Review by Ian Keogh

Anyone concerned about the wellbeing of Britain as it is now was surely concerned about the fate of the land as Parliament of Magpies ended. It’s been dragged into the Otherworld where King Arthur and Merlin once faded into history, but they’re now back, and not the kindly souls of Camelot most people believe. It’s a right pickle and no mistake.

However, as we’ve already seen time and again, despite her age, Bridgette McGuire is the person you want beside you when it comes to pulling fat from fire, and she has stashes of guns around Otherworld. She’s not at her best, though, with secrets only she and a few others knew having been revealed to the country, and is experiencing a long dark night of the soul.

Once & Future has been about the perception of stories from the beginning, with one truism almost universally applied being that it’s always darkest before the dawn, and Kieron Gillen is working on the penultimate volume. There’s been no fear of incorporating legends beyond the Arthurian, and that’s what’s raised here with a new monster on the loose.

Something relatively new to this volume is the car chase. Dan Mora’s had to draw car journeys ending with a sudden crash previously, but this is the real deal, the most amazing of them being the sight of a lion chasing down Rose’s car. Amazing is pretty well the default description for Mora’s art throughout, and there aren’t any mis-steps here. It’s more of the same and it’s glorious, with Tamra Bonvillain’s colouring elevating it further.

With the British Isles sucked into Otherworld Gillen posits that places associated with stories and storytellers have become more powerful. He’s a classicist, though, so it’s Stratford and Shakespeare under consideration rather than Letchworth and Shaun Hutson. The threats have also spread, so while in one sense it’s good that Arthur and Merlin are occupied, the people we care for are split into two groups. Bridgette, Duncan and Rose have left the remainder, confident they’ll be safer with no mystical presence to draw attention. That’s not the case.

This is another thriller from start to finish. It twists. It turns. It squirms and it burns. It’s great. Why not forgo The Wasteland in paperback and head straight for the oversized hardcover combination in Deluxe Edition Book Two?