Well, this is a strange book. Billed as a collection of “stories,” Illuminations is, rather, as Neil Gaiman concedes on his back cover blurb, “a sort of camouflage, or frame” for What We Can Know About Thunderman—which, at 240 pages of a 450-page book, is not a story or even a novella but a full-length novel. Gaiman describes it as “a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four-color funnies.”
