does, through experience and experimentation and sheer dumb luck and where he ends up is a realization; one of those light bulb moments in life that shapes how we live the rest of it from that point forward.

The thing is that, like most realisations, it's not about the light bulb moment. That's good for a couple of panels in a graphic novel, maybe a couple of pages if it's stretched out for effect. It's a story about how Santini gets to that light bulb moment and DeMatteis has himself a grand old time dancing his way there. It's a nightmarish morass of other moments, all being looked back at with the flawed eye of memory. While the big ones might take place during Santini's senior year, most of the rest don't, because they're all puzzle pieces acquired throughout his life and it's only here, when he tries to put them together that he manages to actually do so.

What this means to the reader is that the first book in isolation doesn't seem to have much of a point. It seems to be all about Santini getting arrested, which ought to be a traumatic thing for a high school student, except that doesn't happen until volume two and then it loses focus like a balloon, whisked off into the sky until we can't see it any more. However, DeMatteis is really removing a layer from Santini's journey and each book takes another until we find the truth at the heart of it all and, of course, more importantly, so does Santini himself.

While 'The Doors of Perception' tends to be seen as the title of Aldous Huxley's book about his psychedelic experiences on mescaline in 1953, it actually borrowed its title from 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', by William Blake, which had nothing to do with drugs at all, instead being a metaphor about how little we can see of reality. Huxley also found that drugs may have been one path to enlightenment but weren't the only one, with meditation and prayer being others. As such, it's entirely appropriate that this book approach the layer of religion in Santini's life.

We already expect that religion is going to be an odd thing for him, given that his parents have different faiths, his mother Esther being Jewish but his father Dominick, Catholic. Here, we find that his experience of religion was traditional and cultural rather than ever being about God in whatever form, meaning that when he thinks about Jesus, he thinks about a man rather than a Son of God, just as he sees temple as a community centre and church as a horror movie set. It's all just there and it never held much meaning to someone learning about the meaning of life in Dostoyevsky.

Talking of "that lovable epileptic", it's Mr. Horowitz, who taught him Honors English in senior year, who got him into Dostoyevsky and it's Horowitz who supplies the final puzzle piece with an assignment to keep a journal. Santini hates the idea, like he hates everything else, being an angry young man, but he does it anyway and takes to it like a duck to water. And it's in grasping his raging hormones and understanding of everything by pouring it down onto the pages of his journal that he reaches light bulb moments. If book three was about duality, filtered through Dostoyevsky's good and evil, book four is about moving beyond that to realise that they're not fighting each other; they're a balance.

That the final light bulb occurs under what Santini believes to be a heavy influence of acid, only to discover that it wasn't because the blue dot was just food colouring, is real poetry. It tells us that Huxley was right and that, while drugs can be a way to open the doors of perception, they aren't the only one. Given all the pharmaceutical exploration of earlier books, it's notable that they're not what did the job in the end. Everything's a journey and they were a part of Santini's but they served their purpose and he could move on.

At the end of the day, there's not much to the light bulb moment that wraps up four volumes of 'Brooklyn Dreams', because there's never much to a light bulb moment. It's always inherently simple because it has to be. It just takes a heck of a lot of work to get to the point where it can be grasped and that's what this series is. I've used the jigsaw puzzle often as an analogy as I've reviewed this volumes, and DeMatteis explicitly does it too in this one, but maybe it's more of a collage, Santini grabbing moments from across his life and finally, in his senior year, being able to assemble them in coherent fashion. There never were any neatly cut boundaries.

The series is the adult him looking back at why that was so important and trying, from quite an impressive distance in time, to grasp it afresh for our benefit. It's a serious achievement, from the perspective of a writer assembling a collage by introducing us to its individual images first. But, having talked about DeMatteis's work so much in this final review, I should mention Glenn Barr, his artist, who brought it to life. There isn't really any more I can say here beyond echoing what I've said about the previous books, that he tailors the level of detail in each panel to the confidence Santini has in his memories, and seems to have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.

Once again, I have favourite panels and, once again, they're often full-page ones. As a writer, of very different material, I appreciated the one depicting Santini riding his journal's paper like a flying carpet, freely exploring his thoughts as he floats beneath the stars. There are others of note here that aren't full-page though, because they rely on sequential art. There's one where Santini is speared by the inner self trying to carve his way out, which is followed by one in which blood flows everywhere but, being metaphorical, his family completely fails to notice it, Esther vacuuming over it like a good housewife. One page depicts Santini's perception of Annie Stern morphing from panel to panel, as he reevaluates who she is.

I have no idea how well the two worked together, but the results are outstanding. While I have to assume that every rambling aside was carefully choreographed by DeMatteis, I wonder how much freedom he gave Barr to bring it to visual life. If he detailed everything microscopically, then Barr did a great job. If he gave him substantial creative freedom, he did even better.

And now that I've experienced this as a four-issue graphic novel series, each volume carrying a look at Santini's journey through a particular theme, I wonder how it would play as one book. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by J.M. Dematteis click here
For more titles by Glenn Barr click here