Book Review: The Great When by Alan Moore ★★★★☆

Alan Moore is the legendary British writer behind *Watchmen*, *V for Vendetta*, and *From Hell* — works that elevated comics into literary art. He is notorious for dense, ornate prose, occult interests, and a famously combative relationship with the mainstream comic industry. *The Great When* is his first novel (2024), set in a surreal version of post-WWII London where fiction and reality blur. The review signals that Moore's signature maximalist style is on full display: sentences packed with rare vocabulary and vivid, bizarre imagery that either delights or exhausts the reader. For someone new to Moore, the key tension is that his "overwritten" quality is deliberate — he treats language as alchemy, and the reader's enjoyment depends on whether they relish the pyrotechnics or find them exhausting.