Reviews

Darger's Resources by Michael Moon

benedorm's review

4.0

The book is really more about contextualizing Darger than it is purely about the resources he used, and the prose tends toward a certain irksome academic pomposity. That said, Moon raises some fascinating points about Darger vis a vis Weird Horror and sequelating prose and comics; it's a valuable book almost in spite of itself.

librarycore's review against another edition

4.0

Reading as a companion to the biography "Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy" by Jim Elledge. It's fascinating how different writers/researchers/critics see Darger. Moon's short, dense collection of essays places Darger's work in the cultural milieu of early 20th century pop culture, discussing "In the realms of the unreal" in relation to pulp writers like H.P. Lovecraft, newspaper comic strips, stories of Catholic martyrs, and the juvenelia of Bramwell Bronte. This last is a particularly rich idea that certainly bears further research; although Bronte's work was written in a very different time and place, the similarities between the themes of the two men are striking. There are lots of good ideas in Moon's book and it's nice to have authors like Moon and Elledge seeking to place Darger within his proper historical and cultural context rather than seeing him as part of the "outsider artist" machine. Elledge's book humanizes Darger and Moon's offers some provocative interpretations of Darger's work. Recommended for those interested in early American "low-brow" art, nascent pop culture history, and of course fans of Darger's work.