The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
Gaiman reenlists the remarkable artist who made Creatures of the Night (2004) so staggeringly beautiful. Here Michael Zulli visualizes a much better story from Smoke and Mirrors (1998), which was excluded from its American edition. In it, a fantasy writer much like Gaiman recalls a strange night in London. Prodded out by an old pal and his wife, he meets their biogeologist acquaintance, Miss Finch, at dinner and goes with them to an odd, animal-free circus performing in the cellars underneath the train tracks near Southwark Cathedral. The audience is ambulatory, passing from one chamber to another to see various ostensibly spooky acts; scientifically skeptical Miss Finch is not amused. In the next-to-last room, Miss Finch is pulled away, stoutly protesting, by a performer who says her most ardent wish will be granted in the ninth room. It is. In his characteristic crisp pen-and-ink and watercolor, Zulli has a field day with the garish, freakish, ultimately animal (after all) circus denizens, and he renders regular London interiors and exteriors as gorgeously fore and aft of the circus sequence. --Ray Olson