Lost Girls, the voluminous graphic novel by eccentric genius Alan Moore and brilliant underground illustrator Melinda Gebbie had been a sixteen-year labor of love (literally, as the collaboration apparently brought the two together romantically as well as artistically). It is also, I should state upfront, an exceedingly difficult work to review.

Separated into three complete books, our story begins at the posh Hotel Himmelgarten nestled in the mountains of Austria mere days before the outbreak of the first World War. It is here that our three protagonists, Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy (of “Wonderland,” “Oz,” and “Neverland,” respectively), first meet and strike up an instant, mutual, three-way attraction. Bored, frustrated, and verily busting at the seams with sexual tension and dark, steamy secrets from their pasts, the three women hole up together to share their stories, their dreams, and their bodies with each other. Wendy is now a middle-class lady in a middle-class rut trapped in a loveless marriage with a man nearly twice her age. Alice is older, disillusioned with life in general, and aggressive in pursuing her desires. Dorothy is, of course, the hick farm girl all grown up, but considerably less “innocent” than she may first appear. The tales that they tell are instantly recognizable, and yet strangely less fantastical than we may remember them . . . besides now also being packed end-to-end with incest, rape, bestiality, opium-fueled orgies and sado-masochistic school girls. As the world outside comes ever closer to total destruction our Lost Girls become all the more entangled with one another in a fog of lust and remembrance, hungry for a hot new tale and a hot new tail, periodically dragging outsiders in for a bit of fun – bellboys, maids, and the loathsome de Sade-esque Monsieur Rougeur, house manager of the Himmelgarten whom Alice anally violates with a strap-on (not that he minds, of course). It is the character of Monsieur Rougeur that arguably brings about the darkest and most troubling elements to the novel, as he regales the ladies with graphic stories of raping his own illegitimate children (and forcing them to rape each other while he watches) before selling them into sexual slavery. As the stories (and the ladies) one and all reach their mutual climax, the piece as a whole becomes a surreal wash of pastel colors, writhing bodies, and shattered taboos.

Make no mistake; aesthetically this work is an absolute artistic triumph. Gebbie’s gorgeous and fluid art nouveau visual style, constantly evolving as the stories progress, elevates even the seamiest of passages. Moore’s writing is as sharp and clever as ever, making Lost Girls not just a piece of high-minded smut, but a boisterous exaltation of artistic freedom, a sly piece of post-modernist meta-fiction, and indeed even an accomplished piece of revisionist historical fiction. And ultimately therein may lay the problem, for Moore and Gebbie have stated upfront that Lost Girls is, and is to be viewed as, a work of pornography. Not as fiction with an erotic bent, not as “adult fairy tales” (whatever those might be), but as pure and honest literary pornography. This brings us to my two principle laws of pornography-slash-erotica (also featured in my forthcoming novel Blackchurch Furnace – advertising!). These laws are not hard and fast (no pun intended), for indeed everyone’s standards of what “works” erotically is subjective. But I feel that they apply more often than not. The first is The Law of Diminishing Erotic Returns, which states: an image or concept that is genuinely arousing can and will be rendered progressively less so with repetition and overuse. The second and far more damning is The Law of Negative Erotic Returns, wherein an image or concept that is genuinely arousing can, and often will, be utterly negated and even rendered disgusting and repellent by its proximity to another image or concept that is itself disgusting and repellent. Lost Girls, as a work lit porn . . . ejacu-lit if you will . . .is largely undone by these two laws. So many masters are being served, so many levels of storytelling are put into motion, that the basic thrust-and-pull of a standard pornographic tableau becomes too abstracted and intellectualized to be effective in that regard. Simply put, Moore and Gebbie may indeed be too talented and even too smart, and their work too nuanced and complex to succeed as fodder for masturbation (or like activities). It is certainly far too all-inclusive in material and scope. That having been said, Lost Girls is nevertheless a masterwork of its kind and worthy of exploration, celebration, debate and discussion . . .particularly of a heated nature. Were that other artists and writers of graphic novels to attempt even a fifth of the ambition and love of craft that Moore and Gebbie present in this work, the medium as a whole would be profoundly impacted and categorically elevated to a higher level of respect and prestige.