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Dredd - Bad Moon Rising
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18th
September 04 |
 Judge
Dredd: Bad Moon Rising
David Bishop
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What to Expect:
One night in the life of Mega City’s toughest lawman.
Review by Richmond
Clements
From the start
off, this book was going to have a hard time with me. It was my third Dredd book
in a row, after the very good Eclipse and the not so great Dredd vs. Death, I
was coming to a Dredd saturation point, so this would need to be bloody great
for me to enjoy it.
I should not have
worried, or indeed doubted. David Bishop is really the best at this sort of thing.
Yes, you can criticise some of his strip work in 2000AD, but when it comes to
the Dredd novels, he’s all but untouchable.
He has an understanding of what makes Dredd work that makes me wonder if we have
let another great Dredd writer, in the wake of Wagner and Rennie, to slip through
our fingers. Too much? Maybe, I don’t know, but what I do know, is that
he writes a hell of a Dredd novel.
This one is a
corker. We begin with Dredd about to go off duty, but being seconded for the Graveyard
shift in Sector 87. Sector 87 is a powder keg of simmering xenophobic tensions.
Will this powder keg go off, or continue to simmer away..? What do you think?
The parallel between
aliens being moved into the sector, with the perception that they are getting
preferential treatment above the existing inhabitants, and Great Britain’s
current Daily Mail lead anti-immigration stance is an obvious one, but that doesn’t
have it any less relevant. That’s just one plot thread that Bishop has woven
throughout the night's goings on. The others work just as well, but me telling
you would only increase my word count, and spoil the novel, so I am not going
to tell you.
The secret of
good Dredd, or indeed any good novel, is a simple one: characters. As well as
his understanding of Dredd, Bishop also throws in a large cast of well realised
and rounded characters, from the humans, to Judges and aliens. I might be wrong
here, it’s happened before, but I think one of the characters, Judge Miller,
is one that Bishop is revisiting here from an earlier work.
So, we have great
characters, great plot with some genuine twists and change of pace and chapters
that last one hour of the shift each. Kind of like an episode of 24. Only it’s
12.
Never mind, all
you need to know is that this is probably the best of the Dredd novels to date.
Roll on Kingdom of the Blind, Mr. Bishop!
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this book from Amazon.co.uk
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